When this year’s installment of the sxʷiʔe ̕m “To Tell A Story” Indigenous Writers & Storytellers Series returns to UVic on November 1, it will be the latest gift to the community by the Department of Writing and professor Gregory Scofield.

“My goal is to honor the nations on whose territory we live, and to celebrate and honour the writers and storytellers in our communities,” he says. 

Scofield is following up last year’s successful event by presenting two acclaimed Indigenous authors this year: Icelandic/Red River Métis poet Jónína Kirton and Cree author Joseph Kakwinokansum

“It has been and continues to be a very exciting time for Indigenous writers and storytellers,” he says. “There are so many important stories to be shared, told and celebrated across Turtle Island through the mediums of literature, film, music, dance and oral storytelling . . . . As more Canadians become aware of truth and reconciliation, more people are reading works by Indigenous writers and gaining knowledge of our history.”

Scofield

About Jónína Kirton

Jónína Kirkton was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba: Treaty 1 territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis. She graduated from the SFU Writer’s Studio in 2007 and since that time has published three books with Talonbooks. She was 61 when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category, the same year her first collection — page as bone, ink as blood — was released.

Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, was released in 2022. It merges poetry and lyrical memoir to take us on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on her Métis family. She currently lives in New Westminster BC, the unceded territory of many Coast Salish Nations. Although she acknowledges and is thankful for the teachings offered through academic institutions, she leans heavily into what some term ‘other ways of knowing.’ Her writing is often a weaving of body and land as she firmly believes until we care for women’s bodies we will not care for the earth.

About Joseph Kakwinokansum

Joseph Kakwinokansum is a writer, creator, and storyteller. A member of the James Smith Cree Nation, he grew up in the Peace Region of northern BC and is a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and Writer’s Studio Graduate Workshop.

He was selected by Darrel J. McLeod as one of the Writers Trust of Canada’s Rising Stars of 2022. His short story “Ray Says” was a finalist for CBC’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 and his manuscript Woodland Creetures was awarded the 2014 Canada Council for the Arts Creation Grant for Aboriginal Peoples, Writers, and Storytellers.

His debut novel, My Indian Summer (loosely based on his own childhood) was winner of the 2023-2024 First Nations Communities READ Award and shortlisted for the 2023 ReLit Award for fiction. His work has been published in the Humber Literary Journal and the anthologies Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing, Emerge: The Writer’s Studio and Better Next Year: An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies.

Kakwinokansum was also selected as the 2024 Storyteller in Residence for Vancouver Public Library.

The free event  sxʷiʔe ̕m “To Tell A Story” Indigenous Writers & Storytellers Series, starts at 7pm Friday, November 1, in UVic’s First Peoples House. Books will be available for purchase & signing