Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator. They are inspired and guided by relationships with their homelands, their extended family and their non-human kin. They live in Bella Bella, BC.
Rooted in the territory and resilient, ancestral wisdom of the Heiltsuk Nation, Housty’s debut poetry collection Crushed Wild Mint brings deep teachings and land relationship forward to the present – and toward the future – in a way that is visceral and tactile, full of questions and reflections that can guide us all toward healing and hope.
Interviewed by Amy Reiswig
Amy Reiswig (AR): Your work life has been and is extremely busy, with involvement in areas like leadership, politics, non-profits, community-building, food security, environmental and cultural education and more. How and when do you find time for writing poetry? Where does it happen for you?
Jess Housty (JH): I wrote often when I was young, and then for many years convinced myself I simply didn’t have the time. Everything else – the campaigns, the community work – all felt more urgent and important. It took me a long time to realize I can’t do good work without the joy and balance I feel when I give myself space to write. So now I let the poems come when they want to, and I try to extend myself lots of grace when I can feel in my body that it’s time to write – most often when I’m driving my boat or out on the land.
AR: You ask a lot of questions in Crushed Wild Mint, such as “What will you ask the medicines to embody?” “What causes the wound and what heals it?” “Who is at your back?” “What can you recognize by touch?” “How do you appease a spirit?” One of the book’s most arresting questions is “What if we howled roses?” My question to you is: What role does poetry play in exploring those “what ifs”, those ideas of what might be possible if we allow ourselves to shift perspective?
JH: I think for a long time I thought poetry was about answering questions, but the more poetry I read the more I was struck by the power good writing wields in posing questions rather than answering them. I think that extending questions invites readers into your own curiosity as a poet and creates a conversation between you, the poem, and its audience and to me this feels like a generative, community-building space.
AR: In the title poem “Crushed Wild Mint,” you write “Let the scent/ cleanse Grief like smoke,/ like cedar, like tenderness.” There are many very tender poems about your grandmother in this collection, and so I wonder if poetry can also do this – cleanse grief — for us as well.
JH: I often find I understand myself most clearly when I write freely and then spend time unpacking the rawness that I’ve put to paper. The tenderness that’s most abundant for me in my writing is actually the tenderness I extend myself to feel my feelings when I write, although this is probably not visible to readers. Many of the poems in the book were written during the liminal time when my grandmother was dying and just after she left us, and poetry gave my feelings momentum in the moments when I felt stuck. In this way, it was absolutely a cleansing and ceremonial force for me.
AR: The land features so prominently in this collection, as it nurtures, teaches, heals and reveals. Are you hoping that sharing the Heiltsuk worldview of kinship, relationship and reciprocity with the land can help settler readers unlearn our sense of separateness?
JH: Absolutely: at the bare root of so much of our trauma – under the layers of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism – is fundamental disconnection. I believe that healing is most possible in the moments and spaces where we build deep community, including with the land and our non-human kin. This is not a typical Western worldview but if there’s one invitation I could make to Settler folks, it would be to imagine what it could feel like to be in relationship with the world around you as though the whole world was a cherished loved one. This is how I see the land and I believe this is how the land sees me, and I think this kind of deep kinship is a powerful pathway to shared healing.
AR: In your essay as part of the book Raincoast at Risk: Art for an Oil-Free Coast, you note how the richness of the land attracts “the gaze of people who do not hear it speak.” And in this collection, you mention, for example, “the mountain speaking/ in flowers.” Is part of this book about giving the land a voice?
JH: I think the land has a voice and what we need is to understand how to listen. Because I grew up in a cultural context in which the land is held to be a relative, it feels very normal to me to be in relationship and conversation with the land – but I know this is not a universal understanding. So it feels important to me to illuminate the land’s living power when I can and to uplift the land as an act of reciprocity for the ways it holds and nourishes me.
AR: There is a lot of looking back to the lessons of the past as well as a loving awareness and attention to the present in these poems — a witnessing to the land, to your ancestors, to your own experiences. How do these affect your sense of and hope for the future?
JH: In my culture, being a witness is important business. It means you contain a chronicle of the things you’ve observed and can be called on to testify to what you’ve witnessed. I feel a deep responsibility for this reason, to my human and non-human kin, to my ancestors, and to the generations to come. I want to be a witness so I can uphold them, and I want to be witnessed myself so I can also be upheld, and the community that grows around this mutual witnessing becomes rooted in a power that transcends time. When I feel this connected to a greater whole, the only possibility is to feel the hope that grows from deep love.