Louise Bernice Halfe

Cree poet and kehte-aya Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer chronicles her childhood in a cabin on reserve, through the Indian Residential School system, and into her reclamation of her nehiy´aw language, culture, and spirituality. My parents taught us the art of observation. I learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. I also watched my grandparents work on the land and live their spirituality. I helped gather, dry, and grind their medicines. I inhaled the medicines’ power and ingested it. When I left for residential school all this fell asleep. In never-before-collected essays and new poems, poet and kehte-aya (Elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land. In Cree, inspiration is described as a sudden insight. It can come from visits from spirit, from the charged reciprocal experience of being taught by Elders and teaching the next generation, from speaking Cree, which allows the poet to “somersault into memory,” and from the practice of observing and being in relationship with the land as it “constantly gives birth to itself.” witamowik / Tell Them is a stunning love song to nehiy´aw ways of knowing—ways which Halfe has spent her life working to reclaim from the violence of colonization, in order to celebrate their survival and share their enduring teachings with future generations.

Cree poet and kehte-aya Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer chronicles her childhood in a cabin on reserve, through the Indian Residential School system, and into her reclamation of her nehiy´aw language, culture, and spirituality. My parents taught us the art of observation. I learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. I also watched my grandparents work on the land and live their spirituality. I helped gather, dry, and grind their medicines. I inhaled the medicines’ power and ingested it. When I left for residential school all this fell asleep. In never-before-collected essays and new poems, poet and kehte-aya (Elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land. In Cree, inspiration is described as a sudden insight. It can come from visits from spirit, from the charged reciprocal experience of being taught by Elders and teaching the next generation, from speaking Cree, which allows the poet to “somersault into memory,” and from the practice of observing and being in relationship with the land as it “constantly gives birth to itself.” witamowik / Tell Them is a stunning love song to nehiy´aw ways of knowing—ways which Halfe has spent her life working to reclaim from the violence of colonization, in order to celebrate their survival and share their enduring teachings with future generations.

A bundle of Laurier Poetry books for course use that includes Fierce Departures (Dionne Brand); Sonosyntactics (Paul Dutton); The More Easily Kept Illusions (Al Purdy); False Laws of Narrative (Fred Wah0; and Sohkeyihta (Louise Bernice Halfe).

I build this story like my lair. One willow, / a rib at a time"" - ""The Crooked Good""Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe's work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe's career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing. Halfe's own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong. She writes of coming into her practice as a poet and the stories, people, and experiences that gave her courage and allowed herto construct her ""lair."" She also reflects on her relationship with nêhiyawêwin, the Cree language, and the ways in which it informs her relationships and poetics. The introduction by David Gaertner situates Halfe's writing within the history of whiteness and colonialism that works to silence and repress Indigenous voices. Gaertner pays particular attention to the ways in which Halfe addresses, incorporates, and pushes back against silence, and suggests that her work is an act of bearing witness - what Kwagiulth scholar Sarah Hunt identifies as making Indigenous lives visible.