Ted Bishop has made the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist for On Not Knowing Cree.

He will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and his essay has been published on CBC Books.

The winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will be announced Sept. 26. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions until Nov 1. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025 and the CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2025.

This year's CBC Nonfiction Prize jury is composed of Michelle Good, Dan Werb and Christina Sharpe. The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the longlist, which is chosen by a committee of writers and editors from across the country. Works are judged anonymously on the basis of the participant's use of language, originality of subject and writing style.

For more on how the judging for the CBC Literary Prizes works, visit the FAQ page.

Ted Bishop is the author of The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word, which was a finalist for the 2015 Governor General Literary Award for Non-fiction, and Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. In 2022 he published Ulysses Blue, an essay for British typographer John Morgan's Usylessly: an exact physical replica of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is completely blank. His article in Edify magazine, Imagining Treaty 6, takes up the question of land acknowledgments through a motorcycle ride around the territory. He lives in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) on Treaty 6 land and writes with a fountain pen.

Bishop won second place for the CBC Nonfiction Prize, formerly Travel Writing, in 2002 for The Motorcycle and the Archive.

Bishop told CBC Books about the inspiration behind On Not Knowing Cree: "I always felt uneasy during land acknowledgements, because "acknowledge" means to "own the knowledge of," and I had never seen a map of the territory, never read the treaty, never heard a word of the other languages I shared a treaty with. I had no knowledge to own.

"So I read the treaty, did the motorcycle ride (mentioned above), and signed up for a Cree class at my local library."

Lori Tootoosis told us we had to be patient with Cree, that it would take a long time, but that we could do it, not to be discouraged. She wrote on the board nikaskhitân –"I can do it."

Then kikaskhitân – "You can do it."

And finally kikaskhitânaw – "We can all do it."

Lori was a nice person but a confusing teacher. She rambled on, told the same stories, never got round to going through the introductions or the list of numbers on the sheet she'd handed out. I drove across the city once a week through the dark winter and into the spring when there was still light in the sky when I arrived at Highlands library. I scribbled in my notebook just to keep from being bored, wondering when we were going to actually learn some Cree, consoling myself that at least I was hearing a Cree person.

Then when I came to take a second course I dipped into my notebook and there were the verb paradigms, and observations like, "We usually talk in the third person because we're storytellers," or "We know what nouns are but we don't talk about them too much," or "The sounds are animate. They have a spirit." It was as if someone had stuffed my notebook with brilliant insights. "We think differently from you," Lori had said. "In Cree you don't ask straight questions." I'd written that down but not taken it to heart. Unable to break out of my university box to see Lori was a fine teacher.

She would say, "I want to stretch your mind," and we would laugh and say she was doing that for sure. She also told us, every class, "key-yuh," which meant "It's up to you. You have to figure things out on your own." And the encouragement, kikaskhitân. "You can do it." Which we didn't really believe, but it gave us heart.

"Ahkamêyimok!" she'd say ("Awk-a-may-mock" ), which meant "Keep trying."

In the fall I registered for a university extension course. Dorothy Thunder smiled up at me from her desk.

"Tansi" I said.

"Tansi," she said, and then a string of incomprehensible phrases. Baffled. Everything I'd learned in the drop-in classes forgotten.

What she probably said was "namoya nântaw" (not bad / I'm fine)

and then kîya mâka? ("and you?").

To which I was supposed to reply, "Peyakwan" (Just the same.)

Instead I just mumbled, "Um, I don't understand anything. My name is [***]."

We were in a high school after hours. Most of the board had French exercises on it with P.L.O. in block letters. The other official language. We were the unofficial language, with just a little space reserved for us.

Dorothy explained that the verb changes depending on whether it's alone, with an animate object, or an inanimate object. In English it doesn't vary: I eat; I eat soup; I eat bread.

Of course, right? Not so in Cree.

Alone it's nimicison – I eat. But if you've got a bowl of minestrone it's nimicin mîcimâpoy. I eat soup. And soup is inanimate. And then if you break off a chunk of baguette to go with it, it's nimowaw pahkwesikan. I eat bread. Because bread is animate.

Why? Soup seems at least as alive as bread. What if it's clam chowder?

There was no rule for what was animate or inanimate. "You just have to learn," Dorothy said. "Repetition. Lots of repetition."

I couldn't get my head around it. I'd read about the residential schools, but for the first time I felt how bewildering, frightening, it would be coming from Cree to English. What if Dorothy whacked me with a cane every time I got something wrong, which was every ten minutes? My son was six, in a bilingual Mandarin school. I imagined a police officer taking him to China and a woman there in strange dress forcing him to exist solely in Chinese. It didn't bear thinking about.

Dorothy mentioned in passing that awâsis, the word for child, means "a little spiritual being, something on loan to you." I'd never thought of my children that way.

At the end of the class she said, "I used to wonder why my parents would hang up on me without saying 'goodbye'! It's because there isn't a word for 'goodbye' in Cree."

So we parted without goodbyes.

We'd learned the phrases of introduction; we'd talked about soup; how everything is animate or inanimate; we'd been introduced to the Cree attitude toward children, and the Cree notion of farewell. The lesson seemed disjointed compared with the French classes I'd taken long ago, but I was becoming more at ease with this method. "Key-yuh," as Lori always said. It was up to us.

