Celeste Dugas is a non-Indigenous student born and raised in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke), Canada, on traditional Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) land and waters. 

Sintering. I liked the word before I knew what it meant. I liked the way it rolled off my tongue. Try it: sintering. Remember it well.

Sintering is often used in industrial contexts to describe the process of melting materials together to form one fused mass. In Theory of Water (2025), Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses sintering to observe how snowflakes create bonds with each other as soon as they reach the ground. Sintering is “building coalitions with your neighbours,” she says; a way to weave oneself into the existing environment in a way that forms new elements. 

Sintering was the leading theme for one of three events at the Festival of Indigenous Stories—a series curated by Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn Araluen and nêhiyaw author Jessica Johns as part of this year’s Melbourne Writer’s Festival. Sintering: An Evening of Indigenous Brilliance gathered a stellar line up of Indigenous voices from North America and Australia: Jasmin McGaughey (Torres Strait Islander and African American), Chelsea Vowel (Métis), Jesse Wente (Anishinaabe), Alicia Elliot (Mohawk), Quill Christie-Peters (Anishinaabe), Mykaela Saunders (Koori/Goorie and Lebanese) and John Morrissey (Kalkadoon). Writers variously upheld the concept of sintering by presenting rigorous and imaginative works on themes of kinship, relationality, environmental responsibility, solidarity across colonial borders, and more. In doing so, they threaded palpable bonds across the room, lines for new relations and new ideas. The air was charged; I was brought to tears by many of the pieces and my neighbours were too, and what a gift to be held there, shamelessly, together. I was reminded of the great and precious chance that is the exchange of stories in a collective space. 

We live in erratic and uncertain times. We are inheriting landscapes of extreme violence and ecological collapse on a global scale; “things that we, as Indigenous people have experienced for many, many years,” Johns said in an interview, “we’re sort of witnessing on our screens and with impunity.” Our social spheres are at once unprecedentedly networked and individualistic. This singularity in our current moment, it seems, calls urgently for bonding and for stories. Chelsea Vowel shared an excerpt from her recent collection of speculative fiction, Buffalo is the New Buffalo (2022), reminding us that the extreme necropolitics we are so mundanely exposed to are nothing new to the land and to non-human relatives. In her story, animals are united in mourning after the near-total extinction of the Plains Buffalo in the twentieth century—a deliberate campaign by North American settlers to force Plains First Nations into colonial governance by decimating a population that depended on their subsistence. Despite the profound grief we intuitively carry, Vowel said, we learn to forget the brutality of our impact on land and attune to irreparable changes as the new normal. “Buffalo is the New Buffalo” is a play on an expression commonly used among Indigenous peoples in Canada, “education is the new buffalo,” signifying the importance of education to Indigenous cultural survival, while implying the need for adaptation. Vowel subverts this assumption in an act of radical imagination; what if the damage was not irreparable? What if traditional ways and relations with all living kin could be restored? 

Vowel’s inspiring engagement with cyclical and circular temporalities was echoed by many of the writers in evocative interpellations of the past as it lives tangibly with us in the present. I was particularly moved by Mykaela Saunders’ use of her adroit prose to dialogue with the poems of her late uncle, Kevin Saunders. She first read a poem written by her uncle, followed by one of her own, in which she quite literally held her lineage in her words: 

“time does not distance us          everything accumulates

their sorrow and rage compressed deep within me like time

sedimentary layers of heartache and horror

and my own grows hard and heavy on top of theirs.” 

Besides Saunders’ poise, sorrowful and strong, which by itself dug its way deep past my skin, I was touched by the image of our bodies as sedimentary layers, melted into the earth’s bedrock, which retains the traces of all those who were there before, and all their stories, repeated and reenacted from generations to generations, layered beneath our feet. All sintering. This land always was, and always will be, as utters the title of her recent collection of speculative fiction. 

The various visionary works presented at this event testified to the inextricable connection between relationality and imagination. Stories form bonds across time and space—across genealogies, across readers from two sides of the Pacific ocean—bringing new worlds into being. 

In another session I attended at the Writers’ Festival, the Closing Night Address, Tony Birch delivered a thought-provoking reflection on this important correlation. Birch, a multi-award winning author, historian and activist whose work is of paramount contribution to Aboriginal literature in Australia, discussed “ethical imagination.” There is a responsibility to storytelling, he explained, as the generative power of story can divide and destroy as much as it can sinter. Many of Birch’s works allude to the erasures and distortions of colonial discourses as they represent Aboriginal peoples; most notably, his recent novels Women & Children (2023) and The White Girl (2019) honour Aboriginal women’s writing practices as acts of resistance to continuous colonial policies of assimilation. A point he made that stayed with me is that there is no lack of imagination, only imaginative acts with various positive or negative outcomes. The myth of “Terra Nullius” he used as an example, was an imaginative utterance of considerable power; and so are the imagined vanishments in our colonial archives. Considering how “the written word has been used against us,” he affirmed, Indigenous writing is of seminal magnitude to imagining a more just and more free collectivity. Birch referenced amiskwaciwiyiniwak scholar Dwayne Donald on “ethical relationality,” a framework for enacting responsible and reciprocal ecological networks. Ethical relationality is constituted by and constitutive of ethical imagination as, in Donald’s words, stories are “templates of public dreams—a society’s dream of and for itself.” Ethical imagination is the power and responsibility of writers and audiences to generate organic bonds in our fragmenting times. 

The theme for the special 40th anniversary edition of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival this year was “Visions and Revisions.” I highly recommend purchasing, loaning, reading and supporting the brilliant works of those writers who stand at the front lines of courageous acts of visioning and re-visioning more peace, more liberation, and more sintering.