Truths That Bear Repeating

Louise Bernice Halfe, whose Cree name is Sky Dancer, does not identify as a “survivor.” The word “victor” is truer to her experience. Halfe’s career achievements attest to her victory. She has published several award-winning poetry collections, starting with Bear Bones & Feathers, from 1994. She has served as poet laureate for the province of Saskatchewan (2005–06) and as the Canadian parliamentary poet laureate (in 2021–22). In 2017, she received the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize for her body of work, and she was appointed, in 2025, a member of the Order of Canada.

But to judge by wîhtamawik — her latest book, which assembles oral presentations, essays, and poems — Halfe’s greatest success may well be in her spiritual dexterity and determination to live a life rooted in Cree teachings and connection to the land. The volume traces the writer’s long-term commitment to creativity and Cree language, culture, and ceremony. It reads as a personal record as well as a tender offering to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike. Its title in English is Tell Them, and the twin imperative to relay and to listen is its driving force.

Halfe was born in Two Hills, Alberta, and raised on the Saddle Lake Reserve, northeast of Edmonton. At the age of seven, she was taken from her family and forced to attend Blue Quills Residential School in nearby St. Paul. She remained there in “captivity” for seven years. Her parents had also been banished to residential school. Those periods were traumatizing and left their scars on members of the family, all of them “wounded souls with brown skin and disrupted identity.” In adulthood, Halfe settled in central Saskatchewan and turned to journal writing as an outlet for her thoughts, then to poetry. She also trained as a social worker at the University of Regina.

Halfe’s daughter, the Carleton University historian Omeasoo Wahpasiw, provides a foreword to this book. In it, she vividly evokes her mother’s writerly purpose: “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.”

Wahpasiw’s introductory remarks are followed by the poem “Supplication; A Cry of Desire,” in which Halfe, speaking for herself and her community, shares a searing, stark vision. “I bring to you this howl, / this flame / this song / from the ballad of askiy, / our earth,” it begins. Following another six short stanzas, the poem ends with a sense of defiant optimism:

Halfe’s “you” is at once the Great Mystery or Creator that commands esteem, wonder, and love and the audience that is swept up, slowly and steadily, in her invocation of the Cree way of being in the world. Indeed, she seeks through verse to “scrape skin and bone and leave a trail of blood to bring the reader into the emotional and intellectual sphere of their own lives.”

Writing, for Halfe, was originally a means of self-expression. As a form of “meditation and deeper awareness,” it required her to pay “attention with all the senses.” This did not come easily. Years of abuse, she admits, led to internalized feelings of inferiority and shame. As a young adult, she felt a sense of estrangement, as though she were living “in the lost valley of fossils.” Often insecurity and jealousy caused her to “lash out emotionally.” Putting pen to paper helped calm her unrest and fear. She ventured regularly into the forest, a sanctuary setting that offered her space to think and write. There Halfe developed the immersive capacity to heed her surroundings and herself. Time readied her to “dive deep,” and eventually she was able to “write from this place of irrationality to bring it to life, to bring it to the place of consciousness.” Today she prizes writing that emerges from “stillness,” or the “slow trickle of my life source.”

Halfe’s pathway toward healing started with writing in English, but gradually it widened to include her Cree heritage, in particular nêhiyawêwin. She longed to retrieve her “tribal tongue,” which she had been obliged to abandon in school. So she made a purposeful and ongoing effort to regain her first language, with words that frequently “relate to the physical, as in the land or a body, yet contain a spiritual essence.” The reacquisition helped ground her “emotionally and mentally,” and she began bringing Cree expressions into her poetry. This soon became a characteristic feature, a way to authentically and honourably merge past and present — and to convey the “unique and beautiful world view” of her ancestors. Readers of this book, Cree or not, are urged to explore the language and thereby partake in literary dialogue.

