Decolonizing the Narrative Conversation Series with Waubgeshig Rice: Adapting Oral Storytelling to Literature

Date: Wed, Sep 17 @ 7:00 PM

Location Max Bell Auditorium

Optional Smudge at 6:45 PM

This event is free and all are welcome.

Waubgeshig Rice, photo by James Hodgins

Join us for an insightful conversation with award-winning author and journalist Waubgeshig Rice as he explores the creative opportunities in adapting oral traditions into written form.

Passing stories down orally from generation to generation is a foundational cultural practice for people around the world. Today, writers capture, adapt, and document these spoken stories in diverse and evolving ways.

In this talk, Waub will reflect on how the oral stories of his Anishinaabe heritage inform his fiction writing. He will also share approaches for bringing oral traditions to the page, with a focus on dialogue, character development, and staying true to the spirit of spoken storytelling.

Facilitated by Janine Windolph, Director of Indigenous Arts at Banff Centre, the session includes a presentation by Waub, followed by a discussion and a Q&A. This conversation will be live-streamed and will also be recorded and shared following the event. Sessions may share experiences and ask difficult questions.

About the Decolonizing the Narrative Conversation Series

The Decolonizing the Narrative Conversation Series is a bi-monthly conversation session inviting leading Indigenous Art creators to discuss their practices and processes. The series engages an Indigenous lens across various art forms, including Literary Arts, Film and Media Arts, Digital Media, Visual Arts, and Performing Arts such as Theatre, Dance, and Music. These sessions offer a space to explore and deepen your understanding of how Indigenous artists use their disciplines as tools to decolonize artistic processes and creation.

Biography

Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. His first short story collection, Midnight Sweatlodge, was inspired by his experiences growing up in an Anishinaabe community, and won an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2012. His debut novel, Legacy, followed in 2014. Moon of the Crusted Snow, his breakthrough novel, was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. It received widespread critical acclaim, including the Evergreen Award in 2019. The sequel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, arrived in late 2023. His books have been translated into French and German, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies.

His journalism experience began in 1996 as an exchange student in northern Germany, writing articles about being an Anishinaabe youth in a foreign country for newspapers back in Canada. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002. He spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist, web writer, producer, and radio host. In 2014, he received the Anishinabek Nation’s Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nation Storytelling. His final role with CBC was host of Up North, the afternoon radio program for northern Ontario. He left daily journalism in 2020 to focus on his literary career.