A few projects:

JUST RELEASED! Afghanistan: Requiem for a Generation, the war requiem I wrote in 2012 with composer Jeffrey Ryan, and based on my road to war and back with the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2008-10) as an official war artist with the Canadian Forces Artist Program (CFAP). The stellar cast and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is conducted by the late and so brilliant Bramwell Tovey, includes three-time Grammy winner, baritone Brett Polegato as the war-damaged Senior NCO, with soprano Zorana Sadiq as the medic, Colin Ainsworth as the young Lieutenant, and Rebecca Hass as the lover. With the UBC Singers and Choral Union and Langley Fine Arts School youth choir representing the war machine, and the voices of the children of war, this work stands the test of time.

In 2010, I met the late empresario Michael Green who had heard me interviewed on the CBC. We met for lunch in Calgary where I was passing through and he asked me what I wanted to do with the body of work I wrote from my time with the infantry (over 1000 poems and a play). I told him I was most interested in writing a war requiem because I believed it was a post-religious generation of Canadians going to war and that they needed a vehicle for their grief; I had been to funerals and memorials and I could see the tremendous burden on these soldiers and their families. Well Michael picked up the phone, called Heather Slater at the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO), arranged a meeting and voila, after Slater played me a variety of composers, I chose Ryan to collaborate with, the CPO drew up a commission and within two years we premiered Afghanistan: Requiem for a Generation to a sold-out house, a house entirely without a dry eye by the end of the performance.

The requiem was performed several times again by the Toronto Symphony and yet another stellar cast (including Measha Bruggergosman-Lee) conducted by Tania Miller, the CPO again, twice, and the Vancouver Symphony. This recording is of the latter.

Distributed by the CMC’s Centredisk, here is where one might order it. There is a QRL code within that links to the full text.

New!! I co-lead a huge new project through the University of Lethbridge, one that honours the peoples of my Red River Métis Gaudry/Fayant families. The Red River Jig Network was a series of online visits and virtual/live-knowledge sharing activities with scholars, artist-practitioners, and community members of the Red River Jig (RRJ) family networks. Hosted by me (Dr. Suzanne Steele [ULeth]), and the Red River Métis poet and scholar, Dr. Michelle Porter (Memorial), and newcomer (French Canadian) fiddler and scholar, Dr. Monique Giroux (ULeth), we sought to trace a ‘cultural DNA’ of a peoples for whom the RRJ represents not only a dance, an entertainment, a historical connection, but also signifies a national project, and, importantly, a spiritual balm. This project was a multi-year, cultural inquiry into dance, music, and song as practiced by the Red River Métis Family Networks. It focused on the centrality of the RRJ to the Michif peoples but also invites conversations on its meaning to Indigenous peoples and friends throughout Turtle Island, the homeland, above and below the Medicine Line. Scholarly articles on the project will be available soon, as well as popular media articles.

Co-producer and originator of the podcast, Li Keur (2020).  Hosted by Bryna Link and Hannah Connolly (Canadian Mennonite University), this podcast engaged in conversations from the heart of the continent on Indigenous languages, music, culture, and art in the age of reconciliation. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada research project on the Aesthetic Translation of Indigenous Languages, this project was a collaboration with composer Neil Wiesensel (Canadian Mennonite University).

image ©MIT Press 2019

Editor and advisor (substantive, copy, Indigenous and cross-cultural editorial style), Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating within Communities across Disciplines and With Algorithms  MIT’s Open Documentary Lab’s Co-Creation Studio, headed by Emmy-winning documentarian, Kat Cizek.

Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North is a major new dramatic musical (book by S.M. Steele, music by Neil Weisensel and Alex Kusturok) that previewed (40 minutes) with the Regina Symphony in 2019, and premiered in November 2023 (full-length) in Winnipeg. Li Keur is made possible by the Canada Council New Chapter Awards, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Manitoba Arts Council, and is in partnership with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Louis Riel Institute, the Manitoba Metis Federation, and L’Union Nationale Métisse Saint Joseph de Manitoba. I wrote it in five languages (including three Indigenous: ‘Southern Michif’, ‘French Michif’, and Anishinaabemowin) with help from language Knowledge Keepers Madame Vera de Montigny, Jules Chartrand, June Bruce, Lorraine Coutu, Agathe Chartrand, Patsy Millar, Andrea Rose, Suzanne Zeke, Joyce Dumont, Donna Beach and Debra Beach Ducharme.

Above left to right, RAMM staff member, Dr. Suzanne Steele, Dr. Marjorie Gerhardt, curator Cristina Burke-Trees, MA, and Professor David H. Jones, at the Faces of Conflict exhibition opening (poster on the right) at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery.

I was literary advisor, a Named Collaborator, and team member of the three-year 1914FACES2014 Research Project: an international project funded by the EU, as part of the UK team (led by David Houston Jones) and a French team (led by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, Institut Faire Faces, Amiens). Professor Devauchelle was the first surgeon in the world to perform a face transplant. My work was as facilitator, presenter, assistant to the curator, installation artist, and literary advisor.

Project Lead,  The Long Goodbye: a conversation across a century, an Exeter-fund WWI centenary outreach project, in Exeter, UK. This project was manifested by our fabulous team, and co-led by Dr. Jaime Robles and Dr. Mike Rose, with whom I formed Exegesis, and our wondrous assistant, Will Dyer. Other installations and publishing projects with Robles and Rose include: The Wittgenstein Vector, a meditation on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s  Tractatus;  51 Shades of Black & Blue (a satire and cabaret); and The Wall of Miracles, an international poetry project.