Three New Reviews: U Alive by Chelsea Coupal; Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times by Mark Fletcher; and Another Leaf: A Refugee Story by Marg Epp, as Told by Ma They Yare

“U Alive”

By Chelsea Coupal

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9781771872836

   

Chelsea Coupal’s second book, U Alive, is the most enjoyable poetry collection I’ve read in many moons. The rural Saskatchewan-raised writer and new mother documents—through sensorial and beautifully imagistic poems, mostly written in formal styles (couplets, tercets, quatrains)—a quintessentially prairie childhood; the transition from adolescence to motherhood; our often inexplicable attractions and attachments to people; the vagaries of the months and seasons; a close connection to the natural world; and a concern about the environment.

The book possesses a self-reflective, questioning tone. Each of the twelve sections begins with a stylized poem named for the months of the year. Coupal has split these calendar poems into two columns, and rather than reading straight across the horizontal lines, the poems are best read down the left column, then down the right. In “March,” Coupal contemplates breastfeeding (“The second week I get mastitis”) and philosophizes about her life: “I could have as much time ahead/as behind me, maybe less./I wonder if everything I’ve done/equals good or bad.” Her breast milk “is the colour of salmon,/dyed by [her] own blood.”  

There’s plenty of blood in these poems, ie: “Tongues wet/as blood or birth;” “Lady beetles in bleeding grass;” “blood-eyed ghosts;” “don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week/and doesn’t die;” and “blood on the sheets.” A rural Saskatchewan upbringing gives one a pragmatic perspective on death, I believe. It’s a place where one might see an eagle’s “white face red with the warm blood of a rabbit.”

Seasons are a focal point, too. In spring, “[March] lands/before rain, before geese, before seeding,/before tulips break through soil, wavy-green wings.” And in August, “Some nights the air is water/that surrounds a canoe.” How lovely. One teenaged September finds the narrator at a bush party: “We aren’t dressed/for the gentle sting of clear September night. A bonfire stains/the horizon” and partiers have “crop stubble stuck in [their] socks.”

In an environmental poem about taking a great-horned owl to a rescue, Coupal laments a prairie where “Every acre [is] maximized” and “chemical containers lie around.” The owl “Probably ate a mouse that ate rodenticide.”

I commend Coupal’s smart use of verbs: “birds flurry,” “snow shoots” and “rain swishes.” And who doesn’t appreciate a great moon metaphor? Coupal’s moon is a “pale thumbprint, creased and shadowed” and, in a particularly apropos comparison, it’s “a bullet hole/in the side of an old barn”.

The Saskatchewan Coupal portrays is the one I also experienced, from dancing “in cigarette smoke” to admiring the “wheat-husk whisper” of chickadees that land in retreating writers’ and artists’ upturned palms at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, and coveting the “honey scent” of sweet peas (“Moths in watercolour”).

 Loss is omnipresent in these stunning poems. In “Same Basic Losses,” we find this truism:

      We wait for the same basic losses: death of our pets

      grandparents and then our parents. And when our loved ones die,

      we remember we’re animals.

Sensorial, sexy, and steeped in the “small astonishment/at being alive,” I’ll savour these poems—repeatedly.

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

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“Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times”

By Mark Fletcher

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$29.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-047-1

 

At 398 pages, I harboured reservations about reviewing Love Big Country: Tales of Wildfire, Wildlife & Wild Times, a memoir conveyed in stories by Mark Fletcher. What if it was dull and/or poorly written? Then I began reading, and before I’d turned the first page, I was rapt, as Fletcher—wildland firefighter, smokejumper and adrenalin junkie extraordinaire—not only writes exceptionally well, this natural storyteller’s lifetime of intense experiences could make for blockbuster movies. He was in a helicopter that “flew directly through a residual cottonwood tree” and crashed. He’s shared rivers with grizzlies, was threatened by armed criminals, and, most terrifyingly, experienced burnovers: “fire penetrated the surrounding green fuels in a rush of flying embers, licking flames and loud, thick, wind-driven smoke. Burning trees fell close with muted thuds. The dragon was upon us.”

His “beloved profession … nearly killed [him] a number of times,” and he earned ten concussions in the 1980s. “Parachuting into forest fires and firefighting in general come with risks,” he asserts. “Everyone knows I push boundaries.” But there’s no braggadocio here: the author regularly credits his associates, from heavy equipment operators to birddog pilots.

More than half the book brims with harrowing tales from the front line (the “Wildfire” pieces). “Wildlife” and “Wild Times” sections follow, and each section provides “snapshots of [Fletcher’s] life,” which, he explains “has been about healthy relationships” with the “natural environment, with the wildlife that shares our planet” and with myriad people. What shines through: Fletcher was masterful at the career that brought him much joy, but work aside, he also comes across as an empath, an environmentalist, a feminist, and just an all-round nice guy.

