Wîhtamawik/Tell Them

Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration
by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$27.95 ISBN 9781779400840

Award-winning Saskatchewan writer Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer is renowned for her candid, Cree-infused poetry and presentations. Her latest book, Wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, braids memoir, poetry and essays to reveal where the author’s found inspiration and, I would say, contentment, after a tumultuous early start. In the eloquent introduction by the author’s daughter, Omeasoo Wahpasiw, the latter writes: “My mom dances with both her bones and the bones of our people, and when they poke and punch her with their insistent rattling, she does us all a favour, as painful as it is, and leaves them naked in the wind.”

Until age seven, Halfe lived with her family in a log cabin on the Saddle Lake Reserve and practiced traditional Cree ways of life. She doesn’t pretend that it was perfect. Her father drank and was emotionally volatile (“His heart was a cave of stalactites.”). Her parents “stooked hay, picked rocks/in white farmers’ fields”. Halfe “learned to hunt, skin, and butcher game through non-verbal methods. [She] also watched [her] grandparents work on the land and live their spirituality.” She was forced to attend Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta at age seven, and for the next seven years was stripped of using the Cree language she’d grown up with, endured abuse, and lost her identity.

Regaining the Cree language—nêhiyawêwin is used liberally in this work, and an extensive glossary’s included—has been central to Halfe’s personal and professional development. “We must examine and appreciate the depth and richness of our language in order to understand our ceremonies and the heart of our culture. Indigenous languages … cradle the traditional knowledge and wisdom of the people,” she writes. “We need this language of meaning and purpose, of action and vitality, to lift us beyond the era of victimization.”

I appreciate that this book takes on so much. There’s inspiration and the writing process (she compares it to autumn leaves that “twist and turn with the sun, whipped and rattled by the winds”); personal history (“No running water. Just buckets/of slough water sifted/through a pillowcase.”), including her spirituality, in which ceremony is of great import; her trust in dreams as “a source of information;” the influence of storytelling and Elders; environmental awareness and great respect for the natural world; the value of long walks; legends; much about wind (yótin), which “gives us direction and carries the breath of all life” and is featured in many of the poems; and there is the poetry itself—or simply poetic lines within her prose—that have given me fresh appreciation for her writing, ie: “winter is on the small hairs of my arms.”

“The past is forever present,” Halfe writes in “A Keening,” and many of us spend our lifetimes figuring out how to reconcile this. Halfe appears to be well on her way. “I live and walk this life in both high heels and moccasins,” she shares, and we who read her are the luckier for it.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM