The Pemmican Eaters

A picture of the Riel Resistance from one of Canada's preeminent Métis poets With a title derived from John A. Macdonald's moniker for the Métis, The Pemmican Eaters explores Marilyn Dumont's sense of history as the dynamic present. Combining free verse and metered poems, her latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time through the eyes of those who experienced the battles, as well as through the eyes of Gabriel and Madeleine Dumont and Louis Riel. Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont's ancestors. In Dumont's The Pemmican Eaters, a multiplicity of identities is a strengthening rather than a weakening or diluting force in culture. Read more Continue reading Read less REVIEW
"Marilyn Dumont uses both rhythmic and free verse to provide a brilliant and insightful look at Métis and Cree people." -- Scene Magazine ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marilyn Dumont's poetry has won provincial and national awards. She has been the writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities and the Edmonton Public Library as well as an advisor in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers Program at the Banff Centre. She teaches sessional creative writing for Athabasca University and Native studies and English for the University of Alberta. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta. EXCERPT. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
THE PEMMICAN EATERS
POEMS
By Marilyn DumontECW PRESS
Copyright 2015 Marilyn Dumont
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-241-5
CHAPTER 1Otipemisiwak

maybe Poundmaker
or even Big Bear
would have dreamt
those waking figures
Gatlin gun sorrows
bullets, crosses and misguided soldiers
if they were Riel
or Dumont
while Macdonald
swilling spirits
was in some crystal case of glory

and Louis dreamt
that supposedly
in broad daylight
the dawn
on its unseen bone
was lifting
above the fire

I don't believe
he was merely mistaken
regardless of
how little daylight remained

this evening
I retrieved a piece of birch bark
and something more
like a petrified limb
lay in the palm of a snowdrift

I thought of Louis
the way he kept envisioning
what was inside the dimness

how he dreamt of it ascending
on its unseen limb
how he wanted it to reflect
like water

Otipemisiwak: the Free People


Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald

Dear John: I'm still here
and halfbreed,
after all these years
you're dead, funny thing,
that railway you wanted so badly,
there was talk a year ago
of shutting it down
and part of it was shut down,
the dayliner at least,
"from sea to shining sea,"
and you know, John,
after all that shuffling us around to suit the settlers,
we're still here and ...

We're still here
after Meech Lake and
one no-good-for-nothin-Indian
holdin-up-the-train,
stalling the "Cabin syllables / Nouns of settlement,
/ ... steel syntax [and] / The long sentence of its exploitation"
and John, that goddamned railroad never made this a great nation,
cause the railway shut down
and this country is still quarreling over unity,
and Riel is dead

but he just keeps coming back
in all the Bill Wilsons yet to speak out of turn or favour
because you know as well as I
that we were railroaded
by some steel tracks that didn't last
and some settlers w

Read more Continue reading Read less