Creeland is a poetry collection concerned with notions of home and the
quotidian attachments we feel to those notions, even across great
distances. Even in an area such as Treaty Eight (northern Alberta), a
geography decimated by resource extraction and development, people are
creating, living, laughing, surviving and flourishing--or at least
attempting to.
The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the role of Indigenous
aesthetics in the creation and nurturing of complex Indigenous
lifeworlds. They aim to honour the encounters that everyday Cree
economies enable, and the words that try--and ultimately fail--to
articulate them. Hunt gestures to the movements, speech acts and
relations that exceed available vocabularies, that may be housed within
words like joy, but which the words themselves cannot fully convey.
This debut collection is vital in the context of a colonial aesthetic
designed to perpetually foreclose on Indigenous futures and erase
Indigenous existence.
the Cree word for constellation
is a saskatoon berry bush in summertime
the translation for policeman
in Cree is mîci nisôkan, kohkôs
the translation for genius
in Cree is my kôhkom muttering in her sleep
the Cree word for poetry is your four-year-old
niece's cracked lips spilling out
broken syllables of nêhiyawêwin in between
the gaps in her teeth
