MD: I don’t see myself in a key role in this initiative to stop the racialisation of Métis peoples. I see myself as one small voice among many of the centuries who have expressed anger and resentment over having to reiterate our Indigeneity. Métis have been struggling for the acknowledgement of being Indigenous since our ethnogenesis. Many individuals and collectives have taken up this fight on a personal and political level. This is an issue, unfortunately, that the Métis will continually battle in the nation state of Canada because of blatant policies such as the Indian Act, The Dominion Lands Act, The Scrip Commissions which sought to extinguish Métis identity and sovereignty.

The divisions that exist are deliberately a double bind for the Métis. The Métis are hemmed in by the state’s erasure of our identity such that we are either ignored and passed as a political football between provincial/federal jurisdiction, or we are pulled apart by national policies such as multiculturalism which always undermine our nationhood.

I have written that ‘Métis is resistance.’ The very act of our daily lives is resistance. To continually state, ‘No, I am not white, nor am I First Nations; I am Métis’ is a resistance act which Métis have been saying since our ethnogenesis.

AL: Thank you for that. Métis is resistance indeed! And many voices together are powerful, just as one voice can make a difference to many. Could you make a comment on your own voice, how it has perhaps changed and evolved from your first collection to the present? Your voice as a storyteller through poetry, as the world has evolved and shifted personally and collectively, how have those shifts impacted your works as a Métis writer, artist, scholar?

Many poets today, myself included, are impacted by your vision and scope of the past and present world. Can you tell us more about that, and what has impacted your own writing past and present? Where do you most draw inspiration through each of your subsequent collections, if you wouldn’t mind reviewing them for us?

MD: What has influenced my writing past was first the desire to read and pour over them like my older siblings who were at school. I was the youngest, so whatever they did, I wanted to do. I also found refuge in books and the fact that I could take them home from the library was very special. Both my parents spoke Cree and English. My mother had slightly more European education than my father, and she read newspapers, romance magazines, or paperbacks.

I was also influenced as the youngest of nine children by my parents’ bilingualism because there a lot of language play in both Cree and English.

As a teenager, I continued to read and kept a journal, and wrote what I thought was poetry. Recently, I had a chance to read some things I wrote then and was pleasantly surprised that one of the poems wasn’t half bad.

I have always been a reader, and now recognise how this has educated me.

I don’t want to list my books and go through each one as though the process of writing is always about product. I research/read when I write about things like The Pemmican Eaters; other ways of researching is reading poetry, poets who may have tried what one wants to accomplish to see how they have approached a topic.

I am driven by what I see as contradictions/injustices in the entire world, but I am particularly motivated by my own Indigenous experience which I did not realise had been gaslighted by Colonial standards my entire life.

It’s a strange question that is continually asked: What motivates you? There is never anyone identifiable stimulus; it all matters – who I converse with about Indigenous topics. It might be my friends and then books and film or vice versa.

Each artist/writer is different and must learn to continually nurture their process in whatever time/seasons they have. I am looking forward to a time in the spring to do just that.

AL: Kischii maarsii, many thanks for your conversation, time, and thoughtful replies to these questions – and I am sure I am one of many who looks forward to seeing your next works out, in whatever genre and subject matter you choose to release it, in the upcoming times and seasons that you are gifted!