Dorothy told us the best syllabics teacher was Jerry Saddleback. We met Jerry in a small room around the side of an inner-city law office, across from a funeral home. He had long grey hair, tied in a ponytail. He wore black jeans and a blue checked cowboy shirt, untucked, over a t-shirt and a capacious belly. He smiled a lot, and I could see why Dorothy's children liked him.

Jerry began by lighting the end of a braid of sweetgrass over what looked like a little frying pan, and with his hand wafted some of the smoke onto his face. Then he chanted something in Cree, which must have been a prayer because the others closed their eyes. (I thought of another Cree expression I had learned: nama kîkway ê-kiskêyihtamân— "I know nothing.")

Hand-drawn charts of the syllabics hung on the walls. Jerry talked about how the syllabics are themselves spiritual beings, how they represent balance, symmetry, in the universe. His talk repeated, looped back, moved forward, in a voice rhythmic though never sing-song. A soft chant.

He offered some commands for children. My favourite was "nah-gus-tah-SOH"— make your bed.

Jerry said, "We come from a society of preparedness. You always made your bed. You didn't leave bedclothes or mattresses lying around. The chief would give a command and they could get a whole camp ready to go in less than an hour. And they'd leave no imprint on the ground."

Also: "If you don't fix your bed your soul stays there. But if you do fix your bed your soul comes with you. And that's important because that's you. Your body is loaned to you by the Creator and you have to take care of it." So, cultural and spiritual contexts embedded in a household command. I knew that Cree, like many First Nations languages, is verb-based, whereas English is noun-based, but more than that every Cree word seems multi-layered, multi-faceted.

I made up flash cards but it was like writing on water. Forge those neural pathways! I thought.

Like an icebreaker crunching into a silent solid sea. Yet as I watched, the bright shards bobbing in the dark waters were already reforming into a trackless mass behind the ship. I begin writing the words in syllabics on my flash cards. It helped. I couldn't say the word for chair unless I looked away from it. Têhtapiwin is pronounced "tay-ta-poo-in." Why? Because "iw" is pronounced "oo." It was easier to get there if I wrote: ᑌᐦᑕᐱᐏᐣ . In any case I found writing syllabics calming, a meditative act.

One night our guest was Robin House. She wore a black toque, a black shirt, beaded black mukluks. She told us that Cree extends across North America.

"You can see it in the place names," she said. "Sipiy is 'river' and the prefix they used is misi, which means 'big'." We took a moment to put it together. Oh my god. "Yes, the big river, the Mississippi."

How many dozen songs and stories had I heard about the Mississippi? As kids we learned to rattle off "m-i-SS-i-SS-i-pp-I !" But no one ever mentioned Cree.

An Edmonton city councillor objected to naming a stretch of road Maskekosikh —people of the land of medicine. He didn't mind Indigenous names that sounded the way they looked, like Kaskityao, he felt this one would be too confusing, even though it is easy to pronounce —"Muss kay go see." But English, with its variants on 'ough' — rough, cough, through, bought, 'dough — can hardly claim clarity. Those words only sound the way they look if you've learned them from birth. Further, as Senator (then journalist) Paula Simons pointed out: "This is a city [with a hockey team that] traded away the guy named Hall — and kept the ones named Lucic, Draisaitl, Slepyshev, and Puljujärvi." I liked the name because it was a reminder that when you shoe-horn Cree into the Roman alphabet it's not going to fit exactly. the letter k is sometimes pronounced like a k and sometimes like a g. And as Professor Sarah Krotz observed, difficult-to-pronounce names are useful because "It makes us realize a lot of us are guests here."

December. Last class.

"Any more questions?" said Dorothy

Every day at work I heard land acknowledgements, so I asked, "What is the word for 'land?'"

"Askiy," Dorothy said, and, casually over her shoulder as she wrote on the board, "It also means "world" and "year."

What? My brain was too tired and scrambled to take this in.

Dorothy said, "We don't really celebrate Christmas, we celebrate in the spring when everything is starting to grow. That is our new year, oskaskiy." Space and time fused.

Later, alone in the parking lot, looking up into the snow that fell softly out of the darkness, I tried to stretch my mind around land/world/year. Baffled. All that in Askîy. ᐊᐢᑭᐩ

Even if my people had not wanted to defraud their people with the treaties, even if they had bargained in the best faith possible, how could they bridge this chasm of incomprehension? Make the leap? "Cree will stretch your mind."

I had learned the Cree morning song, "Waniska," which ends Ê-miyonâkwan kitaskînaw — How beautiful this land of ours is. I'd missed it: askî, embedded in the final word. An exhortation and a benediction: wake up to a beautiful day, a beautiful land. I started using it when I gently shook my son awake in the morning, "Waniska."

Poetic, and complex, Cree is a way of seeing, a way of being, which will always elude me. Yet is there not value in a respectful misunderstanding, an acknowledgement that translation is inevitably approximate, with a resolve to keep trying? The Haudenosaunee Seventh Generation principle takes the long view: we should consider the implications of any decision for our grandchildren's great-grandchildren. I was in my sixties before I ever (knowingly) heard a word of Cree. My son was only six. How much further he will travel.

Keep trying.

Ahkamêyimok

ᐊᑲᒣᔨᒧᐠ

The winner of the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2025 and the CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2025.