Üstün Bilgen-Reinart
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Üstün Bilgen-Reinart (b. 1947 in Ankara, Turkey) is a Turkish Canadian writer, journalist and broadcaster, with two notable books on the sufferings experienced by the relocated aboriginal Canadian Sayisi Dene First Nation in Tadoule Lake, Manitoba, and by Bergama villagers fighting against gold mining in their land.
She was born in Ankara. After her graduation from the prestigious TED Ankara College, she went to Canada and pursued her studies and professional life there. She studied Literature and Sociology at the University of Winnipeg. She started working in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a researcher, and then as broadcaster and producer.
In 1995, with a scholarship granted by the Canada Council for the Arts, she co-authored with Ila Bussidor the story of the Sayisi Dene First Nation, an aboriginal community of Canada who were forcibly moved from their ancestral lands in 1956, and deported to and relocated in an urban environment. Her book, which tells the story from the natives' own viewpoint, Ila Dussidor being a Sayisi Dene herself, is titled Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene. The relocation had destroyed the independence of Sayisi Dene and ruined their way of life, and one-third of their population had perished because of the unplanned, misdirected government action.
In 2003 came her second book, Biz Toprağı Bilirik! (We Know the Land!), on the decade-long resistance of the population of 17 villages around Bergama in Turkey, close to Allianoi, against the gold mining activities of the company Eurogold in their land and to the nefarious consequences on the environment and on the villagers' traditional lifestyle, particularly due to the use of cyanide in the mining pit, which is now managed by Koza.
Currently, she teaches English at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, and is also a free-lance writer in various platforms such as openDemocracy.
In her new memoir Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates published in January 2007, the Turkish-Canadian author and former CBC investigative reporter Üstün Bilgen-Reinart guides the reader through a woman's trek through Turkey. [1]
[edit] Books
- Night Spirits: The Story of the Relocation of the Sayisi Dene by Ila Bussidor and Üstün Bilgen-Reinart, Manitoba Studies in Native History Series, ISBN 0-88755-643-4.
- Biz Toprağı Bilirik! [We Know the Land!] (Istanbul, Metis Publications, 2003), ISBN 1-55002-658-5.
- Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates: A Woman's Trek Through Turkey, Dundurn Press, January 2007, ISBN 978-1550026580.
