The Big Melt by Emily Riddle

Author:Emily Riddle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, Canadian, Indigenous, Women Authors, Native American, First Nations
ISBN: 9780889714373
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Published: 2022-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

sitting in the back seat of a truck on the way through battleford,

i think about how mistahi maskwa lived peaceful refusal,

what he would have thought of the hockey and the bears who came after him.

Dinosaur Economics

Ask the dinosaurs. What happened to them? We asked one of our elders, “Why did those dinosaurs disappear?” He thought about it for a while and he said, “Maybe they didn’t do their ceremonies.”

—Leroy Little Bear

i wanted bitumen to be made of dead dinosaurs. why did i want these ancient kin to be passively implicated in the fossil fuel industry? it felt like an appropriate way to romanticize the disaster of the tar sands. how tragic to be killed by a meteorite and for your remains to warm the planet into disaster millions of years later. perhaps this is a means of climate change coping. a weird one. however, in my research for this poem i concluded that the ford f-150s of alberta are not burning dinosaurs to propel themselves. in fact, petroleum, natural gas, etc. come from plankton, marine organisms and bacteria from oceans three billion years ago. so the entire term fossil fuels is a strange, incorrect one. others were also attached to dinosaurs as part of the energy sector but for different reasons. the term tar sands still remains jarring to me as someone who grew up in alberta. maybe this surprises you about me, but the programming in this province began early. i distinctly remember learning about “have-not” provinces in elementary school, how “we” paid for their free daycare. what i did not learn was that none of the land below the depth of a plow was surrendered in treaty, that my nêhiyaw ancestors would have never understood children going hungry in a land of such prosperity. there was prosperity here before money, oil wells and pipelines; there will be prosperity after those cease to be here. in 2006, my working-class family of four (three out of four of which are treaty indians) received a cheque for $1600 from the klein government due to the surplus of a booming oil economy. that year we went on vacation, packed up a station wagon to the brim, fuelled by old sea creatures.

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