It is impossible to read this book without feeling an immense desolation. Here is a contemporary history of our country, in an intensely personal telling. And it is all the more affecting because it is the history of those who lost.
For Louise Halfe’s story is also a story of the Plains Cree. Not something set in a bygone century, but a living story, of the children who grew to adulthood bereft of the familiar. The children who were wrenched away from their families to residential schools. Children who grew up to be ashamed of all they had and were.
It is no wonder then that this poetry has none of the victor’s confidence, none of the easy arrogance of the winning race. It is a book in which identity is rediscovered bit by bit, in which the search for affirmation comes wrapped in self-loathing. Each step is uncertain, yet in these resonant lines one finds the makings of a life reclaimed.
Bear Bones and Feathers begins to restore a culture we had nearly lost, and we are all the richer for the restoration. This is the voice of all the children like Louise Halfe, who was taken from Saddle Lake to the Blue Quills residential school in St. Paul.
Yes, this book is uneven. Yes, some of the poetry could be further distilled. Yet at its best, its truth plucks your heart.
A stark poem like Boarding School begins with a simple evocation of place and mood. As it grows it becomes invested with the pain of forced departure, the terror of a seven-year-old torn from her family, sent to a residential school.
In these lines is not just the personal experience of Louise Halfe: they speak of a certain generation, of a certain time in a tragic history. And in this poem, as in perhaps three or four others, you feel as though the voice of Akhmatova has found utterance once more.
It’s a mistake
Father’s voice
Shook.
Mother swayed.
The white-skins
Left.
The cold seeped in the
Cracks of the door,
Its fingers wrapped
In silence.
The world
Was silent.
The family gone.
The family not ever more.
Bear Bones and Feathers reaffirms one’s faith in poetry, in the singular power of this most ancient art. This book says “come back” to the people who stopped reading poetry because some “poets” had hardly anything to say.
