By Shane Rhodes
The following is a conversation between Shane Rhodes and Tim Lilburn about Lilburn’s recently published, Assiniboia, and Rhodes’ work in progress, X. The conversation took place over a few weeks this summer and was conducted by email.
Shane Rhodes: Assiniboia is built on an argument that the colonization of the land on which we live in Canada is not only a process of the past but an ongoing process that invades and engenders the present of our settler society, our relationship to land, our relationship to First Nations, our relationships to each other, and even our poetics. What you seem to be proposing in Assiniboia (and propose is almost too weak of a word for your insistence) is a different way of thinking about the past, the present, and colonization. What is some of the thinking that made you want to attempt Assiniboia? Why now?
Tim Lilburn: The Harper government is proposing a model of this country that places Western Canada’s resource wealth, especially tar sands oil, at its centre. I, along with many others, am uncomfortable with an understanding of the West that is built entirely on an extractive, and environmentally irresponsible and dangerous, approach to wealth — the snatch it and leave strategy, decamping to England or a gated community on Vancouver Island — the old Hudson Bay Company, Rupert’s Land model, the new big oil model. I would like an alternative way of imagining where I live.
