Library Spotlight: Posts

Dani's Book Pick: National Indigenous History Month

For National Indigenous History Month, Humber Libraries is collaborating with Indigenous Education & Engagement to highlight new and diverse Indigenous voices, histories and experiences across Turtle Island. Each Friday in June, a member of the IE&E community will recommend a book that has influenced, moved or inspired them. In turn, the library will share a recommended reading list that complements their selection of the week.

Dani's Picks: Poetry by Marilyn Dumont: 

A Really Good Brown Girl, The Pemmican Eaters and That Tongued Belonging

"I like to tell people I am Marilyn Dumont’s biggest fan, yet I have never had the opportunity to meet her. My worn copies of A Really Good Brown Girl, That Tongued Belonging and The Pemmican Eaters have been re-read, leant to students, friends, and family, and luckily have returned to the special place on my bookshelf among all my favourite Indigenous literature.

For me, her poems capture the raw honesty of being a Métis person of the Prairies, from the political struggles and the impacts of colonization to the stories of familial connections, identity and belonging. Her nuanced storytelling is humorous, clever, and often cutting (in that good way, see “Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald”). I think Lee Maracle articulates Dumont’s writing best in the forward to A Really Good Brown Girl: “No other book so exonerates us, elevates us and at the same time indicts Canada in a language so eloquent it almost hurts to hear it.” I feel that way about all of Dumont’s works. Some of my favourite poems include “Leather and Naughayde,” “Otipemisiwak” and “Blue Ribbon Children.“

Danielle Jeancart is an Indigenous educator of mixed French-Métis, nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), and Ukrainian ancestry from northern Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 Territory. She is the Indigenous Curriculum and Pedagogy Specialist with the Indigenous Education & Engagement Team, supporting IE&E and the Humber Community with incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing into course curriculum, programming, workshops and events.

If you liked this week's pick, why not check out some further selected resources,  available at Humber Libraries

Approaching fire by Porter, Michelle

In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating a portrait which expands beyond documentation into a private realm where truth meets metaphor. Weaving through multiple genres and traditions, Approaching Fire fashions a textual documentary of rescue and insight, and a glowing contemplation of the ways in which loss can generate unbridled renewal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Awâsis - Kinky and Dishevelled by Louise B. Halfe

A gender-fluid trickster character leaps from Cree stories to inhabit this racous and rebellious new work by award-winning poet Louise Bernice Halfe. There are no pronouns in Cree for gender; awâsis (which means illuminated child) reveals herself through shape-shifting, adopting different genders, exploring the English language with merriment, and sharing his journey of mishaps with humor, mystery, and spirituality. Opening with a joyful and intimate Introduction from Elder Maria Campbell, awâsis -- kinky and dishevelled is a force of Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and soul-healing laughter.

 

 

 

Witness, I Am by Gregory Scofield

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, "Ghost Dance," raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield's poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From "Killer," Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: "I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you."

 

 

(Re)Generation: The Poetry of Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm; Dallas Hunt (Editor)

(Re)Generation contains selected poetry by Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm that deals with a range of issues: from violence against Indigenous women and lands to Indigenous erotica and the joyous intimate encounters between bodies. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm's influence on the field of Indigenous literature cannot be understated. Her creative work is formative, and she is responsible for the release of other influential works in the field of Indigenous literary studies through her publishing house, Kegedonce Press. Akiwenzie-Damm is proof positive that if Indigenous peoples are going to resist the violent processes of ongoing colonialism, then they're going to have to do it together. Akiwenzie-Damms's afterword speaks to the relations and obligations Indigenous peoples have to one another and their other-than-human kin, as she reflects on the resilient work that Indigenous creative work has done and continues to do in spite of colonial violence. Her afterword stakes a claim for the necessity of poetry in the face of ongoing colonialism, not only in the present but in the future and for the generations to come. 

 

Scars and Stars by Jesse Thistle

Charting his own history, the stories of people from his past, the burning intensity of new and unexpected love, the complex legacies of family and community, and the beauty of parenthood, this collection is a profound mediation that expands his engagement with the ideas and experiences that have shaped his body of work thus far.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Red Files by Lisa Bird-Wilson

This debut poetry collection from Lisa Bird-Wilson reflects on the legacy of the residential school system: the fragmentation of families and histories, with blows that resonate through the generations. Inspired by family and archival sources, Bird-Wilson assembles scraps of a history torn apart by colonial violence. The collection takes its name from the federal government's complex organizational structure of residential schools archives, which are divided into "black files" and "red files." In vignettes as clear as glass beads, her poems offer affection to generations of children whose presence within the historic record is ghostlike, anonymous and ephemeral. The collection also explores the larger political context driving the mechanisms that tore apart families and cultures, including the Sixties Scoop. It depicts moments of resistance, both personal and political, as well as official attempts at reconciliation: "I can hold in the palm of my right hand / all that I have left: one story-gift from an uncle, / a father's surname, treaty card, Cree accent echo, metal bits, grit-- / and I will still have room to cock a fist." The Red Files concludes with a fierce hopefulness, embracing the various types of love that can begin to heal the traumas inflicted by a legacy of violence.