Last time, there was talk of Bevann Fox’s novel Genocidal Love (2020), Isaac Murdoch’s The Trail of Nenaboozhoo and Other Creation Stories (illustrated by Christi Belcourt, 2019), David Bouchard’s and Roy Henry Vickers’ The Elders Are Watching (2003), and Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and Memory of Water (2021), which illuminates issues of concern for Indigenous peoples. Now: a puzzle, poetry, mythology, stories, and essays.

And, meanwhile, I’ve enjoyed another jigsaw puzzle on loan from the public library: “Three Dories” by Chipewyan Métis artist Dawn Onan.

Experienced puzzlers will recognise the novice mistake that I made in thinking that the bold colours on the dorries would be an advantage—the irregular lines transformed that into a challenge. Nobody will be surprised to hear that the small section of blue sky was the hardest part—it required a concentrated finish of sequentially trying all the suitable contenders, and then rearranging the ones that had seemed suitable but weren’t, until each one, finally, fit.

Reading poetry, randomly choosing a verse here and there, was a pleasant relief from that effort. These lines, from Louise Bernice Halfe’s / Sky Dancer’s Blue Marrow (originally published in 1998 and republished in 2020) stand out to me:

“When the voices roar,
I write.
Sometimes they sing,
are silent.
In those times
I read, answer overdue letters,
go for a walk or jog,
stroke my fire, prepare baloney
mustard sandwich, wild rice salad.”

She effortlessly mingles the sacred (singing, the fire, wild rice) with the everyday (letters, jogging, sandwiches), and all around this verse are Cree words, which she includes not only to work towards preserving the language but “to create a dialogue with people who don’t speak the language, whether they are native or settlers.”

There is a glossary after the poems, but this interview with the founder of Kegedonce Press, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, also considers some of the complexities of the language. Like the word wâhkôhtowin, for instance, which means ‘relationship’ but also means “I walk with you in a bent-over manner, with my hunched back on this wayward, back and forth journey.”

She also speaks of the importance of sharing her unsanitized experience of life in Blue Quills residential school, intergenerational trauma, ceremony, life on the Saddle Lake Indian Reserve shape-shifting, and the importance of strong grandmothers, and how their being “determined and fierce, sometimes kind” shaped her (when she was younger, before she was a grandmother herself).

Her 2007 collection, The Crooked Good, reprinted in 2021, is “a woman’s story about family and community healing,” about wâhkôhtowin and the colonial violence that disrupted Indigenous wâhkôhtowin. This Kim Anderson explains in an introduction which contextualizes Sky Dancer’s work and discusses it in relationship to her social work as part of the Saskatoon Social Service Elders Committee. Her elder narrator presents “an Indigenous feminist/womb-as-is tale”, “a woman’s lens on Indigenous history.”

I, ê-kwêskît, share this story,
though a small pain only.

Shadow dancers arrived, ran on Rib Woman’s
roundness. Twigs fall. Thunder rolls. A
dead tree slaps Rib Woman. She
heaves through the night. Breathes, breathes.
Hours. Hours. Many, many nights.
Years. Years. Time and time again.
Rolling Head dreams. Mouth parches.
Tongue thick.
(From “Excavating”)

I borrowed Roy Henry Vickers’ Cloudwalker (written with Robert Budd and published in 2014) from the library because I loved the cover. The images are beautiful, whether a man with a bow and arrow, a group of swans, or a moose. (I still haven’t seen a moose up here. I think they are mythic creatures.) This story was inspired by a recording held by the Royal British Columbia Museum, a book and tape called Paddlewheels on the Frontier. This recording by Imbert Orchard was an elder telling the story of Astace, and the story grew with each telling for Vickers and Budd, until it took this form. So, the artwork appeals, the story appeals, and the concept of museums preserving stories (alongside the history of inappropriate procurement of tribal artifacts) appeals too. “All life begins and ends with the rivers.”

