OUR RECONCILIATION WORK
HOW ARE WE CONTRIBUTING TO RECONCILIATION IN OUR COMMUNITY?
Planet Earth Poetry is committed to creating space for the voices of Indigenous poets and actively seeks to make our events and programming accessible to Indigenous communities. As a volunteer-run charitable society, we are also committed to self-education and growth. Please read about our work below, and investigate our suggested resources. This is a work in progress, and we welcome your feedback and suggestions!
When booking each season’s featured readers, our intention is to give first priority to Indigenous poets with new work.
We acknowledge that there are comparatively few new collections each year by Indigenous poets, and so we also reach out to Indigenous poets with older collections, bending our “new collection” rule so that Indigenous voices are celebrated in our community.
We offer two full bursaries to Indigenous community members in each of our Master Classes, and also in our Summer Retreat.
We changed our policy for poet travel reimbursement, offering the funds up front to Indigenous poets (recognizing that Indigenous poets may not have the necessary resources).
We updated our mandate to make equity one of our top priorities, and are actively looking for opportunities to support poets from communities traditionally underrepresented by the literary establishment (this obviously includes Indigenous communities).
Our Artistic Director completed Indigenous Canada through the University of Alberta with the intention of serving our Indigenous communities and to better understand the challenges faced by Indigenous people.
We offer site-specific land acknowledgements at both of our partner venues. These land acknowledgements were approved (and tweaked) by Songhees language elders. This work was supported by the British Columbia Arts Council.
When Indigenous poets are booked, we inform the Victoria Native Friendship Center so that the Indigenous community is aware of the events.
INDIGENOUS POETS who’ve read at Planet Earth Poetry: we warmly invite you to follow the links to their websites or publications, and to learn about their poetry and other work. You can also click on the link to their performances on Planet Earth Poetry’s Youtube.
SITE SPECIFIC LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 2024, the British Columbia Arts Council generously agreed to fund the writing of site-specific land acknowledgements for Planet Earth Poetry. We hired local poet Nicole Moen, who previously worked with the Songhees Nation’s Language Team from 2018-2020. When complete, the land acknowledgements were taken to Songhees language elders [names in BCAC grant] for final approval.
Here are our Land Acknowledgements for our weekly venue, Russell Books Victoria, and for our monthly venue, James Bay New Horizons with pronunciation guides at the bottom: