Conor Kerr Reflects on Prayerie Possibilities
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ILLUSTRATION BY SYD DANGER, inspired by Kerr’s poem “Big coyote, that one”: “We passed a McDonald’s, and two coyotes trailed off to scour the dropped drive-thru French fries, and I admit that I wanted to join them.”
CONOR KERR REFLECTS ON PRAYERIE POSSIBILITIES
A conversation on his latest book of poems, Old Gods, prairie life, and the future to come.
by Kayla MacInnis
“Mobility,” according to Métis Ukrainian author Conor Kerr, “is pretty ingrained within a Métis worldview.” Kerr’s latest book of poems, Old Gods, moves between departure and arrival, settling into the necessary intersections between. From one poem to the next, one city to the next, the Red River carts’ wheels heave forward, carrying questions across the changing landscape of both the prairies and cityscapes in which Kerr travels.
Each poem's purpose is to galvanize, to transform, to watch the personal/communal/historical narrative of Kerr unravel along the cascading roads ahead. There is a restlessness one senses within the constant motion of Métis identity, but home doesn’t necessarily need to be monolithic, it can be an open road, and it can be moving in seasons, following weather patterns and the routes the bison once travelled.
Kerr’s words are tender, inciting, and resolving, yet there is a grit to his presence on the page that finds itself in checking traplines and the intersecting space between urban and bush Indigenity. As we read on, we witness him uncover language and dismantle the academic mindset through writing against the colonial rules of grammar and spelling.
Crossing the city limit boundaries, Kerr explores the peripheries of the past in candid ruminations that yield rich visualizations of the old trade routes beneath the current highways. Prayerie poverty is juxtaposed with the richness of the land and mouthwatering descriptions of bison pemmican, Saskatoon berries, and moose meat delivered to kin. “Prayerie” is how Kerr describes the plains in his poem “Just Passing Through,” "A couple Métis born into prayerie poverty," he writes. His audience is the early morning birds, his Indigenous kin, and those who seek to understand.
I met with Conor Kerr at Platform 7, a coffeehouse resembling a train station, in East Vancouver on an early June afternoon. On the garden patio, under an umbrella, with the crows cawing in the background, we discussed his time on the road, Métis identity, demolition and world-building, temporality, hope, and “those yet to come.”
I first read your poetry in Issue 215 of The Malahat Review, in which you were one of the 2021 Long Poem Prize winners for your poem “Just Passing Through”—which I adored, by the way. Being Métis myself, I saw and felt what it means to be Métis in your words. Coming from Road Allowance communities and constantly experiencing relocations, migrations, and dispossession, but also being deeply tied to the land. Could you share a bit about your experience with that poem?
Yeah, that one is kind of interesting because Saskatchewan is definitely home territory, but my Métis family and communities were much more from amiskwacîwâskahikan, Edmonton area. It's where my grandmother's roots come from and their connection with the Métis community and the Papaschase Cree Nation in that area. But when the reserve was illegally surrendered and taken over back in 1888, they ended up in the north of St. Paul de Métis in the bush.
There are a few different First Nations up there, like Saddle Lake, Good Fish, Frog Lake, and what would eventually become Métis settlements. They weren't settlements yet, but they were in the process of becoming Kikino and Buffalo Lake. My grandma was in a community that was in the middle of all of that as well. It wasn’t the traditional land, but it was land they had also been forced to move to, and I found that to be such an interesting thing, to be displaced from your home territories while still in your home territory. And to not still have that same connection to space and knowing that the landscapes around you have that relationship with you. But you might feel dislocated just because of the colonial imposition pushing you out of those areas and not letting you actually connect in a meaningful and heartfelt way, the way that we would have traditionally. Some people still have the opportunity to connect like that contemporarily, but a lot of us don't. I feel very fortunate because I grew up with grandparents who were very connected back to the community and the lands, and even though we lived in Southern Saskatchewan when I was a kid—because they worked on the army base in Moose Jaw—even that landscape around there became home for them. It was like their own version of an earlier Métis hunting brigade.
In an interview with the Malahat Review about this poem, I read that you asked yourself, “What defines a prairie life?” That question is burning in my mind. Do you have that answer now, or is it ever-evolving? As someone born in the prairies but grew up displaced from them, I often ask myself this question, but I am curious to hear what it is like for someone who has spent as much time on that land as you have.
That question is burning in everyone's mind from the prairies. That's just one of these things, especially coming from this space in an area where everybody else constantly tells you their area is better. Oh, have you ever seen the mountains? Cool, man. What are you gonna do? Walk up one? Yeah. Vancouver is a nice beautiful space. It has a great backdrop, but there's an edge in the prairies. There's an edge that comes with growing up there and being there.
People are constantly denigrating the work happening in the prairies, even though all the major award winners for the last while in Canadian literature are coming out of Edmonton and Saskatoon. We need to bring in more voices. There is so much of the same story being told. A rising voice is coming from these areas in this space that we haven't seen. It's also a space where you can create, and you can do it sustainably right now. Many people I know, myself included, are all moving back. Here, you're so focused on struggling to survive.
A lot of people are trying to capture the beauty of the prairies in their work, too. I was in Edmonton on Monday morning, and this thunderstorm was brewing, and the sound of that was so beautiful. I miss that. It's ever-evolving, yeah. I don't think there's any definition behind it. There's a bit more of that culture around it. And actually, when I was in Kenya a couple of months ago, it was kind of funny because I found the landscape in Nairobi very similar to prairie land. It stretches out. Similar hues. The dirt, though, was this beautiful orange-red. That was different. And, of course, the animals are different, but there were magpies everywhere, just like in Edmonton.
Your writing is often placed in a relationship with the landscapes surrounding you, calling the prairies “an unfolding promise.” The road is a common theme within Old Gods. I mentioned this a bit in an earlier question, but you do an amazing job at embedding the movement of being Métis into your telling. Not many people understand how much colonization has impacted the Métis.
The idea of permanently settling in one place within a home for your entire life is almost very colonial. You know, this is my owned land and my own spot and blah, blah, blah. I'll never move, and I'll never leave. For the Métis community I'm from, and even with my grandparents and family, everyone moved all the time. We were moving for different opportunities, just like our ancestors did. But always within this landscape that we knew. It wasn't that we were necessarily trying new things or anything like that—it was still within the connection of these areas.
I almost think of the roads like the veins within the prairie. Now there are these highways, but back in the day, the highways were still built on what were old trading routes, the old routes that our ancestors traversed and travelled for generations untold until they eventually just became actual highways in the Canadian prairie context. They're very much like veins, just like the waterways too, you know? These intersecting veins carry the blood of our own mobility and being able to navigate within these areas. I like to think of the road almost as that metaphor for just carrying along in these veins. But also, home can be that, you know? I love the constant mobility that my lifestyle affords me, and not the idea of permanence and settling down somewhere.
I also feel like, for me as a Métis person, there's this innate sense that I have to be moving all the time. It's almost embedded into my being.
Even right now, I'm in the process of moving back to Edmonton from Vancouver. I have to go to the island to drop my dogs off with my parents tonight; I'm going to Quebec City on Sunday for a conference. I like going, travelling, moving, and doing those kinds of things. Even at home or in space, I'm still constantly leaving to go camping or out because I feel that mobility is pretty ingrained within a Métis worldview.
You play a lot with temporality in this collection, moving from past to present to future. I think a lot about time, especially concerning colonial systems and being a people of the land. We experience time in a different way, following time as we did with seasonal migrations, where our people have learned to move and adapt. Can you share some of your experience with revisiting the past, looking toward the future, and navigating the now?
