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Lee Maracle is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and awardwinning fictional works, including Ravensong (1993), Sojourners & Sundogs (2002), Bent Box (2000), Will’s Garden (2002), and Daughters Are Forever (2002), and co-editor of a number of anthologies. Maracle currently teaches at the University of Toronto and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre. She is a member of the Sto:lo nation. Kit Dobson: We’re as much interested in your own experiences as a writer with the cultural industries as in broader questions about how writing in Canada works today. And we’d like to start by asking you to talk about your experiences applying for art funding in Canada, working with bodies like the Canada Council, provincial agencies, and others. Lee Maracle: God, I have not had good experiences. Part of it is that they don’t have a section for most of the projects I would like to do—even in their multidisciplinary section—so I’ve had a difficult time qualifying for funding. I am working on a project now, and I tried to get funding for it, because I want to include a number of Aboriginal artists, experts in their fields. And the only thing they have is a collaborative exchange grant, which means the people from out of town get paid, but the people who live in town don’t get paid. The theory is that we have to pay the people from out of town because they’re not able to pay their rent while they’re working on this project. Well, that is also the case for people who live in town. It doesn’t make any sense, but there is no other source for the project I’m trying to do. And I’ve run into that before; it is difficult to match the project to the guidelines. I think they’re really amazing projects, based on Salish art creation, where you engage a gathering of oratorial art creators, then you work the oratory into various art forms, and then create a single piece of multidisciplinary art from it. I also know that Indigenous writers with more than six books can’t apply for the Aboriginal Secretariat writing grants, while the competition in the Canadian grant section is so much stiffer. 47 Interview with Lee Maracle 3 ChangetheWayCanadaSeesUs Change the Way Canada Sees Us 48 48 Smaro Kamboureli: So this seems to be an issue with how the Canada Council categorizes writing projects in terms of genre or the media involved. But how about funding for one of your novels or your collections of short stories? LM: I once applied for a grant to do a novel that was something of a continuation of the story of the family in Ravensong, and I was quite surprised that I got slam-dunked. I was told no. They said I could know who the jury was after being rejected, but I’ve asked several times and they haven’t told me who was on the jury. I’ve had bad experiences with grants, not the least of which is that I am not all that good at writing them. SK: So, in your experience then, this would have to do with the system’s inability to accommodate different kinds of creative visions, at least in part? LM: Well, I think there’s a lot of politics too, and I think there’s a lot of race stuff going on. I applied to Canada Council’s Canadian literary publishing section. Aboriginal people have been consistently rejected from that section because a number of people think that the existence of the Aboriginal Secretariat takes care of us, but some Aboriginal writers don’t qualify because they have already published too many books, which puts Aboriginal writers on a need, not merit-based, system . So I think that’s politics. If you’re an Aboriginal person, and you apply for a writing grant through the Aboriginal Secretariat, you get ten thousand a year. If you’re a Canadian applying for the Canadian pot, you get double that.1 I can’t live on ten thousand a year, so I went after the Canadian pot. Years ago—I think it was in ’92—before they had an Aboriginal Secretariat, I did receive a grant, but I haven’t received anything since. SK: So, what other sources of support are there for Aboriginal writers like you? LM: Well, there are lots. But like I...

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