Today, a very exciting and important show, our guest is Cree graduate student at the Ontario Institue for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Erica Violet Lee who joins us from downtown Toronto for an exclusive interview. Erica, along with five other Indigenous women and Two-Spirit artists and intellectuals, wrote an open letter to University of Regina Press asking for poetry by Saskatchewan based Cree poet, Neal McLeod, to be removed from an anthology of Saskatchewan authors, they were initially included in, entitled – Kisiskâciwan: Indigenous Voices from Where the River Flows Swiftly – due to his convictions of domestic abuse. URPress had publicly stated they would not remove McLeod’s work citing censorship rules; but, the day before we taped the interview, McLeod had posted a public apology and willingly removed his work. I check-in with Erica and get her take on the feelings of the group about the process and the movement that has garnered loads of media attention Nationally on social media and in the publishing world.
In solidarity, I asked my friend and Métis-Saulteaux-Polish visual artist from Tio’tia:ke (Montréal), Dayna Danger, who was in town to speak at the C2C: Two-Spirit & Queer People of Colour conversation happening at UWinnipeg over the weekend and who preformed at the Launch of Red Rising Issue 7 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery where some of her work is being shown at the Insurgence/Resurgence exhibit, to introduce Erica and lead off the show.