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The Saskatoon-based team from The Indigenous Poets Society was the first up with a group poem during its first bout at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Guelph, Ont.

The team’s scores? All higher than 9.5 — which helped propel it to second place in the bout and into the top five after the first day.

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“Super intense,” Alex Allary, one of the poets for the team, said. “Alexandra (Jarrett) got up first and stood in her power and rocked her pieceand took away some of my anxiety … The other competitors were very, very good.”

The team has travelled a long way — literally as well as figuratively — to be there for that opening bout on Tuesday night. When a team from The Indigenous Poets Society was invited to apply for the festival, the group had to scramble with a mini-competition of their own to see who they’d be sending.

After that, it was a matter of finding funding to send Allary, Alexandra Jarrett, Keccia Cook, Shawn Joseph, and beloved team coach Kevin Wesaquate to Guelph for the competition.