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.