Ask the dinosaurs. What happened to them? We asked one of our elders, “Why did those dinosaurs disappear?” He thought about it for a while and he said, “Maybe they didn’t do their ceremonies.”
— Leroy Little Bear
i wanted bitumen to be made of dead dinosaurs. why did i want these
ancient kin to be passively implicated in the fossil fuel industry? it
felt like an appropriate way to romanticize the disaster of the tar
sands. how tragic to be killed by a meteorite and for your remains
to warm the planet into disaster millions of years later. perhaps this
is a means of climate change coping. a weird one. however, in my
research for this poem i concluded that the ford f-150s of alberta are
not burning dinosaurs to propel themselves. in fact, petroleum, nat-
ural gas, etc. come from plankton, marine organisms and bacteria
from oceans three billion years ago. so the entire term fossil fuels is a
strange, incorrect one. others were also attached to dinosaurs as part
of the energy sector but for different reasons. the term tar sands still
remains jarring to me as someone who grew up in alberta. maybe this
surprises you and me, but the programming in this province began
early. i distinctly remember learning about “have-not” provinces in
elementary school, how “we” paid for their free daycare. what i did
not learn was that none of the land below the depth of a plow was
surrendered in treaty, that my nêhiyaw ancestors would have never
understood children going hungry in a land of such prosperity. there
was prosperity here before the money, oil wells and pipelines; there will
be prosperity after those cease to be here. in 2006 my working-class
family of four (three out of four of which are treaty indians) received
a cheque for $1600 from the klein government due to the surplus of
a booming oil economy. that year we went on vacation, packed up a
station wagon to the brim, fuelled by old sea creatures.
In this poem, playful romanticization meets a stark awakening
- What emotions does this poem stir up in you? What emotions does the speaker seem to be exhibiting?
- The poem begins with an epigraph, which is a short quotation that begins a poem (or a book, or a chapter, etc.) in order to introduce its themes. What theme(s) do you think are being introduced by the Leroy Little Bear epigraph?
- The speaker seems to “break the fourth wall” in this poem, which means they acknowledge the fact that this poem is, in fact, a poem (ex. “...in my research for this poem i concluded that…”). They also speak directly to the reader in a casual, conversational way (ex. “maybe this surprises you about me…”). How does this poetic style affect your understanding of the poem?
- At some point in the poem, the speaker is no longer talking about fossil fuels, but about the way treaties are manipulated by the “Canadian” governments to disenfranchise* Indigenous peoples. Can you identify where that shift in focus occurs? How does the poet connect the two topics? Are there other connections you can make between the topics that might not be explicitly evidenced in the poem?
- The poem is written in a prose (no line breaks) format, which can often make a poem feel like it’s barrelling toward the end without a lot of room for pause or breath. In your recitation, how might you honor the poet’s intention with this form while also ensuring the message of the poem gets across to your audience?
- As an exercise, write a prose poem in which you “break the fourth wall;” your speaker knows that the poem is a poem, and the reader knows that the poem is a poem. For your topic, choose something you’re passionate about that has both big-picture implications for the world and also more intimate implications for yourself.
*Disenfranchise – deprive (someone) of a right or privilege.
Useful Links:
Check out this Crow Reads Podcast interview with Emily Riddle, where she discusses the significance of animal kinship in not only “Dinosaur Economics,” but other poems in her collection, The Big Melt.
Leroy Little Bear is an important Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) figure in North America who “encourages Western science to adopt Indigenous Traditional Knowledges.” Read about him here!
Emily Riddle’s “Dinosaur Economics” Copyright © 2022 by Emily Riddle. Source “Dinosaur Economics” from The Big Melt (Nightwood Editions, 2022). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.