Here’s a book I’ve meant to read for years, and I finally did it: Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe’s The Crooked Good. The linked poems in The Crooked Good tell the story of ê-kwêsit, Turn-Around Woman, who describes herself early in the book through the phrase that became the book’s title: “I am not a saint. I am a crooked good.” She is complex, a mixture of good and bad, like all of us, and her looping, non-linear story touches on many themes: love, sex, family, relationships, the effects of intergenerational residential school trauma, and the effects of what Jo-Ann Episkenew, in her book Taking Back Our Spirits; Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing, calls “postcolonial traumatic stress response.”

And, perhaps surprisingly, The Crooked Good is also a book about walking, partly because of the way the poems incorporate the nêhiyaw âtayôhkêwin, or Plains Cree sacred story, of cihcipistikwân, the Rolling Head, as a parallel narrative. The Rolling Head story is a story about walking, or running: two young boys flee their mother, whose head was severed from her body by their father. In Halfe’s version of this story, the mother calls on her sons to come back to her, but poisoned against her by their father, they refuse. But the poems reflect on walking in other ways, too. As critic Angela Van Essen explains, the nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which is sometimes translated as “kinship relationality,” refers to the familial connections between all beings, including but not limited to humans. I’ve been fascinated by that word for years, and it’s central to my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; it’s also at the centre of The Crooked Good. To live in a good way, we need to honour our relationships. wâhkôhtowin is related, etymologically, to wâhkômâkanak, which refers to one’s family, or, as the glossary of nêhiyawêwin words at the back of the book tells us, “walking in a bent-over way among the relatives,” and as Halfe explained in a lecture that used to be on YouTube but seems to have disappeared. Maybe it’s in her forthcoming book of essays–I hope so. The Crooked Good could be thought of as a story about learning to walk that way once again. It’s not an easy read, but it’s a rewarding one.