Participating in ceremony — unjustly prohibited for so long — was one more way Halfe re‑entered the fold of kin and community. In the essay “Song of the Starved Soul,” she explains that Cree ceremony, with its protocol, nîkân isîhcikêwin, is not akin to Western religion. Rather, it channels the “spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical energy” that is anchored in the elements of wind, water, rock, fire, and the earth. It is sacred, integrative, and curative. It proffers insight and counters the “psychological and spiritual starvation” that came with “colonial disruption.”

Many ceremonies take place in a sweat lodge, or matotisân, which is “shaped like a cave, a lodge, or a den.” Halfe draws a comparison between the “safe haven” of the sweat lodge and the similarly rounded human skull and rib cage — home to the head and the heart, to thoughts and feelings that become accessible to those who engage in ceremony. She celebrates fasting ceremonies, walking out ceremonies, and various dance ceremonies: rain, sun, round, and owl. She also references moon, berry, birthing, and placenta ceremonies that specifically honour the female body and “womanhood.” Halfe recognizes that for many like herself — the generations “who lost their bearings”— joining spiritually with others can be purifying, a chance “to come to terms” with a “turbulent” existence. “Our Elders repeatedly affirm that our ceremonies and stories are our psychology,“ she explains. “They return identity and give meaning and purpose to our lives.”

Walking and hiking have also had a restorative, transcendent effect on Halfe, taking her back to the land, from which she and her family were once separated. She remembers roaming the woods as a child, picking berries, snaring rabbits, and hunting deer with her grandfather and father, both “long-distance walkers.” She rediscovered the pleasure of wandering as an adult and has savoured the scent of sweet clover on prairie strolls with her husband, a well-regarded physician. In 2019, feeling a particular “urgency to walk,” she embarked on a fifty-six-mile five-day trek on the Frenchman’s Trail, which connects Mortlach and Gravelbourg, in southern Saskatchewan. Three years later, at the age of sixty-nine, she tackled “the treacherous and gruelling West Coast Trail.” Although she twisted her ankle and was unable to complete the arduous course, she nonetheless valued the experience and “became aware that all my loved ones and ancestors had walked with me and lifted me up through this challenging adventure.” Halfe never felt alone on the trail. She “had spoken” to her forebears and was certain they had caught her voice, carried by the wind “into their ears.” She knew in her heart that “I had been heard.”

To tell and to listen, to assimilate and to amplify. These harmonizing tendencies are the heart of this book. While Halfe feels compelled to make sense of existence through writing, she also hopes for a receptive audience. She believes, too, in combining Western practices with Cree ways of knowing. Sometime after her experience in residential school, she sought renewal through psychotherapy, embraced it as a treatment model, and went on to befriend her “wonderful psychologist.” Simultaneously, she set out on a “cultural and spiritual reorientation” that brought her into touch with Cree customs and teachings.

Even so, Halfe does not shy away from asserting what is needed for justice and what she expects from “our cousins, the settlers, as allies.” She calls on the Catholic Church to address the lasting harms it inflicted on Indigenous peoples, on the government to resolve outstanding land claims, on every Canadian to eschew “animosity, stigma, and racism.” She champions a mutually sustaining relationship or wâhkôhtowin founded on “respect” and “goodwill” and, to that end, extends an invitation to her audience: “How about joining us for tea?”

Halfe’s respect for readers is manifest throughout this interlacing of poetry and prose. She consistently supplies in‑text contextualization and translation. She also appends a helpful Cree glossary. Still, in a volume that traverses more than thirty years and highlights previously issued material — arranged thematically, not chronologically — some repetition is inevitable. Replication, however, does not diminish the potency of Halfe’s words. Her truths bear repeating.

As an adult, Louise Halfe has centred her life on relearning a language and reclaiming a culture and an identity that had been stripped from her in youth. In so doing, she has managed to revise and reverse the sense of “victimization” imposed by prior violation. Through her poetry, she has triumphed, too, in her larger aim: to laud her community and its knowledge keepers, to “honour truth and the freedom of creative expression.” The inspiration Halfe claims for herself in the subtitle to wîhtamawik will be transferred to her readers, who will be roused by her principled voice and her spirited writing.