| Summary: |
In 2005, the Indian Teacher Education Program (ITEP) in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan published a small anthology of poems. A number of years previously, ITEP had run a creative writing class as part of its program, but the class had lost its momentum and faded away. In 2003, an introductory creative writing class was again made part of the ITEM program, and it attracted the eventual grand sum of four students. The following year, there were nine, and the year after the full complement of 15, which the class has maintained since, occasionally going over the enrollment cap. With the full enrollment of 15 signed up for the 2005-2006 class, ITEP published its first anthology of student poems, culled for those first 13 students' writings. The book was a big hit around ITEP and beyond, becoming a particular favourite with subsequent creative writing classes who was where their work could go. Eight years later, this is the second ITEP creative writing anthology published, comprising work from all 126 students enrolled between 2005 and 2013 in eight on-campus classes and one off-campus class offered at Big River First Nation during intersession, 2007. The selection of poems vary from traditional rhyming patterns, haiku, free verse, song, found and prose poems. Themes range from land, fealty to ancestry and to custom, honour to family and to First Nations practices and institutions, displacement, identity loss and confusion, the pains and horrors of residential schools and its aftermath, forced assimilation, the effects of colonization and de-colonization, growing up on the Rez and in the city, embracing worlds of change, and beyond. |
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