A “Huck Finn-type” from the get-go, Fletcher’s career began in 1975, and in 1993 he became a certified air attack officer with the BC Forest Service, Wildland Fire. His entertaining anecdotes are filled with the language of the trade, ie: smokejumping, saw kits, ditty bags, snags, birddog flying, jumpspotting; a reverence for natural landscapes; stories about various characters and Fletcher’s three beloved “fire dogs”. Sid, a heeler, had “an international fan club” and once, after joining his owner on a “carnival ride” of an air tanker flight in the Kootenays, the author later found the dog on his hotel bed in Castlegar. Sid had laid on the channel changer and turned on the TV—he was watching The Littlest Hobo.

Aside from “literally brushing embers off” and meeting the likes of David Suzuki, John Denver, Buddhist monks (whose incense sticks and cones ignited a mammoth old growth cedar), Mexican firefighters (“Frying tortillas on hot spots with fixin’s was a tasty shared meal”), and using sign language to communicate with a Gwich’in-speaking woman who required ATV evacuation, there are wolf, wolverine, cougar, beaver, alligator and lynx stories. The most touching concerns Fletcher’s connection to a great horned owl at his southeast Saskatchewan farmstead, and the “owl medicine” she shared.

May this absolute firestorm of a book receive the readers and recognition it rightly deserves.

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

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“Another Leaf: A Refugee Story”

By Marg Epp as told by Ma They Yare

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-77869-031-0

 

Ten years ago, while backpacking around Thailand, I visited a Karen village to photograph a woman with gold rings elongating her neck. I knew nothing of Karen culture and was shamelessly after the sheer spectacle. While that experience deserves to be in a “How Not to Be a Culturally Sensitive Traveler” file, it did have me especially eager to read Another Leaf: A Refugee Story, the memoir of a Myanmar-born Karen woman, Ma They Yare, as told, with the aid of translators, to her friend, Marg Epp. A small reparation, yes, but a step in the right direction.

Epp and her refugee sponsorship group at Wildwood Mennonite Church in Saskatoon were responsible, with assistance from the Mennonite Central Committee, for the immigration of single mother Ma They Yare and her five children to Saskatoon in 2016. Ma They Yare bravely fled war-ravaged Myanmar (formerly Burma) with her family, and they remained in Thailand’s Mae Ra Mu Luang refugee camp for fourteen years before their arrival in Canada (sans the children’s father), where everything—food, clothing, currency, weather, customs, language—was new and strange. Epp’s compassion for the immigrant experience was partially informed by her own family’s wartime escape from Europe to Canada.

The author explains that Ma They Yare “has spent much of her life searching in order that she and her family might live lives that are about more than just survival,” and a Karen proverb about a caterpillar continually and necessarily searching for “a new leaf” to eat “in order to survive and grow” is used as a metaphor. Epp writes: “Like the monarch butterfly [Ma They Yare] has crossed borders in search of safer habitats and has shown us that just living is not enough. There is more to life than mere survival.”

Unable to read or write herself, Ma They Yare stresses the importance of education for her children. Three of the five were born in the refugee camp, and Epp’s included touching letters they’ve penned to their mother in this fascinating story that puts a distinct face on the ongoing civil war in Myanmar (frequent and brutal attacks by the Burmese army on Karen villages continue today); details what life’s like in Thai refugee camps; and records the joys and struggles of integration into Canadian society. 

I get a strong sense of Ma They Yare’s strength, directness and hopefulness in her conversational, first-person accounts, from village life and running from Burmese soldiers in the jungle to “things happening to women that [she doesn’t] want to talk about” in the refugee camp, and being terrified in Canada by the house-rattling wind and the smoke alarm’s initial “deafening shriek.”

It was interesting to read about bamboo houses, dugout canoes, the custom of Karin women getting tattoos “all over [their] body” as protection against snake poison, and Ma They Yare’s “traditional Buddhist Marriage”. Actually, the entire, book was a welcome education for this reader. It’s a story the anti-immigrant faction of Canadian society would be well-advised to read.    

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

 

 

 

Two New Reviews: "Honouring the Declaration: Church Commitments to Reconciliation and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples," edited by Don Schweitzer and Paul L. Gareau; and “On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Relations and Resistances” Edited by Emily Grafton and David B. A. MacDonald

 “Honouring the Declaration: Church Commitments to Reconciliation and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”

Edited by Don Schweitzer and Paul L. Gareau

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$39.95  ISBN 9-780889-778320

 

 

Honouring the Declaration: Church Commitments to Reconciliation and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a collection of diverse scholarly essays edited by Don Schweitzer (McDougald Professor of Theology at St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon, and an ordained member of the United Church of Canada) and Paul L. Gareau (Métis associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta) is aptly titled. Over ten chapters, the contributing Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and theologians examine the UNDRIP from many angles as it pertains to the United Church and other Christian denominations, and they weigh in on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. In this gathering of learned minds, the contributors discuss what true reconciliation means, why it’s integral, steps to achieving it, and some of the challenges facing reconciliation.

