Metis poet Michelle Porter believes all poetry is inquiry. A journalist by trade, and an academic by training (she holds a PhD in Geography from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador), Porter’s debut poetry collection, Inquiries (Breakwater 2019), beautifully illustrates how she questions her...
You Are Enough: Love Poems for the End of the World, Smokii Sumac’s debut poetry collection, is a place to rest awhile and find honest expressions of hope, grief, rage and falling in love. In You are Enough, the specificity of daily life in Michi Saagig territory (coffee and the Odenabe) moves alongside...
Author, Carol Daniels | Image source: Inanna Publications & Education Inc. Cree and Dene author Carol Rose Daniels latest Hiraeth (Inanna Publications), a collection of poetry, upholds the strength and resilience of First Nations and Métis women and how the impact of the Sixties Scoop ruptured a se...
“You Will Wear A White Shirt: From the Northern Bushes to the Halls of Power” is a biography written by Senator Nick Sibbeston. Sibbeston grew up in Fort Simpson-a remote northern community in a home with his mother and grandmother. He recalls how life with his mother and grandmother were idyllic- “a yo...
Imagine not having access to education in your community and you have to send your children hundreds of kilometres away from home to attend high school. This is what many remote northern Indigenous communities face. In the words of former Ontario Regional Chief Stan Beardy; “Going to high school is the...
Carol Daniels lays bare the life of Sandy, a Cree woman torn from her mother and kin at birth through the Canadian government’s 60s Scoop set in place to destroy Indigenous families. Adopted by Ukrainians, Sandy narrowly avoids a life in foster care, and although escaping one certain trauma, Sandy’s sto...
This video with Lynn Gehl was filmed around the summer solstice, on Victoria Island at the sacred Chaudière Falls site (Akikpautik / Akikodjiwan) on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) between Ottawa and Hull a kilometre upstream of Parliament Hill. It was part of a series of interviews: the topic here is Hea...
Métis writer and child rights advocate, Shelly Ann Wieringa, uses her own story of abuse, loneliness, homelessness, and eventual triumph as a vehicle to help others deeply affected by childhood neglect and trauma. In I Never Lied – A True Story About Survival, Wieringa takes readers on a step-by-careful...
Award-winning Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s collection of writings This Accident of Being Lost is a provocative and relevant adventure of poetry, song and prose. A journey in getting lost, in all kinds of ways, Simpson’s work is incredibly economical, with each word seeming...
Indigenous poetry has always been a place of unearthing, witnessing and healing. Gregory Scofield’s Witness, I Am (Nightwood Editions, 2016), embodies a Cree Sacred Story, revisions Metis identity, and evokes the critical issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women through poetics. Scofield, who is R...