Whenever I play around with that—I always think that I don't know anything along these lines, of course—but the idea that our current timeframe and worldview is very based around Western disciplines and Christian disciplines and this idea of the past-present-future we’re in. I almost think of it as this animalistic sense where you're constantly always living in this present that's being informed by both future and past, but not this almost historical thing. We're looking and existing within these different timeframes all at the same moment. It's not necessarily linear. It's way more circular, which I know is the ultimate Indigenous cop-out. But it's true, at the same time.
Being constantly informed by the idea of the future, which we don't really think about enough. I've worked a lot of Western jobs in the course of my career and have thought about how people will talk about planning ahead, but they're really only planning for a generation ahead. Where when I chat with Indigenous people—and this is especially true when I was managing Indigenous student centers like the one in NorQuest, the community college there—I would be chatting with the 20- or 21-year-old Cree and Métis women who were talking about how the work that they're putting in right now, it's informing not just their kids, but their kids, and their grandkids, thinking about those seven generations from where we are. Thinking about these things as people from a long line of history where people have tried to be removed, replaced, and revised constantly, there's also this reclamation and ownership of the past within our worldview too. So, trying to build that in, so we can tell our own story about what the past truly is.
A lot of your work highlights your relationship with hunting. In the Hungry Zine, your poem, “A Can of Mushroom Soup,” feels like an ode to growing up a certain way. In “The God of Willow and Muskeg,” you speak of food as one would community. The two have always been intertangled. Your descriptions of food are very sensory, textural, and visual. Being a hunter/trapper/harvester, providing food/medicine/berries for yourself and your loved ones. You can sense your respect for the animals and how it necessitates survival. Could you touch on this?
I fucking hate mushroom soup with a passion. I refuse to eat it. I will eat anything except mushrooms. It's primarily because of the soup but also because my Noohkoom poisoned me regularly with mushrooms. She knew what to pick in Edmonton, but she would do it in the middle of the city, where many had absorbable pesticides and fungicides. I'm surprised my cousins, and I didn't die from that.
I was at my dad's 66th birthday, and he wanted to cook a whole bunch of wild birds in different forms. So the Sharp-tailed grouse—which is basically prairie chicken—my granny wanted to do it the "classic way." Which is also bad cooking, where it's so overcooked. They could be better cooks because the food is terrible and always has been, no matter what. They'd use the cans of mushroom soup and boil and cook the hell out of it. It's just not good. But that's what we grew up eating, and I hate it. Just the thought of that taste is so evocative in my head that I had to write that Hungry Zine piece. But that world is actually kind of one of the reasons I'm moving back. Being here, this is not my home territory by a long shot.
I loved the imagery of you using recipes for fancy meals and putting in the stuff you caught.
That was a pandemic development in my own life. I was trying to become a better cook. One of the things I'm excited about with my return to Edmonton is hunting and harvesting. I'm very fortunate that I grew up knowing how to hunt and harvest, which not many people would have the ability to do, mostly from my grandparents and dad. Nowadays, it's not something that's often passed down because it's such a generational loss—and many people are moving to urban cities to try and make it.
I loved reading about that in “The God of Willow and Muskeg.”
It was funny, though. Because in Edmonton, zucchini grows incredibly well, so everyone always has tons of zucchini, they want to get rid of. You never ask for anything in exchange, but it's just a prairie NDN culture that you need to give something back. So, whenever I was pulling up to a friends’ place, I could see them sitting on the front stoops of their houses with a mountain of zucchini beside them. I had so much that I would have to grate it up and add it to things.
I keep thinking about all the foods from my childhood; the wild game doesn't have to be that bad. You can cook it incredibly well. Harvest it well so the animal doesn't suffer and the meat is good, and then process it right. My brother and I were making all these incredible Italian-style sausages. We got really into these fancy recipe books and replaced beef or pork with moose or goose or duck or whatever we had.
We'd take the moose tongue, which is not a food that many people outside of the elders would find desirable. We cooked them in a broth we made with juniper berries and stock, which was good. Surprisingly good.
