Ânskohk Aboriginal Writers’ Festival highlights talented authors

After a three year hiatus, the Ânskohk Aboriginal Writers’ Festival returned to Saskatoon.

The four-day festival was hosted by the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Literacy Network  and featured improv, readings, workshops, and seminars. The last festival was in 2008, when it was hosted by the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company.

Dawn Dumont read from her first book, Nobody Cries at Bingo, which featured stories based loosely around her childhood.

“One thing I try to define myself as is to make people laugh,” said Dumont, who added she wrote the book for herself. “I always enjoyed memoir fiction.”

Harold Johnson, a La Ronge lawyer, read from his fifth and latest book, The Cast Stone, which is a fictional account of an American invasion of Canada that forces First Nations to decide where their loyalties lay in respect to the history of Treaties and racial conflict.

“What I wanted people to take away from the book is before we start invading other countries... to imagine what it would feel like,” explained Johnson. “As Indian people, we already know.”

Maria Campbell also read from her book, Stories of the Road Allowance People.

The highlight of this year’s Ânskohk was an “intimate evening” with Tomson Highway. He took to the stage at The Roxy Theatre and made the audience laugh and reflect as he spoke about growing up in far northern Manitoba.

Highway recalled how by the time he was 10 years old, he was fluent in Cree, Dene, and English. He said the closest neighbour was 100 miles away and the closest school was 500.

“To get to grade 7 was an accomplishment beyond an accomplishment,” Highway told the crowd, saying he would be illiterate if he hadn’t gone to those schools. “I have a thriving international career as an artist.”

Highway was the first person from his reserve to earn a university degree.

Highway also reflected on how many Aboriginal authors there are today versus a few decades ago.

“Thirty years ago, Native literature did not exist as a body of literature,” he noted. “Now we are here to celebrate that that body of literature exists.”

Highway entertained the crowd by playing original scores of music on a grand piano. He was accompanied by local Métis singer Krystle Pederson as well as a local saxophonist Robert Klassen.

To wrap up the festival, the last day was comprised of workshops, including one focused on creating the Ânskohk Aboriginal Writers Circle to ensure the future of the festival, with about 20 people turning up.

“There were some really good ideas about how we can work with writers’ organizations that already exist and how we might look for support from them,” said festival committee member Lisa Bird-Wilson. “Someone made a good point about the fact that these other writers’ organizations are our organizations, too, and we have ownership there and belonging there.”

Wilson said it is too soon to say if the festival will become an annual event, as SALN committed to running the festival this year only. The Aboriginal writers’ circle, while keen on the idea of the festival, is too new to support it, she added, because it still has to set up funding and structure.