In her lived-experience essay “Restructured Feelings: Pitfalls of Settler-Christian Turns to Education,” Lynn Caldwell questions education’s role in non-Indigenous and Indigenous relations, making “an argument against overstating what education about difference, about injustice and oppression, or about reconciliation and justice can achieve.” The former longtime faculty member at St. Andrew’s College contends that “settler-Christian education” is “preliminary and foundational,” and she writes that the residential school system is an example of “̒education.’” Caldwell effectively uses an anatomy metaphor to make her point: “Learning about oppression, power, culture, whiteness, race, and privilege is [akin to] learning an anatomy … Such learning certainly can be a part of a path to health, but in and of itself the outcome of learning anatomy in the ways I am conceiving of it here, is just that—the knowledge of anatomy.” This knowledge is important, but as lawyer/educator Sa’ke’j Henderson and Don Schweitzer state in their Afterword, “reconciliation requires concrete structural change and material reparations.”

Henderson’s own chapter concerns “the principle of inherent human dignity,” which is critical because “[Indigenous Peoples] have suffered through constant and unabashed violations of [their] inherent dignity.” He cites “cognitive justice” as integral to transcending European knowledge systems and ensuring an “inclusive education and society” for Indigenous Peoples. “Seminaries should collaborate with Indigenous people in an evaluation of their ethos and their efforts at reform, and to avoid repeating the failures of the past,” he writes.

Biblical scholar Christine Mitchell queries the Old Testament commands of “colonization and extermination” and asks “How are the biblical conquest narratives applicable to my experience and the experience of other settler Canadians?” She contends that “we are called now more than ever to contextualize these texts as fantasies, and to resist any attempts to use them to justify an actuality.”

There’s much to learn and digest in these learned essays. As Christianity has been historically complicit in the oppression of Indigenous Peoples, it’s only fitting that “the Church” play a leading role in doing everything possible to right the wrongs. In adopting the Declaration as a framework for reconciliation, the United Church of Canada avows that “A new relationship is waiting, and we turn our faces towards it.”      

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

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“On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Relations and Resistances”

Edited by Emily Grafton and David B. A. MacDonald

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$36.95  ISBN 9-781779-400680

 

 

In 2025, editors and political scientists Emily Grafton and David B. A. MacDonald released On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples, which considered the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report and its outcomes. They’ve now followed up with On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Relations and Resistances. This important new work consists of a “collection of conversations” which address the question: “What does meaning change look like amid ongoing settlerism and resulting inequalities and violence?”

Even the definition of colonialism is sometimes debated. Contributor Joyce Green—professor emerita of Political Science at the University of Regina and a citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation—explains that “At its core, colonialism is about profit acquired by stealing someone else’s land and resources while denying the sovereignty and humanity of those oppressed.”

Anishinaabe law scholar Leo Baskatawang points out that “treaties” have also had different interpretations. He writes that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, which included ninety-four Calls to Action, has not been properly addressed: “The Government of Canada’s approach to dealing with the Calls to Action has been to itemize each one, as if it were a list of goods that can be bought at the supermarket and checked off as done.”

Heena B. Mistry writes about anti-Asian racism and posits that colonialism exercised a “’divide and rule’” strategy to “disrupt solidarity between racialized migrants and Indigenous communities.” She suggests that “efforts to address anti-Asian racism on campus must be in collaboration and solidarity with efforts to decolonize and Indigenize the campus.” Kurtis Boyer argues that education (about colonialism) is not enough, as it can lead to “resentment, and limitations of student engagement.” He writes “To truly achieve reconciliation, education must centre Indigenous ways of knowing, reflecting the diversity of Indigenous thought and practice, and offering relational approaches that foster deeper understanding and learning.”

I enjoyed Enakshi Dua and Elaine Coburn’s discussion on land acknowledgments, which Cree scholar Michelle Daigle has suggested “are more often part of a “̒spectacle of reconciliation’” that serves only to assuage “̒white guilt.’” Dua and Coburn  assert that “we must move from land acknowledgements to Land Back, raising questions about compensation and resources.”

On the prairies, treaty’s being honoured in the creation of the Treaty Land Sharing Network: “… mainly white settler farmers, ranchers and other landholders who have come together to offer safe land access for Indigenous Peoples to practise their ways of life in Treaty 4 and 6 areas of Saskatchewan and Alberta.” Co-authors Naomi Beingessner, Emily Eaton, and Martha Jane Robbins were “inspired by the oral histories and the growing awareness about Indigenous understandings of treaties,” and “[their] network attempts to practise their true spirit and intent.” 

Other acts of decolonization include orchestrating a home-birth (as opposed to a cold and racist hospital experience); the proposed creation of “a mandatory grade 11 course focused on Indigenous voices” in Toronto; and “the rise in Indigenous narratives in arts, literature, and media.” Promising, but it appears there’s still a long way to go.

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