The New Quarterly Issue 173: On Ceremony - Winter 2025

Tenille K. Campbell is a Dene and Métis artist from English River First Nation in Northern Saskatchewan. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is enrolled in her English Ph.D. at University of Saskatchewan. She is the artist behind sweetmoon photography, specializing in photographing Indigenous people over the last decade, and the co-creator of tea&bannock, an online collective blog featuring the photographs and stories of Indigenous women throughout Canada. Her poetry collections, #IndianLovePoems (Signature Editions, 2017) and Nedi Nezu (Arsenal Press, 2021), focuses on Indigenous Erotica—using humour, storytelling and sensuality to reclaim and explore ideas of Indigenous sexuality. She currently resides in Saskatoon, SK. still, we dance is part of a larger series focusing on Indigenous women in their chosen forms of dance, from pow-wow to ballet…

SPIRIT INK WAS BORN OUT OF CONVERSATIONS I’D HAD WITH PAM DILLON, A long-time supporter of our Wild Writers Literary Festival. Over the years we’ve met over lunch and talked about writing, creativity, our families, and we also shared some of the hard stories in our lives and I can say that I learned much about courage and gratitude from her. It was a relationship that blossomed into friendship so we could talk about things that mattered to us. When she told me that she had a personal interest in Indigenous writing it was an inadvertent seed planted. Over time we talked about Indigenous Voices Awards that she supported and how important, and sometimes challenging it was to reach those emerging voices. As we talked about what it might take…

I STEP OUT OF A JEEP AND CEDAR FILLS MY NOSTRILS WITH STICKY SWEETNESS. I AM fourteen years old and there is one hour before the opening ceremony. My sisters and I wander into the corner of Nohkom’s acreage, tracing the paths in the forest like the lines on our palms. We crawl into a clearing filled with old wicker chairs riddled with pine needles and weathered from the rain. I search for long abandoned thumbtacks in evergreen trunks—ones I used to place at my highest climbs. I admire the ferocity of the evergreens: the one snapped in half, struck by lightning years ago, falling the other direction, instead of on top of our trailer. The trees are somehow smaller than the last time I stared up at them. Slightly…

IT’S BEEN SIX YEARS AND 359 DAYS SINCE SARAH AND MY BEST FRIEND JUNE Courtoreille died falling from a tree at a high school party. It’s been six years and 171 days since Sarah kissed me after she found me sobbing under a tree on New Year’s Eve and our friendship became something more. It’s been 6 days and 15 hours since that relationship was torn from my hands and ripped apart like a week-old newspaper you use as kindling. The fire born from it will warm her while it disintegrates me. “Lucy, are you listening?” My mother’s voice breaks the silent hum of the vehicle as we speed down the highway. I press my forehead harder into the glass of the passenger window, watching the green fields and forests…

ELIZABETH’S HAND RESTED ON THE KNOB OF THE DOOR, THE COOL METAL pressed into her palm. She took a deep breath to prepare for whatever lay on the other side of the threshold. As she exhaled, she turned the knob and stepped inside the small two-bedroom home where she grew up. Her nose was immediately hit with the familiar smells of coffee brewing and cigarette smoke. From the door Elizabeth saw her mom sitting at the sturdy wooden kitchen table, a plume of smoke rising from her. Even though the noise of the door opening and closing spoke of Elizabeth’s arrival, her mom did not turn to greet her. For a split second, Elizabeth saw the younger, livelier version of her mom that had existed two decades before. Back then,…

THE SEA DRAGS IN AND OUT OF NASS BAY RELENTLESSLY. ANDREW STANDS AT the helm of the boat eyeing the young Chinese sailors who are scattered across the deck. Some are resting with their knees to their heads outside of the cabin, but Andrew remembers that they came to the Valley on boats, and that they would leave the Valley on boats, and that they would have to learn, sooner or later, how to be steady on boats. He would not be watching them any longer. Boxiang stands beside Andrew holding a lit pipe of tobacco. The smoke slowly drifts past Andrew’s face. He takes in deep breaths as the fumes slowly crawls out the window. Boxiang removes his hat and sets it down on the fabric seat to his…