Billy-Ray Belcourt

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(21 October 1994—)

 

The work of Billy-Ray Belcourt affirms Indigenous queer and trans presence as it occupies space that is rightfully deserved amid a hostile heteronormative and colonial world. The freedom of the Indigenous queer voice is amplified in his works as Belcourt creates his own aesthetic that defies institutional and societal norms.

In 2018, CBC Books counted Belcourt among fourteen Canadian poets and eighteen emerging writers to watch, and as a “writer to know.” Also in 2018, CBC Books named Belcourt’s 2017 debut book of poems, This Wound is a World, the best Canadian poetry collection of the year. These accolades anticipated the most significant recognition for This Wound is a World: the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, which solidified Belcourt as an icon of Indigenous literature. Belcourt is to date the youngest author ever to win this prize. This Wound is a World also won the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and was named Most Significant Book of Poetry in English at the 2018 Indigenous Voices Awards. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award. Belcourt’s many accolades include the 2019 Indspire Award for First Nations Youth; an Indspire Award is the highest honour for Indigenous people in Canada because it comes from the community.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is nêhiyaw (Cree) and comes from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. He was born October 21, 1994, and was raised by his grandmother. Growing up, Belcourt was aware of the lack of Indigenous queer representation in literature and society, and he writes to fill such gaps. He speaks to the Indigenous queer voices and realities that colonization has attempted to silence, ignore, and marginalize. With love and care, especially for queer individuals, his works have advanced understanding about the intersections of racism and colonial violence experienced by Indigenous Peoples. His prose is intimate and tells of the Indigenous queer experience through a world view that is under-represented and easily overlooked. His work has been foundational to Indigenous Peoples, as it navigates the colonial, patriarchal, and heteronormative grasp that is on queer bodies and minds as he formulates a decolonial queer methodology layered in Indigenous world views. He manifests a world that allows him to be who he is and, importantly, to love the closeted Northern Alberta teen he once was. Navigating Belcourt’s queer and Indigenous identity and experiences, his work shares insights into his being and allows readers to break the foundations of what they think they know.

Belcourt was valedictorian at St. Andrew’s School in High Prairie, Alberta, in 2012. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in comparative literature with first-class honours from the University of Alberta in 2016. Later that year, he attended Wadham College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, the first Indigenous person to hold this honour. He completed his master of arts degree with distinction in women’s studies at Oxford in 2017.

In 2018, he returned to the University of Alberta to pursue a PhD in English and was awarded the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship. He completed his doctoral degree in November 2020, supervised by Keavy Martin; his dissertation was titled The Conspiracy of Indian Joy. In 2022, Belcourt was named a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia, where he is also an associate professor in the School of Creative Writing. As a Canada Research Chair, Belcourt aims

to establish institutional space for queer and trans Indigenous artists, scholars, and activists to collaborate and engage in critical discussion that values our modes of knowledge and artistic production and doesn’t relegate us to the margins of already-existing disciplinary formations, and . . . to explore the aesthetics and theoretics of queer Indigenous freedom. (“New Canada Research Chairs in the Faculty of Arts”)

This Wound is a World is part manifesto, part memoir, and aims to upset both genres as Belcourt plays with form to create a decolonial heaven where “everyone [is] at least a little gay.” In the opening poem, “The Cree Word for a Body Like Mine is Weesageechak,” Belcourt brings in core concepts of Cree culture, including teachings of Grandmother Moon and the constraints of gender. He refers to himself as “Weesageechak,” naming himself for a shape-shifter who “was once a broad-shouldered trickster who long ago fell from the moon wearing make-up and skinny jeans.” Belcourt acknowledges the teachings of Weesageechak while placing the cultural hero alongside his queer reality, ultimately decolonizing the method of storytelling to create a more encompassing narrative of what it means to be gay.

