Lisa at AnzLitLovers is hosting a week dedicated to the works of indigenous authors, an event she has retitled First Nations Reading Week, July 3rd-10th, which is an excellent opportunity for me to mention a poetry collection that I absolutely loved earlier this year, in the company of a couple of CDs that I’ve been listening to lately.

Last weekend, on Canada Day, sitting outside and enjoying the warm, but not overly hot, temperatures in the shade, I alternated between some recreational reading (a friend and family member recommended Y: The Last Man, which I didn’t connect with earlier, but am quite enjoying this time) and watching videos of performances and interviews with Buffy Sainte-Marie, one of the performers I learned to recognize earliest in my life (because she appeared on Sesame Street regularly).

One song on this Medicine Songs (2017) CD that has stayed with me, since I last went through a BSM phase (a Donovan song originally, although she is a songwriter herself) is “Universal Soldier”. It’s been recorded by many of the North American folk singers who came to prominence in the 1960s and this video is from a 2019 performance.

This time, however, I was particularly struck by the lyrics of another song here, “My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying” and, especially, this version from a Pete Seeger show, which has been remastered. (The difference is, I think, that I started to follow American news in 2015, and I came to understand, via Thomas King’s non-fiction writing, how inconsequential the Canadian-U.S. border is for many indigenous people, who recognise their own borders and geographical divisions between indigenous nations: both factors increased my interest in American anthems, whereas previously I might have skipped this track.) It’s really something to compare these two performances and to marvel at her long and principled career.

Douglas Walbourne-Gough knows how to write about rock and about the places we construct around the barriers we encounter. Crow Gulch (2019) is a collection that I returned to every week, exhausting my renewals from the library, adding it to my list of “books to buy when I can.” I read and reread the poems, noticing different lines each time, feeling that some were more insistent than others depending on the view from my window on that day.

Crow Gulch is named for an itinerant community near Cornerbrook Newfoundland (on the Atlantic coast of the land currently called Canada) that originally took root when the region’s first pulp-and-paper mill was being built. People migrated there looking for work, and their camps on the steep slopes near the railway line, on the site of an abandoned slate quarry, became their homes.

In “Imposter”, the poet observes feeling displaced having been invited to the west coast as a writer (the Banff retreat/school for writers is referenced) and concludes: “Those mountains, though.” But those rocks are a backdrop on a postcard image; the rocks he know take centre-stage in “Breaking Ground” which is one of my favourites. The way he considers themes of belonging and survival, while observing fields and cloudberries and lichen—it resonates for me. (This link is sanctioned, not someone just posting the poem.)

The final lines of that poem echo the consideration of shifting points-of-view. There is a place for the settlers—“Bearings taken from / the hundred back of Guernsey Island (in Cedar Cove, Revisited for John Steffler). But also a place for the traditional inhabitants of the land, Mi’kmaq and mixed descendants derogatorily referred to as Jackatars. And this is because the poet in “Influences” has “old photos, a handful of stories, one more life-hyphen to live up to.” [He is adopted and mixed Mi’kmaq too.]

The tension between these groups is consistent throughout the collection, most baldly depicted in the short Q&A poems, which situate the Indigenous figures in the poems as “the poorest of the poor” and the area of Crow Gulch a place presented to settler children as a threat (“You’re going to end up in Crow Gulch if you don’t pull your oscks up.”) But there are other tensions too, in particular the inward battle to situate oneself in a landscape, to balance sustainability with extraction, tradition with settler ways, and community with identity.

Terry Uyarak’s CD was linked to another item I searched for in the online library catalogue online: a random selection that will encourage me to take more chances. The tone and style of his songwriting immediately appealed, and I have a new playlist now to which I’ve returned and added. This video was the first single and there’s a translation below.

The CD opens with a spoken track (I don’t know which Inuit language, perhaps Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun) and there are four spoken interludes. Immediately I was reminded of how many times I was told, as a child, that people speaking another language in my presence were being rude, which I didn’t understand anymore than I understood why it was rude to bring a book to the table; now grown, I’m free to think that people speaking their own language are simply speaking their own language. Just as I do, myself. One of the reasons that I love Toronto so much is how frequently I am in the presence of other people speaking in their own tongues; it turns out, you only need a CD player (or, okay, the internet-heheh) to appreciate that experience.

And, what’s next in my stack of Indigenous reading? Emmanuelle Walter’s Stolen Sisters: The Story of Two Missing Girls, Their Families and How Canada Has Failed Indigenous Women (2014; Trans. Susan Ouriou and Christelle Morelli, 2018), which is accessible and informative. It’s also taught me the term ‘mort kilomètrique’, the concept of a tragedy close to home impacting harder than one on the other side of the globe—in the context of the irony that even when the deaths of Indigenous women occur close to home, they do not necessarily provoke the same action and concern but, instead, there’s an element of distance that is factored in, a distance that is not geographical.

What book would you add to my stack on this theme? What book would you pull from my stack to read yourself?