The upcoming 10th Congress of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies, organized by the University of Silesia (17-19 September), will host four distinguished keynote speakers. 

 

d’bi.young anitafrika

 

2025 Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize winner, d’bi.young anitafrika is an internationally acclaimed visionary dub poet, playwright-performer, director-dramaturge, and activist-scholar, who creates, embodies, and teaches critical dub pedagogy. Culminating their PhD in Black womyn’s theatre, their research centers on the embodied emancipation of the oppressed self through storytelling. d’bi.young developed the Anitafrika Method—a nurturant Black-queer-feminist pedagogy of knowing, doing, and being. A widely anthologized Siminovitch Playwright Prize finalist, three-time Dora award winner, and founding Artistic Director of Watah Theatre, and Spolrusie Press, d’bi.young has authored twelve plays, seven albums, and four poetry collections. They currently serve as lead faculty in the training programs of Soulpepper and Obsidian theatre companies; recently completing a term in UVic’s theatre department. d’bi.young’s present initiatives include leading the national Black Womyn in Theatre Digital Archive project, establishing the Black Theatre School, and preparing for the 20th-anniversary staging of their multi-ward-winning classic—The Sankofa Trilogy—at the Theatre Centre.

 

 

The keynote lecture, Dubography of a Biomythicist: Decolonial Performance Praxis in Biomyth and Panto Dub Theatre, will explore new forms of Black transfeminist theatre—Biomyth Monodrama and Panto Dub—through the Anitafrika Method and Critical Dub Pedagogy.

WORKSHOP: Decolonial Performance Praxis: An Introduction to the Anitafrika Method and Biomyth Making

This 3-hour workshop introduces participants to Biomyth Making, a decolonial story creation process grounded in the Anitafrika Method and guided by the Three R Process of re/membering, re/storying, and re/futuring. Developed by d’bi.young, the Anitafrika Method is a transformational creative praxis rooted in nine principles: Self-Knowledge, Power, Orality, Language, Rhythm, Urgency, Sacredness, Integrity and Experience.

The workshop invites participants to map their internal world through a creative inquiry rooted in personal biography, myth-making, and radical reimagination. The process will begin in the autobiographical (re/remembering), drawing on memories of lived experience as a story catalyst. From there, participants will enter the mythic (re/storying), where they will be encouraged to fictionalise and remix theeir memories, weaving in new or pre-existing myths to expand the meaning of their stories. Participants will then engage in the practice of re/futuring, employing speculative frameworks to imagine liberated futures beyond colonial and systemic harm. The creative practice centres process over product, and participants will not be required to share their work aloud, though they are welcome to do so if they feel called.

This workshop is ideal for anyone interested in exploring identity, social justice, and performance-making from a decolonial lens. Please come dressed comfortably and bring a notebook and writing materials. The space will be equipped with a writing board or flipchart, large blank paper, and plenty of markers for creative mapping and drawing.

 

 

Dr. Eugene Richard Atleo (Umeek)

 

Eugene Richard Atleo (Nuu-chah-nulth name – Umeek) is a hereditary chief of the Ahousaht First Nation. Dr. Atleo has contributed significantly to educational, Indigenous and environmental leadership in British Columbia, Canada, and internationally. As the first Indigenous person to achieve a doctorate in Education in British Columbia, his „firsts” created space for others to follow. Books: Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview; Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis; founding of the First Nations Studies Department at Vancouver Island University graduating 100 mostly Indigenous students in the first 10 years; teaching, researching, serving on graduate committees at Universities of Victoria, Malaspina, Simon Fraser, UBC; founding member of Native Teachers Association of British Columbia; founded an Indigenous private post-secondary institute: Umeek HRD Inc.; was research PI for the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia; served as Nuu-chah-nulth Chair of the Scientific Panel of Forest Practices; board member of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources in Winnipeg, and senior advisor to Ecotrust Canada; received the Equity Committee Award for his service in the Canadian University Teachers Association; championed Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association. Atleo was an assistant to the federal minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, assistant superintendent of education, principal & elementary teacher, social worker, and fisher. He is nuii of two sons, naniqsu of 8 granddaughters and 3 grandsons

Keynote lecture: Tsawalk – A Nuu-chah-nulth Approach to Global Crisis

Tsawalk means „one” in Nuu-chah-nulth, the language of the Indigenous people living „all along the mountains on the windward side of Vancouver Island, on the Pacific Rim of Western Canada. Tsawalk signifies the view that all living beings – humans, plants, and animals – exist in harmony brought together through continuous negotiation of respect for one another. Umeek recognizes the intrinsic relationship between the physical and spiritual realms, an expansion of the view of reality presented by Western science. In Tsawalk: a Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview, and Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis, he does not only show that the contemporary environmental and political crises reflect a world out of balance, but he also identifies protocols about how to weave together Nuu-chah-nulth and Western worldviews to establish a ground for more equitable and sustainable communities.

Distinguished guest: Myrna Kostash

 

Myrna Kostash is author of the classic All of Baba’s Children, and of the award-winning Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe, The Frog Lake Reader and Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  In 2016 she published The Seven Oaks Reader, and most recently in 2022, Ghosts in a Photograph: A Chronicle and in 2024 Writing Ukraine. Her essays, articles, and creative nonfiction have been widely anthologized. Kostash was awarded the Shevchenko Foundation’s 2024 Kobzar Literary Prize for Ghosts in a Photograph. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Trust Matt Cohen award for a Life of Writing and is a life member of The Writers Union of Canada. (She served as Chair in 1993-94.) She is active with the Edmonton-based Indigenous Ukrainian Relationship Initiative also volunteers with the Creative Nonfiction Collective of Canada. 

Myrna Kostash will read from the concluding section, the Coda, of Ghosts in a Photograph:  A Chronicle (2022)

Why a Coda? To bring the Chronicle back to the voice of the principal narrator, me.

The narration, the Chronicle, crosses several generations of my forebears and kith and kin; it crosses them in Canada and in Ukraine, in Galicia and in the Ukrainian bloc settlement area of Alberta; I, the narrator of all these relations, stand imaginatively alongside them as I try to recover their stories, some of which will never be known to me. 

But in the Coda I bring it all back to me, claiming my place in this lineage: I bought a quarter section of land and I called it Tulova, a village in Pokuttia. But now I evoke those other forebears, the Indigenous peoples who bequeathed me a parcel of earth on Treaty Six Territory. All my relations.