Do Trees Need Poetry?
With Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian, Jeff Derksen, Fred Wah, and Rita Wong
Thursday, February 13, 2025 | 7:00 PM
Audain Gallery
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Please join us for Do Trees Need Poetry?, with a talk by Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian (Secwepemc and Syilx) on the relationship of Indigenous and settler knowledges and poetry readings from Jeff Derksen, Fred Wah, and Rita Wong. The poets will read new and published work that engages with the life of water and water ways, trees (urban and rural), and Indigenous knowledges. The readings are presented in the context of Oscar Tuazon’s exhibition, What Trees Need.
Tuazon’s What Trees Need, points to the rich history of trees as sculptural material, referent, and even as sculptural objects in their own right. The work in the exhibition issues from a workshop Tuazon held with graduate students that considered the way art production takes place, not just in relation to other works of art, but in a web of relationships that includes place-based communities, ecosystems, water systems, and trees.
Biographies
Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian is Secwepemc and Syilx from the interior plateau regions of what is known as British Columbia. She is happy to be a good relative to her Coast Salish cousins while she lives, works, and plays on their lands. Her research centralizes land, story, cultural protocols and how Indigenous Knowledge informs and guides interrelationships with Canadian Settler society. She serves as a Board member of the Indigenous Screen Office in Toronto and has curated programs for the 2018 and 2019 ImagineNative film festival, the largest Indigenous film festival in the world. With Rita Wong, Dorothy edited downstream: reimagining water. Her critical writing on education includes “Taking a Stand,” in Academic Well Being of Racialized Students (ed. B. Bunjun) and “The Reconciliation that Never Was,” in The Politics of Knowledge in the Aftermath of Mobilizing Against the Canadian State (eds. K. McAllister and M. Oikawa. She works with Indigenous students in Graduate Studies at SFU.
Jeff Derksen’s poetry books include Down Time, Dwell, Transnational Muscle Cars, The Vestiges, and the forthcoming Future Works. His critical writing on poetry, art and urbanism includes Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics and After Euphoria. He has edited Fred Wah’s Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-199. He collaborates with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber as Urban Subjects: their publications include The Militant Image Reader, Momentarily: Learning from Mega-events. He worked with Dorothy Christian in Graduate Studies and is a professor in the English Department at SFU.
Fred Wah has been a central figure in North American poetry since the 1960s when he was one of the founding editors of TISH, the poetry newsletter and published his early, place-based works such as Lardeau, Mountain, Tree, Among, Earth, and Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. His following works, such as Rooftops, Breathing My Name with a Sigh, Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail, Waiting for Saskatchewan and So Far. Many of these works are gathered in Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. His collection of essays Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity and his biotext, Diamond Grill are key in defining a mixed race or hybrid poetics in Canada. Further poetry volumes include Music at the Heart of Thinking, Is a Door, Sentenced to Light, and beholden: a poem as long as the river (with Rita Wong).
Rita Wong is a writer, teacher, and waterkeeper. She is the author of the poetry books Forage, Monkeypuzzle, a selected poetry volume Current, Climate (ed. Nicholas Bradley) and the co-author of collaborative works, Sybil Unrest (with Larissa Lai), beholden: a poem as long as the river (with Fred Wah) and Perpetual and Undercurrent (with drawings by Cindy Mochizuki). With Dorothy Christian, Rita edited downstream: reimagining water. She works as a professor of Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and has served her faculty association as a steward and president.
Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon is the SCA’s January 2025 Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR). The AVAIR program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. The AVAIR program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.
Tuazon’s exhibition, What Trees Need, continues at the gallery until February 15, 2025. More HERE ~