First Year Honourable Mention: Smoke Signals

WRIT 1702, Becoming a Better Writer. TA: Dion Tubrett, CD: Jon Sufrin.

Abstract

This “personal essay” recounts the writer’s quest for identity as a First Nations person, or, as he says, “as a born-again NDN.” Engaging and sincere, this text charts the beginning of this journey – a ceremony with a traditional healer – that gives the writer an opportunity to reconnect with his ancestral language and his own “path”, a path that was “stripped away from my people through centuries of assimilation, colonialism, and genocide.” In passing, he examines his own stereotypical expectations of Aboriginal rituals, and weighs the nature, truth, and meaning in the signs he seeks. This story of reconnection not only addresses the importance of “inter-generational memory”, but also explores the deep responsibility of carrying a name, a history, and an ancestry. The author simultaneously addresses the importance of answering the call to “decolonize” a self as well as a people, and to do so in the company of – and in collaboration with – community.