His poem “God’s River” draws on present-day Indigenous experiences—such as the Government of Canada’s 2009 delivery of body bags to God’s River First Nation, rather than sending medical treatment for the swine flu—to reveal ongoing injustices experienced at the hands of the settler state of Canada. Belcourt lists eight points in his poem “Colonialism: A Love Story,” including “6. colonialism. definition: turning our bodies into cages that no one has keys for” and “8. we need not pretend that love was to be found in wastelands like these.” These numbered criteria are a telling reminder of how Canada has ensured toxic and unjust realities for Indigenous Peoples, while also revealing that these realities of colonialism are not enough to make Indigenous Peoples forget how to love.

In the epilogue to This Wound is a World, Belcourt outlines his intentions for the book and quotes Jack Halberstam’s introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study: “[R]evolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine.” Belcourt’s work introduces new realms of collectivity. For example, his poem “OKCUPID” bridges loneliness and intimacy as he writes about being with another Indigenous man whom he matches with on OKCupid, a website and dating app often used for hookups:

But this was different

because time stops

and is made anew

when two native boys

find each other’s bodies

and write poems about it afterwards

because each kiss was an act of defiance

a kind of nation-building effort

our bodies were protesting

dancing in a circle

to the beat of

a different drum

that was also a

world in and of itself

Belcourt’s work brings us into the ceremonies and teachings of the Cree world as it is crystallized into the white possessive hostilities entrenched in our everyday; and Belcourt writes about resistance, defiance, and, importantly, the way Indigenous existence is stalked by what Angela Davis, whom he quotes in the book, calls “massive genocidal violence.”

This violence is further amplified in Belcourt’s 2019 book of poems, NDN Coping Mechanisms. The title plays on the acronym NDN, pronounced indian and often meaning “Not Dead Native.”¹

NDN Coping Mechanisms won the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; it was also shortlisted for the 2020 Raymond Souster Award, the 2020 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and the 2020 ReLit Award, and longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads 2020 competition.

In one of the first poems in NDN Coping Mechanisms, “NDN Brothers,” Belcourt writes,

Today, the Ministry of Historical Ignorance

didn’t keep me and my brothers safe.

With its extralegal powers, the Ministry brought us to our knees

so as to clog our throats with polluted language.

In defiance, we licked the walls dirty

In a house of administered subjectivity.

His poem transcends the reality of colonialism’s effects on Indigenous bodies and minds as NDN existence leads us to seek out validation through the spaces he challenges, such as academia. In NDN Coping Mechanisms, Belcourt writes, “Art is emotional. Emotion is artful. The purpose of art and emotion for the NDN is to escape the sociolinguistic prison of a white vernacular. My books are emotional and artful only insofar as they are criminal.”

This statement on criminality resonates for all NDNs whose only crime is existence. We are brought into contact with Belcourt’s soul and all those who have shaped him, from those he has loved and hooked up with, to his family, including his kokum (grandmother), whom he encapsulates as “the Minister of Utopia” who “is NDN AF.”

The pain and trauma in “At the Mercy of the Sky” might resonate with Indigenous readers, as Belcourt identifies the intergenerational loss from residential schools: “If I could uninvent the words ‘priest’ and ‘prayer,’ then the dead / could come back from the dead for at least a chance at revenge.” Similarly, in “Canadian Horror Story,” he shares:

If I die prematurely, forget burial,

just drop my body

on the steps

of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Given the political and social climate around the treatment of Indigenous Peoples, their lives, and their bodies, NDN Coping Mechanisms is a reflection of the deep pain of these experiences for readers unfamiliar with these everyday realities.

One poem of particular note in NDN Coping Mechanisms is “Flesh.” In a lengthy footnote, Belcourt explains that “Flesh” is

an erasure poem composed of words and phrases that follow sequentially in the first five chapters of Walter L. Williams’s infamous anthropological account of non-normative gender and sexuality in Indigenous communities, The Spirit and the Flesh (1986).

