Tag: Deanna Reder

9. Rosanna Deerchild, calling down the sky / î-nîhci-tîpwâtamân kîsik

I read calling down the sky / î-nîhci-tîpwâtamân kîsik ten years ago when the first edition came out. I reread it last weekend–the new bilingual English/nîhithawîn (Woods Cree) edition–and I like even better now.

calling down the sky is a book about the traumatic legacy of Indian Residential Schools. Parts of the book are what the Cree-Métis literary critic Deanna Reder describes as âcimisowin: “a story about oneself.” Memoir or autobiography, in other words, although those categories don’t quite map onto âcimisowin, because the primary distinction one makes between kinds of stories in Cree is the difference between sacred stories or âtayôhkana and secular stories or âcimowina, rather than (as in English) between stories that are true and those that are fictional. Other parts of the book, though, are âtosiwêwina, or stories about other people. Sometimes Deerchild tells stories about her relationship with her mother from her perspective; other times she inhabits the voice of her mother to tell stories about her experience in residential school and afterwards. That voice is haunting; the short lines encourage the reader to go slowly, pausing often, as if to take a sip of tea or a drag on a cigarette, or just to gather thoughts before speaking again. Deerchild is also the author of a play, The Secret to Good Tea, which is being produced this year at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, and when I read these poems out loud, I can feel the voices of the book’s characters as if I were an actor on stage delivering a monologue. Yes, even a môniyâw napêw like me can feel those voices. I take that as a sign of the book’s power and strength.

Not surprisingly, the stories told in this collection are hard to read. Stories about what happened to children in those facilities (former Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald suggested we call them “institutions of assimilation and genocide” rather than “schools”) are always hard to read: they relate experiences of physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, loneliness, and unfathomable cruelty. The book’s first poem, “mama’s testament: truth and reconciliation,” calls out the violence of the nuns in the school, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for those institutions, and the community’s refusal or inability to do anything about any of it, perhaps out of a numb despair or a belief that resistance was impossible:

don’t make up stories
that’s what they told us kids

when we went back home
told them what was going on
in those schools

still got sent back
every year
less of us came home

still they said nothing
until we were nothing
just empty skins

full of broken english
ruler broken bones
bible broken spirits

and back home
became a broken dream

calling down the sky also looks at what happened after Deerchild’s mother left Guy Hill Indian Residential School, the physical and psychological aftereffects of her childhood trauma: scars, including being left blind in one eye and deaf in one ear; arthritis; diabetes from the inadequate diet in the facility; and poor sleep, caused by nightly visits from “the dead” who “ask for forgiveness” that cannot be granted. The federal government would not pay any compensation for those experiences, claiming there were “no records” and “no proof.” “there is no word for what they did / in our language,” Deerchild’s mother says.

The book also gives a frank account of the effects Deerchild’s mother had on her relationship with her mother: “mama is always just / out of reach // a bird i could watch / but never catch.” But it also explains how Deerchild slowly built a relationship with her mother, that distant figure whose own childhood made it difficult to express warmth or love, through conversations about her life, including (eventually) her residential school experiences. Those conversations are the backbone of this book. The way calling down the sky stages those conversations, draws on them as sources while crafting them carefully into poems, suggests that it’s an example of documentary poetry.

Together, this collection of poems moves towards relationship, love, and connection. That’s the narrative arc of the book. It also highlights resistance to colonialism and what the critic Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” After all, surviving what the critic Jo-Ann Episkenew calls the “psychological terrorism” of colonialism is victory enough. But this book goes beyond survival; the book’s conclusion suggests something more like resurgence, to borrow Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s term. So too does the decision to publish calling down the sky in a bilingual edition, which quietly but powerfully argues that the assimilative project of residential schools did not succeed, no matter how much damage those institutions did to individuals, families, and communities. Let’s all be grateful for that failure. And let’s all grieve that those places were ever built.

6. Solomon Ratt, kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember

Everything about Solomon Ratt’s 2023 book kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is unique. It’s a bilingual book, written in the two ways of representing Ratt’s mother tongue, nîhithowîwin or Woods Cree, syllabics and Standard Roman Orthography (SRO), and English. As the book’s editor, Arden Ogg, notes in the introduction, Ratt is one of the few residential-school survivors who is “blessed with full retention of his language.” His parents were fluent speakers, and even after he was taken away to the residential school in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Ratt spent the summers with them on their trapline near âmaciwîspimowinihk or Stanley Mission, northeast of La Ronge. Later, at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, he learned to read and write in both SRO and syllabics. That led to a long career teaching Cree at that institution, now First Nations University of Canada, from which he retired a couple of years ago. (Full disclosure: Solomon was one of my Cree teachers, and he helped me with some of the language in my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; I’m grateful to him for that assistance and a fan of his writing.) Most of the book was written in nîhithowîwin first, and then in English; from what I knew about the genesis of the book, watching its brief sections being published online over a period of years–it was at least a decade in the making–I suspected that was how it was composed, and when I emailed Solomon to confirm my hunch, he told me that was the case.

kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is singular in two other ways. It brings together âcimisowina, or “personal, autobiographical stories,” as Ogg translates that term, with âcathôhkîwina, or sacred stories. The book’s âcimisowina are short fragments, sometimes poetry, sometimes prose, in which Ratt tells stories about his life, his responses to settler colonialism, and urges people to retain or relearn their languages. Ogg refers to Cree/Métis scholar Deanna Reder’s 2022 book Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition, which argues that telling one’s own story is a Cree cultural and intellectual tradition. That’s part of the reason the personal stories are here. The reason for including the âcathôhkîwina is clear: for Ratt, as a child in residential school, those stories were a lifeline to his family, language, and culture. Ratt heard them from his parents before he was taken to that school; they were his true education. As Ogg notes, Ratt often says that his schooling interrupted his education. Since they are only supposed to be told in winter, when snow is on the ground, and since Ratt was only with his parents in the summers, the transmission of those oral stories was broken. Discovering written versions of those stories in the school’s library, particularly Cree writer Edward Ahenakew’s versions, published in English in 1929 as “Cree Trickster Tales,” enabled him to retain them and maintain his connections to family and community. In that way, the sacred and the autobiographical come together.

Those sacred stories or âcathôhkîwina feature wîsahkîcâhk, the Cree culture hero. Those stories have a pedagogical function: they are intended to teach people how they ought to behave, often by negative example, since when wîsahkîcâhk doesn’t follow the rules of proper behaviour, he ends up in trouble of some kind. They tend to be both serious and funny. One of the âcimisowina is a quotation from an article by the Anishinaabe Elder, language teacher, scholar, writer, and residential-school survivor Basil H. Johnston, which argues that sacred stories contain “the essence and substance of tribal ideas, concepts, insights, attitudes, values, beliefs, theories, notions, sentiments, and accounts of their institutions and rituals and ceremonies.” Children who hear those stories–anyone who hears those stories–comes to learn all of those things–especially, and perhaps most importantly, how to behave in a good way. When âcathôhkîwina are taken out of their cultural context by settlers, they often lose their complexity and educational value, becoming understood as odd little tales, which is not their intention, purpose, or function. Of course, Johnston’s words are translated into Woods Cree. I wonder if this book marks the first time that’s happened?

The âcathôhkîwina Ratt tells are both comical and serious because, as the late Delaware poet and playwright Daniel David Moses once explained, they are “at once admonition, instruction, and entertainment.” I think the nature of the Cree language might have something to do with it, too. As Tomson Highway has pointed out in interviews, Cree is funny–when people speak that language, he says, they laugh constantly–and it’s visceral, with bodily functions discussed openly and casually, without judgement or shame (as tends to happen in English). In the last âcathôhkîwina in Ratt’s book, an ermine saves wîsahkîcâhk from a wîhtikow, a monstrous cannibal with a bottomless appetite and no sense of its relationships or responsibilities to other creatures, by climbing into the creature’s anus and eating it from the inside. Other, tamer versions of that story, intended for settler audiences, have the ermine jumping into the wîhtikow‘s mouth. That would not be a safe point of entry, what with the teeth and all. The anus would be unpleasant in all kinds of ways–well, one in particular–but by entering the wîhtikow that way, the ermine would be less likely to become an appetizer before the creature’s main course. As an odd parallel, Ratt’s stories about surviving residential school are also a combination of the serious and the comic; as Ogg notes in her introduction, “Solomon’s reminiscences of residential school escapades almost always end with a close call and a smile.” He was a prankster, and a lucky one, too, and in the stories he tells, he comes across like a Woods Cree version of Tom Sawyer.

I’m teaching kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember this week, and I’m sure my students will be intimidated by the book’s apparent length. Not to worry: the first half of the book consists of the text in syllabics, and the rest is evenly divided between Standard Roman Orthography and English. “Don’t worry,” I told them in an email. “You don’t have to read the Cree unless you want to.” I hope some of them know how; despite my language classes, I would find it difficult, although the bilingual nature of the text means that readers can see how the Cree paragraphs and stanzas translate into English.

This book has tremendous value, not least because its mixture of poetry and prose, memoir and sacred narrative confounds the categories through which settlers understand the world. It’s vitally important to try to see the world the way other cultures do–to understand that our way is not the only way, maybe not even the best way.

If you’re curious, kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is available from University of Regina Press.