“The Medicine Chest: A Physician’s Journey Towards Reconciliation”
By Jarol Boan
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$29.95
ISBN 9-780889-779730
I was expecting an academic text when I received The Medicine Chest: A Physician’s Journey Towards Reconciliation by Regina-raised-and-returned-to physician and educator, Dr. Jarol Boan, but immediately discovered there’s nothing dull about this engaging, well-researched and important book. In fact, I flew through it.
Boan, an internist who spent twenty years practising and teaching in the US, returned home in 2011—at fifty-seven—to find “Indigenous people played a different role in Saskatchewan’s affairs than they once had,” and this book documents her poignant experiences while treating Indigenous patients within Saskatchewan’s health care system from 2011 to the present. Her accounts are balanced between compelling anecdotes about patients in Regina and on reserves in the Touchwood Hills, other healthcare workers, the system (ie: fee-for-service) and politics; and medical history (ie: the TB epidemic), research and statistics.
A few details about Boan’s own personal history (ie: challenging divorce and custody battle) are included, but the true focus concerns the inequities, oppression and racism inherent in the Canadian health care system. Moreover, she explains how she and a few others in the healthcare field, both settlers and Indigenous, are using a “team approach” to address “profound inequalities and injustice” through a program called “Wellness Wheel.” The name’s adapted from Medicine Wheel, “to show our desire to enhance every dimension of the human experience.” Although the logistics of delivering this program—with limited resources, personnel and physical spaces, plus inter-agency/jurisdictional confusion—have been a challenge since its inception in 2016, it boasts countless victories, and it's growing.
The book begins: “Imagine an Elder tells me a story.” The opening chapter then delves into the legend behind Turtle Island (North America); turns to the 1876 negotiation between Chief Ahtahkakoop and Commissioner Alexander Morris—the former requested a “medicine chest” for his people, so they’d receive “the same medical care the white settlers had;” returns to the present, with Boan writing the Elder a prescription for joint pain; explains the drug’s connection to willows; and finishes with Boan’s reflection that she’s “one of the keepers of the medicine chest,” which, for Indigenous people, “has often been empty or filled with horrors.”
Trust’s hard-won, but whether visiting patients on reserve or treating society’s most vulnerable at Regina General Hospital—sometimes the ER’s so busy there’s “no time to pee”—listening is the first step. She confesses to her own occasional “assumptions,” ie: being surprised that an unhomed, Indigenous ER arrival was reading Hemingway and Steinback, and he “grew up in Hollywood and went to a school in LA.” She cites Gordon Tootoosis, Allen Sapp, and Maria Campbell as Indigenous Saskatchewan talents who’ve shown “strength and resilience” to succeed, despite unjust treaties and prejudice.
Though “the road to reconciliation is messy” and “we need a reorganization of our health care system,” through “two-eyed seeing,” paying attention to “social determinants of health,” and using her settler-class power “for advocacy,” Roan’s working diligently and empathetically with “her Indigenous partners for a greater good.” This book’s earned my highest recommendations.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“The Door at the End of Everything”
By Lynda Monahan
Published by Shadowpaw Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.99
ISBN 9-781998-273133
The metaphorical title of Lynda Monahan’s fifth poetry collection, The Door at the End of Everything, is lifted from her long, forthright poem of the same name. The piece is set in a mental health facility, and several of these saturnine new poems—particularly those in the book’s middle section, “Saying the Unsayable Things”—are based on the veteran SK writer, editor and workshop facilitator’s experiences as writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert. I’d bet my snow boots that her facilitation of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, and, much more intimately, personal and familial experience, also inspired these thoughtful poems.
As Monahan writes, “there is poetry everywhere,” and bravo to her: she surely finds it. It’s on tattooed wrists that cover scars, the bulimic who “gorges even on [drinking water]”, and in the patient treated with ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) who says he “returned home/like the dry cleaning/my mind pressed flat/as a pair of black dress paints”. These are plainspoken, powerful poems that speak to truth, hope and resilience, even when a donated coat (“buttons long since missing”) is “the closest damn thing” a man experiences “to anything [he’d] call a home.” There’s much empathy for the unhomed and residential school survivors.
