Billy-Ray Belcourt 

Billy-Ray Belcourt headshot

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. A 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, he earned his PhD in English at the University of Alberta. He was also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. He is the author of four books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, A History of My Brief Body, and A Minor Chorus.

His fifth book, Coexistence: Stories, will be published in May 2025 by Hamish Hamilton (CAN) and W.W. Norton (US).

Excerpt from A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

An almost animalistic instinct compelled me to turn off the highway and into a predominantly white hamlet named after a French Catholic priest from the early twentieth century. I wanted, for the first time as an adult, to return to the site of the Indian residential school my relatives were forced to attend as children. It was one of dozens in Alberta intended to brutalize rather than educate. This was an era of horror so prolonged and systematic that it continued to permeate the larger Indigenous consciousness. We are still haunted by it.

I stood in front of what was left of the school: a white entryway (chipped paint), the year 1947 etched into the entryway, a dark and empty room (to the extent I could know it was empty). Throughout adolescence I heard stories of supernatural disturbances spun from these remains: twirling figures, inexplicable sounds. Usually these were seen or heard during teenaged parties thrown in the hidden valley in which the abandoned school is situated, a graveyard just steps away. I never attended one, but almost everyone I knew had; it was somewhat of a rite of passage to do so, to barrel down the hill from a car or quad parked on the public side of a farmer’s NO TRESPASSING sign. On this day, I was alone. The sky was vast and the grass was long and wild, and in it my boots disappeared. Inside me: nausea, the bitterness of the past. Also, a sense of how what I saw agitated representation. I wanted to take a photo and call it “The Unwritability of Grief.” I felt that I too could be photographed and labelled this way.

Continue reading from A Minor Chorus in Toronto Star.

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