Belcourt continues by calling Williams out for presenting an image of queer and trans NDN life that is “deeply binary”; he says that Williams’ views were “slanted by a fetishistic curiosity emptied of ethical investment in the studied.” This mangling of queer and trans stories under the anthropological gaze of an ostensible expert has been reinscribed by other non-Indigenous anthropologists, who have historically attempted to understand Indigenous people without ever actually getting to know them. As Belcourt states, “Flesh” is a

counterhistory via a kind of linguistic archaeology, to excavate the incendiary voices of queer, trans, and two-spirit ancestors whose language was at once a hyperobject and unknowable in the world of ethnographic inquiry.

This is a much-needed poem that addresses how representations of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit individuals must be liberated from the heteropatriarchal colonial world.

Following these books of poems, Belcourt published A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir in 2020 (released in the US as A History of My Brief Body: Essays). A self-proclaimed “kokum’s boy,” Belcourt opens his memoir with a letter of profound love to his kokum. In his letter, we see not only the connection between generations, but also collective NDN thoughts about being “snared in someone’s lethal mythology of race.” But with her love, Belcourt has also inherited his kokum’s “philosophy of love, which is also a theory of freedom.” He writes, “nohkôm [my grandmother], I can write myself into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race that stalks me as it does you and our kin.” And this is what he does in the memoir as he presents a “red utopia” coming on the horizon.

In his memoir, Belcourt shares memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on his home reserve of Driftpile, as well as his navigations through Edmonton, Oxford, and now British Columbia. There is no chronological path to his chapters, but there is honesty layered with vulnerability when he challenges the linear history of colonial time. In the first line of “Gay 8 Scenes,” he claims, “I’m a closeted teen.” This is followed later with his experiences presenting a talk at the 2016 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association on “Anarchic Objects and the Autoerotics of Decolonial Love,” where he argues that Indigeneity is an

erotic concept. Against the sexual pulse of coloniality, its perverse sensuality and all that it elaborates in NDN social worlds, we have the safe haven of us, this flesh, however caught up in the sign systems of race we are.

Throughout A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir, there is a glimpse of his evolutionary journey into a queer identity framed by his Indigeneity.

In 2022, Belcourt published A Minor Chorus: A Novel, which was longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize. He writes of a young, queer, and unnamed Indigenous doctoral student who abandons his thesis to return home. In the first chapter, Belcourt reveals the tensions that exist between community-based research and the colonial hierarchies of academia, as he talks about only ever wanting to be a professor who “wanted to write like every queer theorist [he] read.”

In a 2022 interview with Sarah Neilson in Shondaland, Belcourt said that he “was transfixed with the idea of writing a novel” but had “failed to produce anything that could resemble a novel.” But Belcourt goes on to say that, during a period of something like depression, he decided that, if he was going to write a novel, it had to be in “something like a collective voice” because his overall aim was to “confront and hopefully disrupt that individualizing tendency.” Accordingly, A Minor Chorus challenges the conventions of the novel, and Belcourt states further in his interview that it is

full of essayistic writing, poetic writing. Sometimes it even transforms into a poem. That’s partly because, well, the novel is such a capacious genre that it can actually accommodate these other modes without falling apart. So, I took advantage of that. But I also thought there was something about academic writing, a dissertation in particular, where argumentation is more important, your style of argumentation is more important than what’s actually being analyzed. So, I think I turn to the novel as a form because it’s more about your subjects and your characters than about any kind of argument.

Here, Belcourt reveals how he has manifested a radical queer art form that reveals his literary genius while enlightening readers about the ongoing trauma experienced by Indigenous Peoples—trauma that may not always be Belcourt’s first-hand, but is first-hand enough to convey the reverberations of loneliness that could be interpreted as joy and happiness.

The world of literature will never be the same so long as Billy-Ray Belcourt continues to breathe light and darkness into the hearts and minds of those who come to meet him in his medium. At the end of NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, he states his intention “to make the world in the image of our radical art.” And, as the title of his article for Literary Hub puts it, “Billy-Ray Belcourt Wants a Whole Literature of Queer Indigenous Possibility”—one that is not built on a gay literary canon that is predominantly white. The lack of queer Indigenous voices in the social, political, and academic realms is consuming, but Belcourt offers the ability to see a world where domineering colonial constraints are not dimming the vibrancy of the Indigenous queer realities that Belcourt so eloquently depicts.

