Introducing our new series Art Is My Country. See the stories of 10 bicultural Canadian artists explore the rupture and rebirth of navigating somewhere between identities.

Each portrait will highlight one artist’s story of rupture, displacement and ultimate rebirth as a new artistic voice contributing to the narrative of Canadian culture and experience.

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Montreal-based Natasha Kannapé Fontaine’s poetry grapples with the lingering wounds of colonization, wounds which displace her between two cultures.

Fontaine is from Pessamit, an Innu community on Quebec’s North Shore. “My background is really particular,” she says, “because of the choice of my parents was to leave the reserve and go live in the city next next to the reserve [Baie-Comeau] on the North Shore.” In Baie-Comeau, Fontaine experienced discrimination in her elementary and high schools. “I used to be rejected because I was Innu and I’m still marked by that.”

“When I arrived in Montreal, the feeling of being in between became more heavy because I still feel like a stranger here.” Between these two worlds, Fontaine relates to the experiences of immigrants to Canada. “I feel like an immigrant sometimes. I have many immigrant friends who are used to experiencing discrimination and racism and I felt like we were all similar in our rage and our anger.”

This experience is the fuel for Fontaine’s work. “That’s how I began to write. Since that time I never stopped.” She sees her very presence in the Montreal poetry scene as a statement. “I think that just by existing as an Innu writer in the Quebecois literature milieux, I’m already disrupting the Canadian narratives.”

In the video above, Fontaine recites some of her verse at Montreal’s Molson Park, the first place she performed in 2012 during the Occupy Montreal movement, a moment rich in meaning for her. “I remember holding my sheets in my hands and I was shaking. I remember there was some wind surrounding me at that moment and I was like ‘something is happening when I’m reading.‘”

Fontaine sees her work as a quest for her identity as an Innu woman “growing up an evolving in contemporary society,” connecting with her people’s past and building a future. “I hear many people say that their poetry is home for them. For me, it’s just a place where I’m passing by because I’m always seeking my homeland — what it was before colonization.”

“As a poet, I’m just one of the voices of my ancestors. I’m just one of the transmitters of the ancestors’ voice. I’m just channelling that energy.”

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About: CBC Arts is your destination for extraordinary Canadian arts. Whether you're a culture vulture, a working artist, an avid crafter, a compulsive doodler or just a dabbler in the arts, there's something for you here.

Innu poet Natasha channels the voices of her ancestors
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