Antoine Mountain has received many awards for his art, community activism, and athletic achievement—including the NWT Premier’s Award, the Queen’s Jubilee Commemorative Medal, the Tom Longboat Award—and was recently inducted in the NWT Sport Hall of Fame. Mountain is currently completing a PhD in Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, but will always call Radelie Koe (Fort Good Hope), Northwest Territories home. From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor (Touchwood Editions, 2019) is his first book.
A Wholistic Point of View
Indigenous scholars are challenging the academic world from an Indigenous perspective. We’re redesigning the PhD so Indigenous artists can do visuals and stories, and not just written works. A wholistic point of view – much more complete.
DANIELLE METCALFE-CHENAIL IN CONVERSATION WITH ANTOINE MOUNTAIN
Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail: When did you start working on From Bear Rock Mountain?
Antoine Mountain: I started five years ago – in May or June of 2014. I was at a friend of mine’s place in Calgary doing a series of paintings for an art show and somehow there was an image of a young woman that showed up in a painting of the northern lights and I just left it like that. When I woke up the following morning there was news of one of my niece’s daughters that was murdered in Fort Good Hope. So it followed along with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s issue – the urgency of issues like MMIW really pushed me to start.
To read the whole interview, please visit the Hamilton Review of Books page