In June 2023, Belcourt won gold in the National Magazine Awards fiction category for his short story “One Woman’s Memories.” He returned to fiction in 2024 with the short story collection Coexistence, and to poetry in 2025 with The Idea of an Entire Life. Belcourt continues to live and work on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nation.

Bibliography

Books

This Wound is a World. Frontenac House, 2017.

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field. House of Anansi Press, 2019.

This Wound is a World. U of Minnesota P, 2019.

A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir. Penguin Canada, 2020.

A History of My Brief Body: Essays. Two Dollar Radio, 2020.

A Minor Chorus. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.

I Am Constantly Astonished, by Belcourt and Charlene Vickers. Capilano Review Contemporary Arts Society, 2022.

Coexistence. 1st edition, W. W. Norton, 2024.

The Idea of an Entire Life. Beacon Press, 2025.

 

Translations

Cette blessure est un territoire, translated by Mishka Lavigne, Éditions Triptyque, 2019.

Storia del mio breve corpo, translated by Sara Reggiani, Black Coffee, 2021.

Esta herida es un mundo, translated by Bruno Mattiussi, Letraversal, 2022.

Mécanismes NDN d’adaptation: notes de terrain, translated by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Éditions Triptyque, 2022.

Histoire de mon corps bref, translated by Arianne Des Rochers and Olivia Tapiero, Éditions Triptyque, 2023.

Choeur infime, translated by Mishka Lavigne, Éditions Triptyque, 2025.

 

Other

“The Back Alley of the World.” New Quarterly, no. 143, 2017, p. 95.

“A History of the Present.” New Quarterly, no. 143, 2017, p. 96.

“Cree Girl Explodes the Necropolis of Ottawa.” BRICK, vol. 102, 2018, https://brickmag.com/cree-girl-explodes-the-necropolis-of-ottawa.

“NDN Brothers.” The Rumpus, Nov. 2018, https://therumpus.net/2018/11/07/presence-the-heartspeak-of-indigenous-poets-billy-ray-belcourt.

“Red Utopia.” Contemporary Verse 2, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, p. 41.

“The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve.” The Walrus, 7 June 2018, https://thewalrus.ca/the-terrible-beauty-of-the-reserve.

“What If I Never Write a Novel?” Little Fiction, Big Truths, Nov. 2018, https://littlefiction.com/beta/2018Flash_BillyRayBelcourt.html.

“NDN Homopoetics.” Academy of American Poets, Poem-a-Day, 31 Jan. 2019, https://poets.org/poem/ndn-homopoetics.

“What Is a Human Possibility?” The Puritan, Aug. 2019, https://puritan-magazine.com/human-possibility-belcourt-2019/?fbclid=IwAR19u4Z2_KWwB7T5o-FktTj2AKTk7slJGX7IrQfdfno8PZW4w3Z4JWNvLi4.

“Bad Lover.” The Journal: A Literary Magazine, vol. 43, no. 3, Dec. 2019, https://thejournalmag.org/archives/17607.

“Outside, People Were Crying, or They Weren’t.” Hazlitt, 31 Aug. 2020, https://hazlitt.net/longreads/outside-people-were-crying-or-they-werent.

I Am Constantly Astonished, by Belcourt and Charlene Vickers, The Capilano Review Contemporary Arts Society, 2022. Quarto Series 3.

“One Woman’s Memories.” Maisonneuve, 23 Sept. 2022, https://maisonneuve.org/article/2022/09/23/one-womans-memories.

“Autofiction.” The Walrus, vol. 19, no. 8, Dec. 2022, p. 59.

Selected Periodical Publications—Uncollected

“Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–11.

“The day of the TRC Final Report: On being in the world without wanting it.” Rabble.ca, 15 Dec. 2015, https://rabble.ca/news/2015/12/day-trc-final-report-on-being-this-world-without-wanting-it.

