It Was Treaty / It Was Me, Matthew James Weigel
Vallum Chapbooks, 2020
2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award Shortlist
The 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award will be announced on Thursday,November 25, 2021.
It Was Treaty / It Was Me is your poetry debut. How did the project begin, and how did the form of the poems emerge? How were the poems formed?
There were two starting points. One was how, as a kid, my dad would always tell me how grandpa signed treaty. It was really important to him that I know and be proud that our ancestors were involved in that process. And the second was February 2019 when I first saw the University of Alberta's copy of the Treaty 6 parchment in our library and archives special collections. There is this big mystery about how and when it was printed and how it was never delivered to the signatories as promised. I was drawn to this mystery because as a kid I had that connection to treaty but those kinds of connections had been disrupted in this case. If the stories are sequestered, the connections inherent in these living agreements can be relegated to the past and manipulated. The government's obligations can be ignored and that can go unchallenged. It just so happens that in the course of my work those disruptions continued to take a personal toll as I would find family connections to items in the collections. So the themes of the chapbook are built around this idea that I was being gradually collected by the university and other institutions. The poems are about the interconnected relationships of treaty, the land, and the body, and how archival violence is a special type of colonial violence. In terms of form, my work often blurs boundaries between visual art and writing, and with a background in science I have a fondness for figures and diagrams that can be quite poetic in how complex ideas are explained elegantly and succinctly. It's important to tell these stories in ways that resist 'conventional' methods and poetics, it's a form of resistance in its own way.
Part of what is so compelling about the chapbook is the way it exists as a form of resistance. Had you any specific models when you were putting together this work? Were there any other poets or works in your head as you wrote?
Oh definitely! I think there's a lot of conversation between the works of Indigenous poets writing today. Folks are all reading each other's books and I'm no different. Marilyn Dumont is someone I really look up to, and her work is so critical to revisit and sit with. Especially The Pemmican Eaters. Lisa Bird-Wilson's The Red Files is especially vital as a work that parses archive and documentation. Layli Long Soldier's Whereas might be a book I would call a model, it's an extremely complex and powerful text that is also very wide-ranging in its sources and forms. Joshua Whitehead's Full Metal Indigiqueer is a book that always makes me immediately want to write something. Billy-Ray Belcourt's writing in general is also so layered, generous, joyous. Liz Howard's work always makes me push how I think about language. I'm definitely always trying to think through Jordan Abel's work. As a visual poet, he's just at another level in how sharply he creates work about the land. Other writers I was reading a lot were folks like Claudia Rankine, Mercedes Eng, Douglas Kearney. But the storytelling and spoken word aspects of my work are really important to me as well, so some of these poems had their start at the microphone. In that regard, poets and performers I really look up to are folks like Hanif Abdurraqib, Titilope Sonuga, and of course my partner: Nisha Patel. I hear Nisha's work more than anyone's, she's continuously amazing me.
It Was Treaty / It Was Me feels very much like it could potentially be part of something larger, potentially book-length. Do you see this work self-contained, or has it a shape larger than what we’ve seen so far?
That's interesting you see that! It's definitely not self-contained and is absolutely part of larger works. Something I've struggled with in my work is considering it finished enough to present to others. But I have to get over that! When the work I do is so intertwined with treaty – which is a concept fundamentally boundless, eternal, multi-faceted and multi-layered – so it's not the type of creative work that can be ever finished. That work often takes the form of writing, but I've done some complex visual art as well. I even make multimedia artist's books, pop-up books, and glass etchings. I'm always looking for new ways to tell these stories. Also my creative work is just one part of the work I do in telling stories about this place, and about treaty. I love doing classroom visits because people often have a lot of questions about these topics that are not talked about in school and university. That sort of outreach work I do is always ongoing and I'm always learning and refining. Each interaction with a person, each reader or each listener, is a new connection. As that happens new perspectives on the work emerge, new layers, new elements. When I started on this project Janet Rogers actually said to me "you know this is your life's work now, right?" and I take that very seriously. It's not work that I can ever finish. I have to keep honoring the relationships by sharing the stories and knowledge I have. Treaty is about reciprocity and obligation, I take that very seriously.
You’ve a full-length debut scheduled for the spring with Coach House Books. How do the poems in It Was Treaty / It Was Me relate to the work in the forthcoming Whitemud Walking?
Whitemud Walking builds on this work and pushes it in a lot of different directions. I expand on my relationship with the University of Alberta, the city of Edmonton and the Strathcona neighborhood. The chapbook is an entry-point into a lot of complicated conversations about how Canada attempts to extinguish Indigenous title to land, and how that's a multi-layered and ongoing process. That's a process that's tied up in resource extraction projects like the fur trade, the railroad, the archives, and academia. So a lot of the threads in the chapbook are followed a lot further in Whitemud Walking. And I suppose I shouldn't be, but I keep being surprised at how those threads so often wrap around my family history.