As part of an epigraph to one of the poems in his collection Discovery Passages, Garry Thomas Morse quotes Armand Garnet Ruffo as saying that “poetry [. . .] will make us who are doomed live forever” (79). And indeed there is often a sense of doom in this book, not least in the long, central poem that consists of fragments (apparently) taken from the archive of colonial regulation in early twentieth-century British Columbia. Here we are presented with disjointed words and phrases from the reports of those charged with enforcing the British ban on the native potlatch, and with carting away (and selling) to museums indigenous artifacts and possessions. From “Wm. M Halliday, Indian Agent,” for instance, on November 20, 1918: “give / away / against / the act / persist / no choice / compelled / prosecuted / govern / accordingly” (36). Later, in 1922, from what appears to be a letter to “Duncan C. Scott, Deputy Superintendent, Indian Aff[ai]rs”: “with / regard / material / surrendered / piled / in my / wood / shed / present / time // 300 / cubic / feet / masks / bead / dresses / other / pot / latch / gear” (45). In a systematic policy of appropriation, everything that might be given away is instead taken, to ensure that there is no surplus or excess that could be redistributed. No wonder that in Latin America, the settlements to which the Spanish assigned the indigenous were called “reducciones” or reductions. Styled now as poetry, the colonial record accounts for “articles [that] / are now / beyond / recall J. D. McLean, Asst. Deputy & Sec., Sept. 20, 1922” (56).

Yet despite this dispiriting logic of colonial reduction and rationalization, which aims to leave the indigenous with no more than what they can subsist on, this is also a book that is full of life. Elsewhere, indeed, it portrays poetry as precisely that excessiveness that can never quite be reduced to rational need, as a recovered surplus that spreads across the stolen land: “In other words it is my ancestral right, atavistically speaking, to sing & flood the space with poems & stuff,” Morse declares (107). “You forget,” he tells us in a poem entitled “Potlatch,” “I am other / Multitudes” (15). The British tried even to take away indigenous languages: the final poem, titled “500 lines” in the manner of a schoolhouse punishment, consists almost entirely of the repeated injunction to be interiorized, “I will not speak Kwak’wala. / I will not speak Kwak’wala. / I will not speak Kwak’wala. / …” (114-125). But they proved unable to take away indigenous language, as Morse’s book–and indeed what is practically an outpouring of recent First Nations poetry–goes to show. Discovery Passages does effectively contain Whitmanesque multitudes, multiple styles, multiple voices, from would-be passengers frustratedly waiting for a ferry to documentary film-makers endlessly interrupted, to an almost comic turn at a New York anthropological museum that riffs on Leonard Cohen while demanding the return of indigenous cultural patrimony: “First we take Manhattan / then we take B.C.” (101). This is poetry that sprawls over the page, resistant and rebellious, and can never quite be constricted or brought into line.

Morse comes from the Kwakwakaʼwakw, whose traditional territories are in the Campbell River region of Vancouver Island, Quadra Island, and the neighbouring “Discovery Islands.” “Discovery Passage” itself lies between Quadra and Vancouver Island. His point, of course, is that these claims to discovery, preserved on the cartography of British Columbia, were doubly presumptuous: not only did the native peoples and their territory need no discovering; but the European explorers and subsequent colonial bureaucrats and settlers and even the anthropologists who were the handmaidens of their despoliation (it is here, after all, where Frank Boas effectively founded American anthropology) left so much undiscovered, which continues defiantly if fugitively to this day. It is perhaps then only fitting that the latest indigenous figure to spring a surprise by publicly unsettling the settlers, by refusing to stay within the lines, is also associated with the Kwakwakaʼwakw: former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould, recently expelled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from the Liberal Party, who is a member of the We Wai Kai Nation, on the east side of Quadra.