“A Poltergeist Manifesto.” Feral Feminisms: An Open Access Feminist Online Journal, vol. 6, 2016, pp. 22–32.

“Making Friends for the End of the World,” by Belcourt with Maura Roberts. GUTS: A Canadian Feminist Magazine, May 2016, https://gutsmagazine.ca/making-friends.

“Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation.” Active History, 15 Jan. 2016, https://activehistory.ca/blog/2016/01/15/political-depression-in-a-time-of-reconciliation.

“Meditations on Reserve Life, Biosociality, and the Taste of Non-Sovereignty.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–15.

“The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open.” ArtsEverywhere.ca, 8 Feb. 2017, https://artseverywhere.ca/body-remembers-world-broke-open.

“The Optics of the Language: How Joi T. Arcand Looks with Words.” Canadian Art, 29 Aug. 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/optics-language-joi-t-arcand-looks-words.

“Fatal Naming Rituals.” Hazlitt, 19 July 2018, https://hazlitt.net/feature/fatal-naming-rituals.

“Settler Structures of Bad Feeling.” Canadian Art, 8 Jan. 2018, https://canadianart.ca/essays/settler-structures-bad-feeling.

“What Do We Mean by Queer Indigenous Ethics?,” by Belcourt with Lindsay Nixon. Canadian Art, 23 May 2018, https://canadianart.ca/features/what-do-we-mean-by-queerindigenousethics.

“Top or Bottom? How Do We Desire?,” by Belcourt et al. The New Inquiry, 10 Oct. 2018, https://thenewinquiry.com/top-or-bottom-how-do-we-desire.

 

Interviews

Off, Carol. “For First Time, First Nations Student from Canada Named Rhodes Scholar.” As It Happens, CBC Radio, 27 Nov. 2015, https://cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday-edition-1.3336554/for-first-time-first-nations-student-from-canada-named-rhodes-scholar-1.3338502.

Chang-Richardson, Ellen. “A History of My Brief Body with Billy-Ray Belcourt.” Ottawa International Writers Festival, 23 Aug. 2020, https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2020-interviews/a-history-of-my-brief-body.

Neilson, Sarah. “Billy-Ray Belcourt’s ‘A Minor Chorus’ Is Far from a Traditional Novel.” Shondaland, 12 Oct. 2022.

 

Note

1. This styling of indian follows the advice of Anishinaabe thinker Gerald Vizenor, who recommends italicizing and lowercasing the term, as it’s a fiction.

 

Works Cited

“14 Canadian Poets to Watch in 2018.” CBC Books, 2 Feb. 2018, https://cbc.ca/books/14-canadian-poets-to-watch-in-2018-1.4615094.

“18 Writers to Watch in 2018.” CBC Books, 8 Aug. 2017, https://cbc.ca/books/18-writers-to-watch-in-2018-1.4694306.

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. “About Me.” Billy-Ray Belcourt, https://billy-raybelcourt.com.

—. “Billy-Ray Belcourt Wants a Whole Literature of Queer Indigenous Possibility.” Literary Hub, 24 June 2022, https://lithub.com/billy-ray-belcourt-wants-a-whole-literature-of-queer-indigenous-possibility.

—. NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field. House of Anansi Press, 2019.

“New Canada Research Chairs in the Faculty of Arts.” Faculty of Arts, 16 Nov. 2022, https://arts.ubc.ca/news/new-canada-research-chairs-in-the-faculty-of-arts.

Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. U of Nebraska P, 1998.

 

Dr. Paulina Johnson (she/her) Sîpihkokîsikowiskwêw, Blue Sky Woman, is Nêhiyaw (Four-Spirit or Plains Cree) and a citizen of Samson Cree Nation from Mâskwacis, Alberta. She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alberta and the Co-Research Director for Braiding Knowledges Canada. She is trained in Indigenous and decolonial research methodologies to centre Indigenous intelligence including ceremony rooted in community-based research.