wihtamawik / Tell Them : On a Life of Inspiration

Cree poet and kêhtê-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 nêhiyaw 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 kêhtê-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.” wîhtamawik / Tell Them is a stunning love song to nêhiyaw 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.