Creeland

In Creeland, Dallas Hunt documents the transgressions of white supremacy, colonial structures, and institutional violence against First Nations people. The book also considers how one might resist becoming a plot device in the narrative structure of the white literary canon. Hunt’s critiques are true and just and yet, there are times when the fuel for accountability feels more essayistic than poetic in its execution. While consciously prosaic poems work well, in poems where the rhythm is more syncopated, the sentiment, paradoxically, reads flat and literal. The pace in such poems is often fast with the epiphanies and observations spilling, almost like a waterfall, from line to line. This can read as a method for overwhelming the reader into having a reaction, as is the case with these lines from “Mozart, Saskatchewan”:

a white man is a fist,
illiterate
and still
makes more money
than kikâwiy, despite
being half
as smart

Hunt’s strength lies in his panoramic descriptions of place and community, cousins and friends, interpretations of Cree language and culture, but also, in the exploration of archetypal indigeneity in literature. In “Narrative Trap(ping),” we observe how

a group of
coded-Indigenous
supporting characters help
a carful
of white settlers
back to their
desires.

More compelling are Hunt’s poems about the liminality of birth and death. In “I Was Born Blue,” the speaker contemplates the relationship between being born blue and the intersubjective space of mother and child in the initial moments of birth. To exist momentarily on that brink between life and death is “worth it” he says, if only because it means being “outside / of history / for a moment.”