A Kwantlen First Nation storyteller

It’s 5am and the room is filled with the vocals of PJ Harvey as Joseph Dandurand sits down at his desk in his Kwantlen First Nation home to write.

Dandurand first started putting pen to paper 30 years ago. He’s published roughly 14 books—seven books of poetry and seven children’s books.

Dandurand spent the morning crafting the opening scene of his latest work: a children’s book.

“Sometimes it’s very cathartic,” he said later that day.

Dandurand’s writing—the result of a therapeutic process—was recently recognized by his industry peers. Last year, he was awarded one of Canada’s largest poetry awards for his collection of work.

While his children’s books focus on lessons, his poetry collections tell the stories of darker days. Because Dandurand is a survivor of the streets and his mother of residential school.

Early life

She weeps so softlywe talked about old times 

— Excerpt from The Cheerfulness of Nothing Else, published in The Punishment (2022)

Dandurand grew up on military bases.

His mother had been put on a train in Fort Langley at the age of five and sent to Kuper Island residential school. She graduated from St. Mary’s in Mission at the age of 18 and then joined the military. There she met Dandurand’s father, a non-Native.

Dandurand would only come to learn about his mother’s traumatic past much later in life, after his father died and his mother returned to Kwantlen.

“When my old man died, my mom decided to come back home here,” he said. “That’s probably the first time I knew that she went to residential school because she never spoke about it.”

After returning to Kwantlen, Dandurand’s mother taught in schools, telling her story. Now she battles Parkinson’s disease.

“You mention the word residential school to her and she just starts crying,” Dandurand said. “That kind of shows you how inherently tragic it was for her that even a brain disease can’t wipe out that memory.”

Establishing a career

If ever you see me on the road to nowhere,stop and ask me any question about life

— Excerpt from Sinking In published in The Punishment (2022)

Dandurand explores his family history through his evocative poems, including his own hardships.

Dandurand struggled with addiction growing up. He was an alcoholic by the age of 19 and a drug addict by the age of 26. Until one day, as he describes it, he “woke up” and went back to school.

He attended and graduated from college, and afterwards studied to be a stage actor. But his acting coach advised him he’d be better off pursuing something else because he wasn’t qualified to pursue a career in acting.

“When I graduated theater school I kept writing and then writing for me started opening doors.”

Those doors would lead Dandurand to create more than a dozen published works and produce several plays. More recently, he has been shortlisted for various awards.

“I was always the bridesmaid and I never won,” he said. At least that was the case until last year, when Dandurand’s collections of truth-telling were awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize—a $25,000 award. That prize is awarded not for a single work, but for a mid-career poet’s entire body of work.

A homecoming

we came from the skyit is said we were at firstwolves and we could runand never get tired and sowe became human beings

— Excerpt from Beauty of our people, published in I Will Be Corrupted (2020)

Some of Dandurand’s poetry tells the story of his lived experience on the streets and his mother’s life at residential school, but his writing doesn’t just come from a dark place. He also draws inspiration from nature and Kwantlen history.

“​​I’m able to go back and imagine certain episodes in my life,” he said. “I don’t want to question where it all comes from, it’s just all there.”

While growing up on military bases Dandurand would return to Kwantlen in the summers to fish; that is, until he made the island his permanent home.

“Thirty years ago I came home and I was gonna fish that summer—on my way to Mexico to live on the beach and write poetry—and our Chief Marilyn Gabriel, she gave me that thing called a salary. And I’ve been working for my people ever since.”

Dandurand, now a father of three daughters, serves as the director of the Kwantlen Cultural Centre.

What’s next?

When I’m done writing a poem to sharein my next book, I close the notebookand change the song on the radioas some band tells me I am ahead by a century.

— Excerpt from The Writing Life, published in The Punishment (2022)

Dandurand’s style of writing has evolved since he first picked up a pen.

“I don’t like grammar,” he said with a chuckle. Dandurand’s poems have progressed to long paragraphs unbroken by punctuation.

When the Current spoke to Dandurand he had just finished the first scene of a new children’s play featuring a Raven.

“Every one of my stories has a teaching in it, or a positive quality,” he said. “And a lot of my work has this image of how when we take from the river, we should always give something back.”

One of those positive-quality stories will be hitting the stage for a cross-Canada tour this fall. (Check the Axis Theatre website for the upcoming schedule.)

Th’owxiya: The Hungry Feast Dish features traditional Coast Salish and Stó:lō music and imagery. The tale follows a cunning mouse and shares the heroic efforts of a raven, bear, and sasquatch.

Meanwhile, the story about the Raven is still in the early stages but Dandurand has a children’s book he is releasing later this year called The Girl Who Loved the Birds.

“As I’m finishing one project, towards the end of each project, I’m already thinking about what I should be working on next.”

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