Two Book Reviews: Into the Continent by Emily McGiffin, and Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis as narrated by Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis and Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear, retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight, and illustrated by Treasa Starlight

“Into the Continent”

By Emily McGiffin

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-780889-779891

   

I wasn’t sure how to begin Emily McGiffin’s poetry collection, Into the Continent, with its similar but opposite-side-up covers, front and back, and a Page 1 at either end. On one cover, a bayonetted rifle on a creamy background. On the other, a “Big Old Axe” against the same. As I chose a side (the rifle) to start my reading, I hoped I’d find the answer to why the book—praised by Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn—was structured thus. What is McGiffin, author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics, metaphorically saying with this either way-ness and dramatic images?

What I do know is that the University of Regina’s Oksana Poetry & Poetics book series, of which this book’s a part, concerns titles that “[probe] discussions of poetry’s cultural role”. I mined the internet and learned that the author/academic’s work “concerns the interplay of extractivism, empire, and expressive arts,” and she self-describes as “a multidisciplinary environmental humanities scholar researching arts, extraction, and environmental justice”. Currently a Research Fellow at University College London, she’s also studied and worked in British Columbia, Ghana, Scotland, and Toronto. The global sweep of her work—and her politics—became quickly evident.

The tone here hits like a blunt instrument: clearly the poet’s spotlight is on history, and particularly the violent history wrought by Colonialism and greed. The poems build upon one another, story-like, and the poet’s exclusion of titles supports this narrative flow. The Industrial Revolution, bleak landscapes, the sea and the natural world, a slave ship, land ownership, war, sheep farming, rape, and childbirth are grappled with via ingenious language, including some terms—"quern,” “quaggas”—that had me Googling.

The rifle side thrusts readers into Scotland, “coal-hearted” and with “feet in heathered depths,” “mud banks [standing] bleak along the firth” and “glens desolate”. Soon after, while “port lights wink and simmer on the bay,” a ship is “built for human cargo,” and the narration directs the plot: “i await my carriage”. Note the small i.

Things really get moving on the “age-old/murderous sea,” with “the hull a rising/reek as cargo vomits”. McGiffin demonstrates a sharp ear for cacophony: there’s “grunting hogs” and “planks’ and rigging’s groan”. I noted a reverence for creatures, and admire the image of a “purple-turbaned snail [dragging] a hind foot”. The juxtaposition of the industrial and the natural—ie: “pig-iron dawn” and a single vulture “scything under fisted bright”—is dynamite.

The ship docks, and we find “castaways, dispatched to master/a thorned land”. The linebreaking “master” is clever indeed, and it ushers in the next series of poems. What’s to be mastered? Oh, so much—and that’s just the rifle portion.      

The work’s original, musical, feminist (“the bible is the size and weight of one man’s hand”), and clearly not pro-Capitalism or Colonialism. The rifle? War, oppression and power. The axe? Settlement and divisions. Perhaps the inverted structure represents the ambiguity of beginnings and endings. History often viciously repeats itself.    

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis”

As narrated by Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis and Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear

Retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight

Illustrated by Treasa Starlight

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-780889-779853

   

The University of Regina Press is doing important work with their commitment to honouring the traditional languages, legends and cultures of Canada’s First Peoples, and the list of books in their First Nations Language Readers series recently grew again with the landmark publication of Isúh Áníi: Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká áa Guunijà / As Grandmother Said: The Narratives of Bessie Meguinis. This is the first book to be published in Tsuut’ina (“a critically endangered language”) in more than one hundred years. It contains nine traditional narratives originally narrated by Elders Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis (1883-1987) and her son, Ninàghá Tsitł’á Willie Little Bear (1912-1989). Here they’re retold by Dit’óní Didlíshí Bruce Starlight, the grandson of Bessie Meguinis. Dr. Starlight spent much of his early childhood with Meguinis, listening to her stories and teachings as he recovered from tuberculosis, and with the help of colleague Dr. Christopher Cox—and chapter-beginning, black and white illustrations by Treasa Starlight—he shares invaluable knowledge of this tonal language that less than twenty people now speak.     

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia (online version), “The Tsuut'ina language (often known as Sarcee) is an Athabaskan/Dene language of northern Canada,” and “Today, Tsuut’ina territory is in southern Alberta, bordering the southwestern city limits of Calgary.”

In the book’s foreword, Dr. Arok Wolvengrey, Professor of Algonquian Languages and Linguistics at First Nations University of Canada, writes “it is my hope that this book will be one small yet crucial piece in the multifaceted approach required in the Tsuu’tina’s efforts to retain and revitalize their beautiful language”. This collaborative publication is a “teaching tool” that incudes a linguistic analysis and a comprehensive Tsuut’ina-English glossary.

