Tag Archives: Blue Marrow
“How can I share this?”: Sky Dancer Louise Halfe and the Poetics of the unsayable
“Listen to the bones” -Louise Halfe, Blue Marrow Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe breathes life into silence. For more than twenty-five years, Halfe, who is Cree, from the Saddle Lake reserve and Treaty Six territory, has used Cree poetics to delicately craft voice out of silence: out of the unheard; out of the ongoing […]
“Riding English”: Tradition and Innovation in Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow
At the beginning of the long poem Blue Marrow, âcimowinis (the keeper of the stories) imagines and introduces nôhkom Emma, a strong-willed, adventurous, grandmother whom, because of her own light skin, the narrator guesses married a white man. âcimowinis has never met nôhkom Emma, and colonialism has fragmented and buried much of her Indigenous history, but she uses what she knows of her from […]
Blue Marrow, White Page: Considering White Space in Indigenous Poetics
Almost halfway through the Coteau edition of Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow, right before the narrator delves into her Métis history, the text is interrupted by a blank, white page (what would be page 66). At first, the page reads as an error, something that went wrong on the printing room floor. It doesn’t seem to […]