By Cara McKenna

Indigenous books were featured and discussed when the 29th annual Vancouver
Writers Festival was held in October as more than 17,000 people attended the event on Granville Island.

A panel of authors who have written books about Indigenous Canada participated in an event called ‘Melding Worlds’ around the significance of Aboriginal storytelling.

Katherena Vermette, a Métis author on the panel, said she believes the country wants to hear more stories from and about its first peoples. Her novel The Break is a family saga about women living in Winnipeg’s notorious North End near where Vermette herself lives.

“These were stories that I had with me for quite a long time and that I ran from for quite a long time” she explained. “I learned, because I was talking about such horrific things, I really needed to find a way to talk about that. What I found was, I was looking for the beauty.”

The four-author panel also discussed the concept of reconciliation and how it factored into their novels. Vermette said, for her, reconciliation wasn’t something she thought about much while writing.

“There’s nothing to get over, nothing has ended … families are still being ripped apart,” she said. “My obligation was to these women that I made up in my head.”

However, for settler author Jennifer Manuel, reconciliation was on her mind. Manuel’s novel The Heaviness of Things That Float tells the story of a non-Indigenous woman coming to work in an Indigenous community and explores the complex dynamic.

The story is inspired by Manuel’s experiences working as a teacher in a remote Nuu-chah-nulth nation and questioning her place within the small community.

“There were comments made about [my book] in regards to reconciliation,” she said but added she feels uncomfortable promoting it that way, she also added that she was also worried about this issue before even realizing how to publish a book because she knew due to the topic, whether looking for the beauty in it or not, could be harder to find publishing companies or agents that would run alongside publishing the content.

“When it was published, I actually felt really uneasy about the business of promoting it and going out and saying: ‘read my book.'”

Two other authors spoke on the panel. Joan Crate wrote Black Apple that tells the story of a young Indigenous girl growing up in the residential school system. Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s novel The Spawning Grounds is a family story that joins First Nations and settler cultures in a story set in BC’s Thompson-Shuswap region.

Kathryn Gretsinger, who moderated the panel, said that the four novels in discussion are unique, but the stories intersect in many ways.

“They’re so powerful and there’s characters in here who I know I’m going to carry with me for the rest of my life,” she concluded.