The stories themselves cover diverse subjects. In “How the Earth was Created—The Old Man and the Muskrat,” there’s a flood and an “Old Man” who, Noah-like, built a boat for “All of the animals”. He directed first a beaver, then a muskrat to “try to grab some dirt from the bottom of the water”. The muskrat succeeded in returning with “a little bit of dirt in his paws,” and from this, and with the help of “a fast-running bird,” the earth became “whole again”.   

The matter-of-fact “Buffalo Lake” concerns the water that flowed “uncontrollably” from a slaughtered buffalo’s bladder to create Buffalo Lake, beneath which “the buffalo turned into an island there”.

There are narratives about how the brave Tsuut’ina separated into northern and southern peoples; a tale about the Tsuut’ina meeting the Blackfoot (“they all intermarried … we were all initiated into different societies and ceremonies”), and a story about how a buffalo gifted a young man with the “holy” abode that is a teepee, and how the teepee is structurally representative of a buffalo.

I could almost hear the speakers in the above stories and others—about the Beaver Bundle, water monsters, Thunderbirds and Black Soldiers—and credit the entire crew responsible for sharing, translating and preserving these stories, word for word. How musical it must have been to hear them in their original Tsuut’ina.       

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

 

 

Three Book Reviews: The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails by Matthew R. Anderson; What Fills Your House Like Smoke by E. McGregor; and Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide by Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, with Miriam Körner, and photos by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird

 “The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails”

Written by Matthew R. Anderson

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-780889-779655

   

Uncanny timing. I recently completed a pilgrimage walk—the 300-kilometer Camino de Santiago (Portuguese Coastal Route)—and not a week after my return from Europe I was reviewing a book about a very different—but much closer to home—set of pilgrimages. The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails, by Swift Current-born and raised educator, author and Lutheran minister, Matthew Anderson (who’s also walked the Camino de Santiago), is compelling, exceedingly well-written and researched nonfiction concerning three ambitious Saskatchewan pilgrimages across Treaty 4 and 6 pastures, valleys, roads, ranches and farms, abandoned homesteads, brush belts, villages, First Nations’ reserves and more via the Traders’ Road/NWMP Patrol Trail (2015), the Battleford Trail (2017), and the Frenchman Trail (2018), and creating “healthy new stories” on the journey. “By walking,” Anderson writes, “our group was attempting to pay attention”.  

These “good walks” were undertaken by an eclectic assemblage—including clergy, writers, Elders, family members, a hydrologist, naturalist Trevor Herriot, and book dedicatee and Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society president Hugh Henry—to connect to the land and its stories while respecting the First Peoples who walked these trails long before Henry Kelsey set foot on them and Colonialism dealt its calamitous blows. Anderson makes a connection between long-distance walking and decolonization. He writes that Canadians “need to create better narratives about this land and our place, past and present, in it” and to question “the bright and shiny pioneer narratives”.

This mind-expanding book is steeped in empathy for Indigenous Peoples. Anderson writes of broken treaties and the mass starvation of Indigenous Peoples, and includes several quotes from Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Smudging and leaving tobacco were an integral part of these respectful pilgrimages.

Also noteworthy are the numerous poetic descriptions of prairie landscape and weather; anecdotes about group interactions and the hosts; and Anderson’s familial mission: to return a portion of his recently-deceased parents’ remains to the Shaunavon-area, “lonesome little grave” where the author’s infant older sister—whom he’d never met—is buried. Detailing the walk from Wood Mountain to Cypress Hills, Anderson says “gusts … scared up clouds of grasshoppers that would then be caught in the wind and ping off our bodies like flung gravel,” and “antelope zig-zagged away at our approach”.

The skilled weaving of the personal here-and-now (including Anderson’s serious leg infection during the final days of the Frenchman Trail), folklore and recorded—though not necessarily true—history brilliantly steered me through the sizeable book. A shocking revelation for this Saskatchewan-born and raised reader was that during the November 27, 1885 mass hanging in Battleford—eight nêhiyaw and Nakota were executed—Indigenous students from the Battleford Indian Industrial School “were forced to watch the hangings”. All these years later, racism is still prevalent in the province: the 2016 killing of Colten Boushie created a further divide.

This award-worthy book deserves a long slow read. Probably multiple reads. There’s much to take in with each of these prairie pilgrimages, and each “felt holy in its own way”.  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“What Fills Your House Like Smoke”

Written by E. McGregor

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9781771872522

 

I must admit, the title of E. (Erin) McGregor’s debut poetry collection—What Fills Your House Like Smoke—greatly piqued my interest. I’m partial to similes and metaphors, and McGregor’s title was a poetic hook—what, exactly, does fill this Winnipeg poet’s house with metaphorical smoke? I guessed that butterflies and sweet peas wouldn’t be at the heart of it.

McGregor holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and the sheer variety of poetic forms—prose poems; free verse; quatrains; couplets; concrete; and experimental, sound-oriented pieces—in the book is consistent with the range I’ve seen in other first books by creative writing students. What differentiates McGregor’s poetry, however, is its nearly singular focus on the theme of personal identity; often, first books “free range” across themes and subjects. McGregor’s poems weave pain into a story.   

