Lisa Bird-Wilson speaking at the library at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. (Michael Joel-Hansen/paNOW Staff)

By Michael Joel-Hansen

Literacy

One Book, One Province tour come to P.A.

Mar 4, 2019 | 3:57 PM

A province wide book tour made at stop in Prince Albert Monday afternoon.

The One Book, One Province tour, which features author Lisa Bird-Wilson, was at Saskatchewan Polytechnic as a part of the cross-province tour. Speaking to paNOW before her talk, Wilson-Bird, who is Cree and Métis said she hoped people who read her works look at the issue of identity.

“I would hope that people take something away for that, identity isn’t just an Indigenous question,” she said.

As part of her talk, Bird-Wilson planned to read from two of her most recent works. Her most recent work is The Red Files, which is a poetry book that looks at the history of residential schools and its effect on families for generations.

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“I worked with archival documents in the beginning … and I gathered enough raw materials, I had lots and lots of poems,” she said.

In putting the poetry book together, which was the first of that kind for her, Bird-Wilson was helped by Elizabeth Philips, who helped make the poems a full collection.

The other book which she read from was Just Pretending, which is a collection of short stories. The stories which made up this book were written over a period of time.

“It was a huge process over a long period of time,” she said.

The stories, like the poems, focus on identity which is something Bird-Wilson said is an overarching theme in all her work. She said since she wrote Just Pretending, which was published five years ago, there have been changes in terms of awareness about the sixties-scoop, which saw her taken from her family and placed with a non-Indigenous family.

“There’s more understanding and recognition,” she said.

When Wilson-Bird wrote the stories which went on to make up Just Pretending she explained she did not have a specific audience in mind.

“I wrote the stories that I knew I would have like to have read, I would have liked to have available to me to think about those questions,” she said.

Having the chance to be part of the One Book, One Province tour was one which Bird-Wilson felt was a great opportunity as it provided a chance to showcase her works to a wide audience.

“It’s pretty hard to pass up the idea that your book is going to be king of the book which is promoted across the province,” she said.

MichaelJoel.Hansen@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @mjhskcdn