I am mindful that as I write this essay, the boreal is on fire across the prairies; thousands of people have been evacuated; there are fires too in British Columbia, Alberta, northwest Ontario. Last year was our worst wildfire season in recorded history; according to the New York Times, 7,100 wildfires burnt 37 million acres, “an area larger than the size of England.”[1] And this occurs amidst the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction and the on-going breaching of Earth’s planetary boundaries – topics I attempt to write about in my own poetry:
Camped out all day in the foyer of the
Centre for Interdisciplinary Science as snow falls.
A blank softness. Diffuse light. Drifts of
people meet for coffee, then disperse.
I’m reading papers on the shore ice
melting at Port Hope, on the tar sands and the toxicity
of the Athabascan river—a landscape
resembling a war zone marked
with 200-foot-deep pits
and thousands of acres of destroyed boreal forests.
This sticky viscous bitumen. This most
destructive project.
The sea ice declines. Inuit elders say, Something
has happened—the Earth has tilted
on its axis. The sun sets
in a different place. The stars are not where they once were.
(“Iridium,” A blueprint for survival, Guernica Editions, 2024)
In the face of such existential threat, lyric poetry seems helpless, pointless even, no more than a small quiet voice in the dark.
Yet increasingly, in the podcasts I listen to, amongst the scientists I read, the ecological activists and theorists I follow, I see often a turn towards poetry, sometimes as symbol, sometimes not, as they call for a frame shift, a different way of seeing, listening, being with and among other humans and more-than-human kin in a complex interdependent web of lives: poetry not as a substitute for various actions and interventions, but as an opening, to hold space for others, for the small quiet voice to be heard. And it is often adjacent to or resonant with Indigenous conceptions such as etuaptmumk (‘2-eyed seeing’)[2] and tsawalk (‘one,’ ‘everything is one’),[3] to longstanding Indigenous epistemologies and practices that are grounded in an intimate knowledge of place.
On New Year’s Day I participated in a S'iwes te Temexw Ceremony at the Blue Heron Nature Reserve in Chilliwack. There was a planting of four young cedar trees, with offerings of salmon to nourish their new life, and then a walk to the Vedder River, where offerings of cedar boughs were made to the waters and the wild salmon. This was followed by a tobacco ties ceremony, as described by the invitation,
“offering our heartfelt, reverent prayers to Mother Earth, and sending our loving kindness, compassion and peace to ripple out into the world. We will renew our collective commitment to walk softly on Mother Earth and do our part to restore the habitat of fish and wildlife. Together, we can help transform the world for the greater good, for the wellbeing of current and future generations in honour of our eternal ancestors.”
This peaceful, mindful ceremony has stayed with me all year, meandering, grounding, and I somehow find that I am preoccupied, without any deliberate or conscious intention, with river in my reading. My hope then for this little essay is for it to be an opening of sorts, to hold space for these books and their quiet voices.
I’m returning to the classroom in the fall after two years of service in the faculty union, and re-reading in preparation for this a slim volume I’ve taught before, Rita Wong’s undercurrent. The poem “Unsung Service” is dedicated to Stó:lō, the Fraser River, and begins on the Samson V, a 19th-century paddle-wheeler turned maritime museum moored on the shores of the Fraser near the College where I work; I walk past it daily, the water chalk-green and brown, stitched with log booms and tugboats, while new luxury condos rise precipitously on its banks. The poem observes how the boat/museum “faces the port where mazdas & audis enter / as raw logs exit, the engine of capitalist ideology attacks the river.” It asks, “what will future earthlings find in the neoliberal middens left behind?” And concludes in the voices of kin, “We are tardigrades and tawny owls, river dolphins and rockhopper penguins, slow sloths and fast elk […] We are your relatives […] We call upon you to remember your ancient oaths, your debts to all realms that enable your existence, your obligations as earth-dwellers.”[4] I will bring my students here, to Stó:lō, and we will write some poems with river.
