Good intentions aside,

Nations’ names mispronounced

plough depth patronization

Indigenous and foreign students

invited into their halls

of subtle intellectual
​
and academic racism

These are the rules of

engagement:

Marking rubrics

for the administrative

convenience

of tenured procurers

feeding student wood fibre

into their Colonizing breakdown mill

Minds

sawn, baked and kiln dried

to be sorted into

standardized dimensions

graded, degreed and certified

suited up in priestly robes

to satisfy today’s
​
commodities market.

(To the memory of the Kamloops 215 little ones)
 
THE MUSH HOLE RUBRIC 

Having been administered

a psychological caning

and made to feel among

 “The Other,”

in our own homeland.

Citations not quite in order

Not fitting into the paint

by number

linear boxes

Regurgitating the same old

same old


 
This is how you will

surely lose marks

boy…


 
Such are the metrics

 of compliance

and obedience


​

"Mush Hole Rubric" previously published in Mad Canada

Dave Monture, Bear Clan Mohawk, is a retired part-time student who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve. He is a fourth year student in Honours Creative Writing, his second degree at Western. He has participated in readings with Writers-in-residence Margaret Christakos and Alicia Elliot. He has opened for a guest reading of Poetry London. He has contributed to recordings of the Indigenous Writers’ Circle for Radio Western. In 2019 he was a recipient of the Dr. Valio Markkanen Undergraduate Student Award of Excellence and a Head and Heart Fellowship. Most recently, he has contributed to Mad in Canada, Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice.
​
He is a member of the Indigenous Writers’ Circle, an independent Indigenous creative voice, at Western. He is working on a novel, poetry and flash fiction. He recently returned to painting.
​

A CITY STREET

I swim thru the tunnel
of stately maples 
on old Barclay Street

where smart cars fart
beneath protective leaves.
A luminous green sky

that forms a canopy
over the grey green river
of a shape shifting street.

Even here their instinct
is to protect.
To give and give and give.

Born in England Yvonne has spent the majority of her life being an actor coast to coast in Canada.  She now lives in Vancouver B.C .  A passionate activist since her days on the front lines of protest against logging in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island in the  eighties, one of the first of such successes , she believes that climate change is the most urgent issue on the planet and mourns the loss of every tree .