McGregor is a “Euro-Settler/Métis,” and in her piece “Weeds”—another metaphor—she begins: “Don’t judge me too harshly/for not understanding the small things/that come with your blood”. In that same poem: “[white people] have me by the roots/it’s confusing”. The poet contends with her lineage, and, in particular, the maternal line, including her grandmother, Dora—to whom the book is dedicated—and her mother, both of whom had “the drinking disease”. She writes of the hardships Dora faced, including an abusive husband who “beat her up and cleaned her out,/stole her dogs”. Of Dora’s siblings, she writes of “The streets of Toronto that swallowed one brother, the train/wheels in the Fraser Valley that bisected/another. The sea of alcohol/that could not be swum.”

The poems are real and raw—full of hangovers and lousy partners, class disparities and Death Apnea. And they’re credible, though the back cover copy claims the book’s “an incomplete and wildly imaginative biography of [McGregor’s] grandmother”. I applaud this imagination. In the opening poem— “Instructions for the Death of a Grandmother”—McGregor writes about her grandmother’s “gurgle-thick breaths,” and the poet wonders if Dora can smell “the stale alcohol” on her granddaughter’s skin. Hyperaware in the hours after death, McGregor considers “the way gas-bar lights make everything look silver” and she notes “the song that is playing on the radio”. At times grandmother and granddaughter are close, sharing “Japanese chicken wings and rice,” and other times they struggle with the “finding of things to give words to”.   

The poems are set in a few different locations, including Edmonton (“Edmonton is a thin soup, at first”) and Winnipeg, with its “goose shit and shadows”. In Edmonton, Dora’s husband “retrieves her from toilet-stall floors/and carries her, like a hunter with his kill,/to the cold car”. This poet demonstrates deft, non-sentimental handling of intimate personal experience, poem after poem.

What fills this house with smoke? Bravery. Honesty. Curiosity. The matriarchal line contains all the strengths and “lesions” of three generations, and the youngest of these women—through examination, contemplation and literary skill—is doing her best to slowly clear the smoke, and understand who she is.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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"Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide"

Written by Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, with Miriam Körner

Photos by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$49.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-032-7

 

In these modern times, when we want information our “Go To” is usually to Google or Youtube it. If one wanted to learn to tan moosehides, for example, they could indeed go online to discover how, but some steps might be missed. If tanning moosehides is indeed your intent, now there’s an excellent resource that you can hold in your hands or spread on a table: Tanning Moosehides the Northern Saskatchewan Trapline Way: An Easy Step-by-Step Guide. 

The softcover guidebook by northern Saskatchewan residents Tommy Bird, Lawrence Adam, Lena Adam, and award-winning La Ronge writer Miriam Körner takes readers through the twenty-four steps involved in the time-consuming process of tanning moosehides, “a skill passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial”. The book is filled with colour photographs provided by Miriam Körner and Tommy Bird, and it begins with a helpful introduction.

If you’re from the north, you may already know the various uses of tanned moosehide. They were and are “sewn into mukluks, moccasins, mitts, vests, jackets, pants, tent coverings, dog harnesses, toboggan bags, bedding, snowshoe straps, laces and a lot of other day-to-day items”. You may have also seen beaded moosehide purses, credit card holders, earrings, and dress clothes for Queen and King Trapper winter festival events. The introduction relays that historically, Woodland Cree families on remote traplines all worked together to process the hides—it’s a huge job. Now one can learn some of the tanning skills— and “get knowledge from Elders”—at hide camps or culture camps, but there may not be time to learn everything.

Recognizing that it’s important to pass on the skills they learned with their own families, Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation’s Tommy Bird and Lawrence and Lena Adam of Fond du Lac Denesuliné First Nation have combined their “decades of experience” in moosehide tanning to share with newbies, “so that the youth of today can once more pass this knowledge on to the next generation”. In Tommy’s back yard, the trio have tanned “more than thirty hides from start to finish, and smoked “more than a hundred that had been softened in tanneries”.

It takes strength, perseverance, skill and practise to do this traditional work. The materials list is surprising, including “A small pot to cook the brain mix in,” “Oatmeal,” and “Sunlight liquid dish soap and/or bar soap”. On the optional list of materials: “Common salt,” “Sawdust” and “Spruce cones”. A bone scraper is among the important tools for tanning moosehide, and the writers include the steps to make your own from “the leg bones of moose, elk, deer, or bear”.

I particularly liked Step 24: “Sit Back and Admire Your Work”. The accompanying photo shows Elder Lena Adams and her husband Lawrence holding a finished hide that looks “soft like a fleece blanket”.

The detailed instructions, helpful photographs, and “trouble-shooting tips” in this guide are inspiring, and I hope copies of it frequently find their way into the hands of those who desire to do this culturally significant work.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM