Arts challenge renews storytelling traditions

The Canadian Aboriginal Writing and Arts Challenge is going into its seventh year, and is eagerly awaiting entries from young Canadian writers and artists aged 14 to 19 years old.

“It’s the first year that we’ve added arts to the competition. It had been strictly writing from 2005 to now,” said Jeremy Diamond, director of Development and Programming with the Canadian Aboriginal and Arts Challenge.

The challenge was born from an anthology written in 2004.

“We reached out to some well known Aboriginal storytellers, like Drew Hayden Taylor, Tomson Highway, and others, and asked them to write about a defining moment in Aboriginal history, we put it together as a book called ‘Our Story’,” said Diamond.

The professional writers got together after the book was published with the idea of creating a similar challenge to the young writers to tell their own stories in their own voices.

“In the case of several of the original writers, they became jury members, and several of them have remained jury members,” said Diamond.

“Drew Hayden [Taylor] and Tomson [Highway] are still jury members. They kind of help to pass the torch on from one generation of writers to the next,” he added.
The top entries get published in Canada’s History Magazine, which is operated by the Canadian National Historical Society. By the way the competition has been growing every year, the voices of the younger generations are getting louder.

“It’s been going up about ten or fifteen percent every year,” said Diamond. “It’s remarkable, we got over 300 entries last year, we’re hoping for even more this year.”
Diamond added that the best part last year was getting submissions from every province and territory in Canada for the first time.

“So it truly is a national initiative and we’re hearing from young Aboriginal writers who lived in large urban centers, and also still lived on reserves, and others in very remote communities,” he said.

The topics are always chosen by writers, said Diamond, so as not to limit the range of subjects. Some have written on residential schools, others on more recent topics such as the Oka crisis or the Caledonian standoff, with the addition of the visual arts in this year’s edition.

“We’re responding to some of the educators and community leaders that we should expand the competition, or the challenge, as we call it, outside of writing to include arts,” Diamond added. “So what we’re doing this year is adding the two-dimensional form of [visual] art, and who knows, maybe down the road, we’ll include three dimensional artwork, like sculpting or carving.”

“We’ve noticed some past winners pursued writing because of their success in the challenge. For seven years, we’ve been very encouraged by what we see,” he said.

The deadline for submissions is March 31st, and entries can be submitted by postal mail, e-mail, or fax.

For more information on both the writing and art challenges, please check out their official website at http://www.our-story.ca.