Reclamation and Resurgence: The Poetry of Marilyn Dumont

By Marilyn Dumont and Armand Garnet Ruffo

To describe the writing of Marilyn Dumont is to call her a poet of reclamation and resurgence. Some thirty-five years ago she set about documenting her life as a young Métis woman and telling the story of her people, the Red River Métis, and, in the process, she has become a principal literary voice for the “Renaissance” of the Métis nation. To understand Marilyn Dumont’s work is to understand Métis culture and history, that of a people who originated in the 17thth century upon the meeting of the First Nations and the newcomers, the European voyageurs and cartographers who travelled along the great waterways of Turtle Island/ North America.

How does a Métis poet write about a country where its politicians and bureaucrats are honoured as national figures when they made family fortunes from confiscated Métis and First Nations lands? For Dumont, the answer to this question resides in telling the truth, about the present and the past. Through carefully crafted poems, Dumont takes the reader through a range of personal and historically connected experiences grounded in emotional truth. For Dumont, perception, like memory, is as much about the body as it is the mind, surfacing as visionary insight, which has become the hallmark of her poetry.

Reclamation and Resurgence contains poems selected from A Really Good Brown Girl, green girl dreams Mountains, from that tongued belonging, and The Pemmican Eaters, as well as previously uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo and an afterword, "Contradictory Co-existence," by Marilyn Dumont.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781771126106

Marilyn Dumont

Marilyn Dumont is the author of four collections of poems: A Really Good Brown Girl (winner of the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award), green girl dreams Mountains (winner of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award), that tongued belonging (winner of the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and Aboriginal Book of the Year Award) and The Pemmican Eaters (published in 2015 by ECW Press). Marilyn has been Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library and in numerous universities across Canada. In addition, she has been faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Writing with Style and Wired Writing programs, as well as an advisor and mentor in their Indigenous Writers’ Program. She serves as a board member on The Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada, and freelances for a living.

Book preview

“Reclamation and Resurgence, the poetry of Marilyn Dumont. Selected with an introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo.” The cover page shows an aerial view of various landscapes that flow into one and other.

Reclamation and Resurgence

The Poetry of Marilyn Dumont

Reclamation and Resurgence

The Poetry of Marilyn Dumont

Selected

with an

introduction by

Armand Garnet Ruffo

and an

afterword by

Marilyn Dumont

Logo: LPS, Laurier poetry series. WLU press, Wilfrid Laurier, University Press.Logo: Laurier, Inspiring lives.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Funding provided by the Government of Ontario and the Ontario Arts Council. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Logo: Canada. Logo: Ontario arts council. Logo: Canada Council for the Arts.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Reclamation and resurgence : the poetry of Marilyn Dumont / selected and with an introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo ; and an afterword by the author.

Other titles: Poems. Selections

Names: Dumont, Marilyn, author. | Ruffo, Armand Garnet, editor, writer of introduction.

Series: Laurier poetry series.

Description: Series statement: Laurier poetry series | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230502989 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230503004 | ISBN 9781771126090 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771126106 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771126113 (PDF)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS8557.U53633 A6 2024 | DDC C811/.54—dc23

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Front cover image: Detail from ᑮᓯᑌᐳᐃᐧᐣ ᓵᑳᐦᐃᑲᐣ / kîsitêpowin sâkâhikan / cooking lake by Heather Shillinglaw. 2022, 39 x 58 inches. Elk hide, recycled fabrics, hand-sewn beadwork, stabilizers, thread painting, acrylic paints, and yarns. The text stitched in beadwork in the water is an excerpt from memory, a poem from that tongued belonging by Marilyn Dumont. Reproduced with kind permission of Heather Shillinglaw.

Series design by P.J. Woodland.

Cover design by Blakeley and Blakeley. Interior layout by Mike Bechthold.

© 2024 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press is located on the Haldimand Tract, part of the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, and Neutral Peoples. This land is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe Peoples and symbolizes the agreement to share, to protect our resources, and not to engage in conflict. We are grateful to the Indigenous Peoples who continue to care for and remain interconnected with this land. Through the work we publish in partnership with our authors, we seek to honour our local and larger community relationships, and to engage with the diversity of collective knowledge integral to responsible scholarly and cultural exchange.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Tanis MacDonald

Biographical Note

Introduction: Marilyn Dumont: Poet of Reclamation and Resurgence, Armand Garnet Ruffo

from A Really Good Brown Girl

The White Judges

Helen Betty Osborne

Blue Ribbon Children

Leather and Naughahyde

Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald

The Devil's Language

Circle the Wagons

not just a platform for my dance

a bowl of smooth brown wood

from green girl dreams Mountains

scorching

I give you arbutus

kindling

Straw Boss

lucky stars

house, broken

will I, night

ghosted

throatsong to the four-leggeds

from that tongued belonging

that tongued belonging

this, is for the wives

if we are pictured too easily

the breed women

Camp Cook

she is many branches

we are where we live

the southern most somewhere

Uncollected Poems

Water and Trees

Brown names

Chalk dust past

One Pound One, Big Mountain, Iron Shirt

from The Pemmican Eaters

Otipemisiwak

I wanted to treat them as we would have treated buffalo

these are wintering words

Not a single blade

Fiddle bids us

with second sight, she pushes

the land she came from

you are riding for the border tonight

Louis’ last vision

Afterword: Contradictory Co-existence, Marilyn Dumont

Acknowledgements

Foreword

I am happy to serve as the general editor for the Laurier Poetry Series, the development and growth of which I have followed from its early days. My gratitude goes to Neil Besner and Brian Henderson, who conceived of the Laurier Poetry Series in 2002 as a way to offer a more robust selection of a single poet’s work than could be found in an anthology. In 2004, the Laurier Poetry Series launched the first volume, Catherine Hunter’s selection of the poems of Lorna Crozier, Before the First Word. Neil served as General Editor for all volumes until he was joined in 2016 by Brian, when he left his role as WLU Press’s Director. In an act of commitment to poetry publication that is nothing short of inspiring, the Laurier Poetry Series expanded to a list of thirty-three fascinating titles under their leadership.

The retirement of the original editors in 2019 gave me a surprising historical jolt. But thinking historically is a good way to revisit the original plans for the series, and to think towards the future. Under my editorial eye, the series will retain its original aim to produce volumes of poetry made widely available to new readers, including undergraduate students at universities or colleges, and to a general readership who wish for more poetry in their poetry. WLU Press also retains its commitment to produce beautiful volumes and to alert readers to poems that remain vital to thinking about urgencies of the contemporary moment.