The versatile writer’s free verse also delivers images of domesticity, ie: “laundry/heaped like a small unscalable mountain,” and there’s “an anarchy of wet towers and dirty shirts,” plus family poems. Like most of us, Monahan often writes from experience, and some of her most powerful poems concern a difficult father who was “bigger than all our lives.” She notes that joys seems easier for some people—like her sister—who finds it “in the wild asters at the road’s edge/on the filigreed wings of dragonflies.” For others, the “white lace of baby’s breath in ditches” is not enough. Sadness, loneliness, alienation and invisibility … these are the stones in this collection’s river, and sadness, especially, doesn’t reveal “the way stars sparkle up the sky/or when clouds are doing something to the moon.”
I appreciate how Monahan uses fire, the colour blue, food, and even the forest to manifest mood in her carefully-crafted work. Things decay and relationships stale. In “Poor Mary,” apples and peaches rot in “soggy cardboard boxes,” and, when visiting, the poet writes of “fruit lies flitting around our heads/like miniature Tinkerbells.” What a brilliant simile. The forest is seen both as sanctuary (“here where fox glimmers/in the purple shadowed snow/I know myself best) and, as in the poem “Clear Cut,” a “place of fractured branches/and broken spirit and loneliness.”
The book’s third and final section is rainbow-like. In “These Little Things That Save Us,” we find “a nest of newborn starlings” and “bits of beach glass.” Monahan knows and eloquently writes about the way the simplest things—skin “perfumed with wood smoke”—sometimes make everything better.
This new collection brims with poems that anyone with a beating heart must feel in the pit of their stomach. Bravo, Lynda Monahan.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“What If You Could?”
By Lynne Harley, Art by Kiram Akram
Published by Lynne Harley-Mastery for Life Coaching &
Consulting
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$16.99 ISBN: 978-1-77-821860-6
In my many years as a reviewer, I’ve noted that some of the best children’s stories are penned by those who bring professional knowledge—garnered after a career in a non-writing profession—to the page, and Lynne Harley’s a case in point. After four decades as a social worker and transformational life coach, the Camrose, AB writer has now published her first children’s book, What If you Could?, and I’m certain any youngsters who find this colourful softcover in their hands will feel just as empowered to dream big as the story’s green caterpillar does.
The story, told in rhyming verse, features a large-eyed caterpillar who is “Feeling bored” as he’s “munching and crunching” through leaves. On one “grey and gloomy day,” said caterpillar hears his inner voice, which suggests it’s time to turn over a new leaf (so to speak), and find “something new” in his life. Firstly, he begins observing the flora and fauna: “He saw squirrels, chattering noisily/playing a game of hide and seek,/and hungry baby robins gobbling/worms from their mother’s beak.” Even the wildflowers, as they “swayed freely in the breeze,” seemed to be enjoying life more than him. The contrast between the caterpillar’s days—which are “glum and dull as rain”—and the creatures around him spurs the hero into action. “A voice as warm as sunshine” compels the caterpillar to “̒Dream Big!” and “̒Let [his] imagination run free.’”
It's a true thing that sometimes we need to be given permission to “dream big,” even if that permission comes from within. If an adult’s reading the story aloud, this might be a spot to ask listeners what they might wish to see or accomplish in their lifetime. The caterpillar imagines “travelling all around the world,” and realizes he “would love to fly.” If he had colourful wings, he could “drink the sweet, sweet nectar/of flowers kissed by morning dew,” and “people would point and admire” him. But is it all a dream?
The book also features the flipside voice, the one that “was cold and quite mean,” and encouraged the caterpillar to keep the boring status quo. “̒Who do you think you are?’” it harangues. After a “long and gloomy day,” the seesaw between hope and doubt plagues the cartoon-like creature, but in his dreams he does indeed soar—and is becoming a cocoon. Then “magically, one morning,” you know who “flew free” as a smiling, white-gloved, yellow and red butterfly, soaring over the green landscape.
The power of positive thinking is real, and sometimes we all—regardless of age—need to hear this: “̒Believe in your dreams, because I believe in you.’”
This story is also about transformation. Change can be difficult, but again, it’s definitely helpful when we’re able to silence the negative inner voice and embrace the one that says: Yes you can!
I’ll happily share this book with my seven-year-old neighbour, and as I do I’ll remind myself that even at my great age, it’s never too late to dream big.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
