“Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration”
Written by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky
Dancer
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$27.95
ISBN 9-781779-400840
Award-winning Saskatchewan writer Louise
Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer is renowned for her candid, Cree-infused poetry and
presentations. Her latest book, Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of
Inspiration, braids memoir, poetry and essays to reveal where the author’s
found inspiration and, I would say, contentment, after a tumultuous early start.
In the eloquent introduction by the author’s daughter, Omeasoo Wahpasiw, the
latter writes: “My mom dances with both her bones and the bones of our people,
and when they poke and punch her with their insistent rattling, she does us all
a favour, as painful as it is, and leaves them naked in the wind.”
Until age seven, Halfe lived with her family in a log cabin on the Saddle Lake Reserve and practiced traditional Cree ways of life. She doesn’t pretend that it was perfect. Her father drank and was emotionally volatile (“His heart was a cave of stalactites.”). Her parents “stooked hay, picked rocks/in white farmers’ fields”. Halfe “learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. [She] also watched [her] grandparents work on the land and live their spirituality.” She was forced to attend Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta at age seven, and for the next seven years was stripped of using the Cree language she’d grown up with, endured abuse, and lost her identity.
Regaining the Cree language—nêhiyawêwin is used liberally in this work, and an extensive glossary’s included—has been central to Halfe’s personal and professional development. “We must examine and appreciate the depth and richness of our language in order to understand our ceremonies and the heart of our culture. Indigenous languages … cradle the traditional knowledge and wisdom of the people,” she writes. “We need this language of meaning and purpose, of action and vitality, to lift us beyond the era of victimization.”
I appreciate that this book takes on so much. There’s inspiration and the writing process (she compares it to autumn leaves that “twist and turn with the sun, whipped and rattled by the winds”); personal history (“No running water. Just buckets/of slough water sifted/through a pillowcase.”), including her spirituality, in which ceremony is of great import; her trust in dreams as “a source of information;” the influence of storytelling and Elders; environmental awareness and great respect for the natural world; the value of long walks; legends; much about wind (yótin), which “gives us direction and carries the breath of all life” and is featured in many of the poems; and there is the poetry itself—or simply poetic lines within her prose—that have given me fresh appreciation for her writing, ie: “winter is on the small hairs of my arms.”
“The past is forever present,” Halfe writes in “A Keening,” and many of us spend our lifetimes figuring out how to reconcile this. Halfe appears to be well on her way. “I live and walk this life in both high heels and moccasins,” she shares, and we who read her are the luckier for it.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Blue thinks itself within me”
Written by Kim Trainor
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$27.95
ISBN 9-781779-401205
I knew I was in for a different kind of
book when I read the author’s dedication, which begins: “For the flying beings,
the ones with sharp teeth,/the ones who swim, the fire stones, the trees, the
rain.” By the end of prize-winning Vancouver writer Kim Trainor’s text, Blue
thinks itself within me, I can affirm that her dedication tracks.
Trainor sees, hears, experiences and questions with the intensity of a scientist and the detail of an artist as she draws readers both into the forest at the two-year Fairy Creek blockade near Vancouver Island’s Port Renfrew—where she joined other protestors to protect old growth logging—and through her elegiac and philosophical quandary re: how best to approach writing a long lyric poem about the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen (a rare and threatened species found on yellow cedar in ancient forests) in a kind of respectful co-making with this oldgrowth resident.
Trainor describes artist Natasha Lavdovsky’s discovery of “over sixty trees draped in glittering specklebelly,” and explains that “The finding of such a large community of oldgrowth specklebelly was evidence of the age of this forest that Teal-Jones [“a privately owned timber harvesting and primary lumber product manufacturing company” – tealjones.com] was in the process of cutting down ...”
The book brims with questions, ie: “What tools might lyric poetry bring to a project of co-making of the world with our more-than-human kin, in the face of this slow-burning ecological catastrophe? What furious witness?” and “How will I stitch the poem’s ecosystem into its seams …?”
Trainor admits that her deep dive into how to work artistically with oldgrowth specklebelly lichen at times “engages with complex poetic and ecological theories.” True thing. I far more enjoyed the concrete, sensory-rich descriptions of the Fairy Creek site, where protestors had “code names”—Trainor was “Crow”—and shared supplies: “headlamps, compressions sacks, dry bags, whistles, and a body cam for arrestees to wear in order to document their experiences.” She acknowledges that the land-defenders “combine[d] the most basic of technologies, fire, and one of the most complex, the smartphone, as [they held] vigil with forest and kin.” Constant rain; working in the dark; difficult terrain; and interactions with RCMP, liaison officers, and paramilitary-trained officers (with the Community Industry Response Group) made for great challenges. The protestors created “hard blocks,” “soft blocks” and “blobs” (with protestors interlocking arms), and Trainor was sometimes on the front line. “A blue [RCMP officer] gouged his thumb under my chin, then slipped his hand down to my neck and pressed so hard I couldn’t breathe, his other thumb screwed into my right shoulder at a painful pressure point.” I understand the passion here; one of my family members also participated in the Fairy Creek blockade.
The nonfiction book also includes Trainor’s quiet, beautiful, sensorial moments—a necessary counterpoint. “At night in my one-person tent, the sound of the creek rises, flows through huckleberry and salal, seeps through thin nylon, flesh, bone. I am awash with creek. World pours in.”
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