I sense a theme of demolition in your poems. “Wintersongs” touches on “dismantling the structures,” and in “What Do You Believe In?” you speak of the children of the future giving Canada “away to the grass.” There is this common sense with healing that we have to look back to move forward. And for you, it seems like looking back means going to a place where the wrong path was walked and choosing a better way, a different way.
It's that resurgence concept. That last poem, "What Do You Believe In?", I wrote that one for The Mamawi Project. They were putting together a Métis collective zine. That poem has got a lot of references in it. It's got Louis Riel. Pieces of the Seven Fires prophecy, the people will be reborn, like the artists. There are a lot of these really old historical Métis references hidden within there. I very intentionally did that. I'm not usually that intentional about writing, but I was very intentional about that one in particular.
It’s still in the system.
Yeah, exactly. These class structures are still embedded in place, which created a lot of the shit, unfortunately. At the same time, you get the beauty of the resurgence of language and the resurgence of all these other traditional and contemporary concepts. I think we often talk about this in Canada: What would decolonization actually look like? It may not go well. The provincial organizational structures are terrible, and all the bureaucratic bullshit that comes with that. It's also, obviously, a hypothetical. But I do still love the idea of a return to—not a traditional way, because I think that's such a weird, outdated, stereotypical concept, where we're going to go back to existing as we did back then. But it's like, no, no, no. Indigenous peoples of every culture have always adapted and innovated. I've always adapted. I have always brought future in. And that's just such a racist, old Canadian way of thinking, where you lived in antiquity and never wanted to see change. I liked the idea of what it could potentially look like, within these futurism ideas, of returning to governance.
Your poem “What Do You Believe In?” reads as someone with endless hope, and in “The North Sask,” you write, “fill the water with seeds,” which feels like a very visual telling of hope. Tell me about hope. Why is it important?
There are these odd areas in Saskatchewan that are few and far between. The ones that have been allowed to return to prairie grass and what it looked like before, and it is exceptionally beautiful there. Similar to Wanuskewin and Grasslands National Park down south. Some of these weird areas where whoever owned it decided it wasn't good enough for farming anymore, and they just gave up on it, and it returned to natural grasses, and it's so incredibly beautiful. When you're driving by those fucking mono-crop areas with lentils or canola in southern Saskatchewan, you realize that's why the landscape looks so beat up—it was destroyed by modern agriculture, and it's destroying its habitat. But these areas, it's almost like in Game of Thrones, that sea of grasses that the Dothraki ride over. They are these beautiful grass structures. I think it is so cool to see that land return to more of a natural composition and natural state.
My next book, Prairie Edge, touches on this kind of. There is this one Métis activist that is running the show, and she kind of gets disillusioned by the current protest culture. So she decides to do one last big kind of movement and steals a whole bunch of bison from Elk Island National Park and releases them in the middle of downtown Edmonton.
I think when I write about a lot of settler colonialism, like in the prairies, in particular—and, I mean, even on the West Coast out here—it's such a minimal time speck regarding the world around us. It's only been 150 years since it has not been under the governance of Cree and Métis matriarchs. It's such a small thing. I was trying to capture that in some of my poems. This is just such a small blip. Everything ends. It's a natural cycle. But at some point, it will return to a different form, whatever that is. This isn't forever in any sense. This is just a small cycle. We can see a change in all of these current global situations. It's not forever, and there will be an end, and that's alright, and we'll see what that return looks like after that. The future will be alright. Hopefully.
Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer and educator living in amiskwaciwâskahikan. Born in Saskatoon and raised in Buffalo Pound Lake and Drayton Valley. Conor is descended from the Lac Ste. Anne Métis community by way of the Red River Settlement and the Papaschase Cree Nation. He is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and has been a recognized harvester for years. His Ukrainian family are Settlers in Treaty 4 Territory.
Kayla MacInnis is a multidisciplinary Métis/European storyteller from Misâskwatômina (Saskatoon) residing on Coast Salish territory. Through sharing stories that mix visual arts and the written word, Kayla hopes to inspire people to find different ways to connect with themselves and one another. Follow her on Instagram or visit her website to learn more.