And we will also read poems by two poets I’ve been in long-distant communication with these past few months, talking about ecopoetry, lichen, rivers, an entangling of ideas and intentions. sophie’s book is a long communion with a river, Conversations with the Kagawong, in which she creates space for river to speak. As she notes in her poem “February 15: The Wind and a Spruce Tree Along the Kagawong River Collaborating on a Text,” “I have been wondering what the Gaagigewang Ziibi might say about herself if she wrote her own plaques and texts.” So she tied a sharpie to a long string attached to a spruce branch to see what Gaagigewang Ziibi might say. I cannot quote the poem that follows, as it is a series of lines scribbled by the wind on a piece of paper placed along the banks of the river. As sophie notes in “September 8,” “I increasingly feel the River watching me. Sometimes I feel she knows when I’m here. Sometimes I feel we listen together. I greet her each time I come.”[5] I felt this sentience and watching presence, although I was a newcomer, on New Year’s Day along the shore of the Vedder as we dropped branches of cedar into the clear waters and said our prayers. As Renée, who first brought the three of us together in conversation, writes, in her poem “Water is,” water is “elemental” and “calls us back to ourselves;” “water at play is water / is the bear splashing salmon / and she the bearer of water.”[6]
This knowing, that river is elemental, living within us and a living being, a person, is the focus of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? As he describes in the introduction, when he told his 10-year old son the title of his book, his son said, “’Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad … because the answer is yes!’”[7] What any child knows, many of us have long since forgotten. Macfarlane begins by exploring the oddity that water is seen as a commodity, as “liquid asset,” that “it is normalized that a corporation, in the eyes of the law, is an entity with legal standing and a suite of rights, including the right to sue—but that a river who has flowed for thousands of years has no rights at all.” His use of the pronoun ‘who’ is one small attempt to nudge us towards Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘grammar of animacy,’[8] an animacy that Rita and Renée and sophie all speak to in the poems I have just described, an animacy lost to the hypercapitalist industrial world that processes all forests, rivers, waters, beings, as resources or standing reserve. Macfarlane discusses the legal movement known as “Rights of Nature,” which first saw some success in Ecuador’s new constitution, ratified on 28 September 2008, that enshrined the rights of Pachamama, water as “‘inalienable, imprescriptible, unseizable and essential for life.’”[9] He describes this Rights of Nature movement as “an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world which is far more alive than power usually allows.” I think of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s report on pathways for legal personhood for the Fraser River Estuary, under threat now as former Greenpeace activist Steven Guilbeault (then Minister for the Environment) and the liberal government under Trudeau gave the green light to the construction of Roberts Bank Terminal 2, a massive extension to the terminal currently there. The Raincoast Conservation Foundation observes that “the estuary, and all the living things it supports, are not viewed as having intrinsic worth. Economic imperatives consistently override the need for ecological protection, and as a result, threaten the very existence of one of the most ecologically important regions in the province.”[10] RB2 threatens a complex web of life, from salmon to resident orcas to biofilm that feeds the western sandpipers and dunlins enroute to breeding grounds in Alaska and the arctic.
Of course, these movements for legal personhood for rivers attempt to bend western legal frames to encompass what cannot be encompassed— Stó:lō is the water that flows bearing silt through shifting banks and channels, the salmon that return each year to spawn and die, the mudflats at the estuary, the diatoms and the biofilm slurped up by the rough tongues of western sandpiper and dunlins who then fly in their shifting murmurations along the Pacific Flyway—migratory routes that span the continents,[11] water that is drawn up into cycles and returns again and again as rain, as fog, as river.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speaks to this in her theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead. I attended the Vancouver launch of her book at the St. James Community Square in April, a launch that was held as a conversation between herself and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Nibi—water—she writes, “is interdependent and decentralized, a vessel for multitudes of land- and water-based species and communities.”[12] And nibi “decentres itself: it leaks, moves, flows and reconnects, not as real estate or enclosure or property, but as a living network, linking endless forms of life working with each other to bring about more life, more diversity of life, more abundance of life.” She moves beyond the idea of a western legal framework and asks, “What if, instead, we obliterated the categories of gender and human and rights altogether, and created lateral, co-operative systems of sharing, all in service to bringing forth more life?”
These are some of the small quiet voices I listen for.
[2] “Etuaptmumk / Two-eyed Seeing and Beyond.” https://rwok.ca/dialogue-4
[3] E. Richard Atleo, Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview (UBC Press, 2007). https://www.ubcpress.ca/tsawalk
[4] Rita Wong, undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). https://nightwoodeditions.com/products/9780889713086?srsltid=AfmBOooKc-sZV1NnVYYRLdi4terDfqEyE64Rxk2OYLc2u7GxEAXeETfd
[5] sophie anne edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talon Books, 2024). https://talonbooks.com/books/conversations-with-the-kagawong-river
[6] Renée M. Sgroi, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions, 2024). https://guernicaeditions.com/products/in-a-tension-of-leaves-and-binding?srsltid=AfmBOopm2j7Z-cBmfLeI6hBqbQbe6pqQtxfSqR4M5w4MUP5VIUQT46QS
[7] Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Penguin Random House, 2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/724830/is-a-river-alive-by-robert-macfarlane/9781039007956
[10] Pasternak and Walters, “Rights of Nature.” https://www.raincoast.org/reports/fraser-personhood/
[12] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, theory of water: Nishnaabe maps to the times ahead (Penguin Random House, 2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/742373/theory-of-water-by-leanne-betasamosake-simpson/9781039010246
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. A blueprint for survival appeared with Guernica Editions in 2024. Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin) as well as in Athens, Dublin, New Zealand, Copenhagen, Seattle, and elsewhere. Kim’s most recent project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC at the mouth of the Sto:lo (Fraser) River, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders. She will also be a featured reader at "Poetry by the River: Environmental Stewardship through the Arts," taking place this month in London, Ontario, which will begin with a river cleanup at the Forks of Deshkan Ziibi/the Thames. Her next book, Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form appears with Oskana Poetry and Poetics (University of Regina Press) in February 2026. She lives in Vancouver, ancestral, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations.
