“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
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