Excerpt from A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Death itself wasn't nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time. We endure with quaking certainty; the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.

In a matter of days, I confirmed a number of interviewees, all of whom were amiable and eager to participate, a symptom, to my mind, of an urge to perform the novelistic as a kind of abstract moral value (an urge I found relatable). During the phone calls, it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn't time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one's life, to assert one's enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up? Inside us, as routinized as oxygen? Or is it like dust, a porous, vulnerable, almost unperceivable film covering everything? In one's mouth, would it taste like the earth?

Once I'd made arrangements and packed my vehicle with my bags, with books I treated like talismans, I drove northward out of the city and, in so doing, deeper into my homeland. I drove for four hours through central Alberta and into the boreal forest, along the southern edge of the subarctic. I whirled past rows and rows of trees, which, blurred by speed, looked like a wall I could knock over. Upon crossing the Athabasca River, I pulled over, in front of a sign that marked the division between Treaty 6 and Treaty 8, an old but not ancient division I felt called to acknowledge. After a few minutes I darted away, shoving my palms into the off-white bark of a single poplar. I swear, for a second or two, the whole forest shook.

As I made my way from one side of the province's third-largest lake to the other, I passed through reserves as well as predominantly white villages and hamlets, one after the other, a pattern that could only have been devised by a colonizer's militaristic imagination, and maybe it was. There were swaths of forest around the reserves and farmers' fields in between, especially so around my hometown. Nothing was inextricable from the trauma of the twentieth century, everything was bound up in colonial policy, in the processes of racialization and settlement, yet the topography was gorgeous, yet my people were still so full of life. I was a product of this paradox, and I had returned to study it.

Excerpted from A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Copyright © 2022 by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.