Whether we are the victims of violence or the perpetrators shame may have made a home in our bodies. In many cases our body contains memories that are not accessible to us. There may be trauma but there is also blood memory. Intergenerational trauma and our own trauma may be woven together creating a barrier to our ability to trust the wisdom, the blood memory that our bodies hold. Together we will create a safe space where we can access what our bodies have to share with us. We will do this with the intention of using writing to remove shame and reclaim hope so that we can write/dream a new future for ourselves.

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Jónína Kirton is a Red River Métis/Icelandic poet and a graduate of the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio where she is currently their BIPOC Auntie supporting and mentoring BIPOC students. A late-blooming poet, she was sixty-one when she received the 2016 City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her first collection of poetry, page as bone ~ ink as blood, was released with Talonbooks in 2015. Her second collection, An Honest Woman, was released in 2017, again with Talonbooks and was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

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About Exchanging Words Workshops

Exchanging Words is a new project in a partnership between Warriors Against Violence Society, Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast, and WePress. By providing writing and storytelling workshops to the community at a number of events online, the workshops encourage participants to write and tell stories about experiences with violence (which can include residential school, the 60s scoop, murdered and missing family members, family violence, and intimate partner violence).

The sessions are a way for people to express themselves in ways that they might not have had access to in the past or perhaps ever considered before. Led by professional Indigenous writers in our communities who are collective members of the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast (AWCWC). The variety of approaches in writing include traditionally-inspired storytelling, poetry, songwriting, fiction, personal essay, and theatre.

The participants will have access to counsellors during this process to ensure that people feel safe to share. The participants will be encouraged to publish their work online through the AWCWC’s new website in a collection at the end of the process. This project is a way of giving voice to people that may have not had the opportunity to do so and at the same time raising awareness of the many forms of violence that happens in our communities.

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Online workshops will take place from February 2 through mid March 2021. Schedule and more information about the project can be found at https://www.saltchuck.ca/exchanging-words

Funding for this project comes from Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation and the Minister͛s Advisory Council on Indigenous Women through the Giving Voice Initiative.

For more information please contact Russell Wallace and other members of AWCWC at info@saltchuck.ca