Norma Dunning’s Tainna (2021) is an worthy companion to Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (2017). And Annie even appears in “These Old Bones”: “Johnny raised his wineglass and smiled. ‘To you Annie Mukluk. A survivor.’”

There are both melancholic and humourous moments in this collection. One of my favourites is in the first story: “I wonder if she still starts each day with a wire push-up bra and two Spanx camisoles. One thing that pushes her tits up and the other that sucks her guts in. Her own version of being a shape-shifter.” Not only have I shape-shifted myself like that (just once—for a funeral!) but I appreciate the way that Norma Dunning is playing with the expectations of readers, taking a legitimate aspect of her culture and squishing it into contemporary Inuit life.

In a later story, too, readers view the events through Quarta’s perspective, when she correctly anticipates an older white man’s stereotypical ignorance of her culture; she inwardly comments that he’s right on target, when he asks her: “Did you ever eat raw meat?” The heat of the exchange comes in the following private observation: “JJ can’t stop himself from asking that common question that only Inuit are asked in Canada. The question that signals their inbred lack of civilization. The question whose answer confirms what all white people think. After all, if you eat raw meat, you must be backward. Unless, of course, it is sushi.”

Throughout these stories, tradition and modernity rub elbows in the tight quarters of the short form. “Times changed and no one fished anymore. Not like they used to. They ate Kraft Dinner and warmed up frozen KFC in microwaves and called that supper. The people hunted at the Northern Store.”

There is talk of dinner and drinking, and more rituals of everyday life than there are ancestral presences; readers looking to broaden their understanding of this northern culture will appreciate the tone and detail, but readers simply looking for tightly written stories will value the clean edit and deft characterization.

Contents: Contents: Amak, Kunak, Eskimo Heaven, Panem et Circenses, These Old Bones, Tainna (The Unseen Ones)

Pathways of Reconciliation: Indigenous and Settler Approaches to Implementing the TRC’s Calls to Action (2020), edited by Aimée Craft and Paulette Regan, is a collection of academic essays. I had the same question that the editors present in the introduction as one impetus for the work: “How can I participate in reconciliation?” They refer to the range of opinions on the “usefulness of reconcilation as a mechanism for authentic societal change.” Critics of the concept advocate for a “deeply decolonizing resurgence of culturally diverse Indigenous political philosophies, governance systems, and laws that support self-determination and land-based ways of life.” Building on this foundation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can work together “for justice, equity, and responsible land stewardship in solidarity.”

The book is divided into four parts, to focus on different pathways of reconciliation: reframing, learning and healing, researching, and living. But this division belies the reality of these pathways being integrated and mutually dependent. In combination, theoretical approaches work in combination with practical efforts to “shift attitudes and stimulate actions that can lead to real social change.” The bulk of the book was formed by conference papers, but the editors sought to expand their contributors to include more sectors of society, representing a wider variety of individual and collective responses.

These are essays designed for thinkers and students, for readers well-versed in these topics, with the kind of specialized vocabulary that I lack; still, just leafing through, I found much food for thought—as in Erica Jurgens’ essay “Teaching Truth Before Reconcilation.” She presents the concept of “split tensing”, a term used by Patrick Wolfe, “whereby the settler situates the Indigenous as dead or dying and the settler as constructing and progressing.” She writes about the need to complete Indigenous and settler histories.

“Too often,” Jurgens writes, “Indigenous histories are mentioned only in relation to contact and within settler history told from the settler perspective.” So, Indigenous histories are erased and only the story of Canadian nation building is told: “even many Indigenous people see themselves ahistorically, without the knowledge of their own equally valued histories.” She encourages the inclusion of narratives that have been “missed, dismissed, or forgotten” like the stories of residential school survivors, whose stories have been told in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission project “to pierce through this historical amnesia and speak truth to power.”

These are not for the casual reader necessarily, but even a casual reader can glean something of interest here.

Next time: a mystery, a dystopia, and more poetry.