“Tough Pastoralism
Poetry collection explores Thunder Bay, Lake Superior
Although he now lives in Winnipeg, Michael Minor was born in Thunder Bay, on the north side of Lake Superior, Canada’s Gateway to the West. He dedicated his new, debut book of poems, Learning to Love a River, to his birthplace and its 100,000 people.
“My ancestors are all from Europe,” Minor says, “so I am careful to avoid claiming any kind of ownership over the places I’ve lived. I consider myself a guest, to acknowledge that as a relative newcomer, I am in a relationship with the Indigenous people who can call Turtle Island home.
“Personally,” he adds, “I needed to reconcile myself to the place of my birth and I found that honouring Thunder Bay was the best way to go about this. More broadly, I think there are millions of Canadians that need to reconcile themselves to the complex colonial structures that we continue to be a part of.
“We need to stop thinking of places like Thunder Bay as outliers of the Canadian story and understand that these more obvious sites of colonial violence reveal the ideological and economic foundations of Canada.”
In his book, Minor writes about the city’s hinterland – the landscape, and the hunting, fishing, and sailing. At times in the collection, Lake Superior has so much presence it almost seems like a character.
“Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world,” he point out, “so in most ways it looms larger than the small city nestled on its north shore. One of the goals of treating it as a character is to change the way we think about this important lake. We need to stop thinking of Superior as a nonhuman other and enter into a relationship with it, just as the Anishinaabeg have been doing for millennia.”
Minor adds to the tough pastoralism of the book with unflinching looks at the people who call Thunder Bay home, the descendants of the original inhabitants and the settlers who now occupy it. “Spoons” remembers Barbara Kentner, killed walking down a street in January 2017. “McIntyre River” memorializes the Indigenous youth whose bodies were discovered in the river that flows through the city.
“The topic of colonial violence is something that most of Canada has gone to great lengths to avoid,” he says. These two poems confront the death of Kentner, who was struck by a trailer hitch thrown from a moving vehicle, and the nine Indigenous youth from northern communities who have died in Thunder Bay without a thorough investigation.
“Although I am certainly biased in this assessment,” Minor goes on to say, “the land around Thunder Bay is some of the most beautiful anywhere. More objectively, it is in the heart of the Canadian Shield and boreal forest.
“Given its diversity and the relatively few people who can bear witness to it, I felt quite a lot of pressure writing about this land. I want to give the beauty a rave review without denying that there are also very ugly things that happen in and to this place.””

— Quentin Mills-Fenn Prairie Books NOW