DANCING THE MUSE - Danial Neil

  the rain settles like hands upon you, cold fingers remembering your face there is no one in the street but the washed few who think that it is for them there are small voices in the rain, no one talks, and you can think without the urgent sun and the melancholy drift of it, the grey and insipid pouring that allows you to shrink back we can rest there, a moments withdrawal from the world look at the solitary crows and how the rain boils off their ungodly capes they cackle with their jaunty hops, pleased, I would say, to be so ridiculous in the carnival of wet and shivering but not too much of it under the dripping leaves listening to the drizzle and sizzle I once sat in the woods as a boy when a thrush told me stories with its rusty-hinge song and when it rains now and the sky falls black and brooding, I take his hand and wait for the music    

While Winnipeg Free Press did give Dominion of Mercy a good review, the reviewer did criticize the absence of indigenous content, specifically the impact of the Anyox Smelter and its development on the occupied traditional lands of the Nisga'a people. The story takes place in 1917 in northern British Columbia.  I thought a lot about this in the context of historical fiction, writing a novel that contains both fact and fiction. Although I did have the main character question the presence of an indigenous person in one scene, and further content offered by an other character, (Dominion of Mercy p.197-98), the structure of the novel could not provide the proper treatment to address the cultural and human impacts of the smelter. https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/scottish-lass-starts-fresh-in-bc-mining-town-574612052.html My reflection returned me to a question that I've had for a long time. How did we acquire the lands called Canada? Were they just...