An Evening with Marie Annharte Baker

Join us for an evening with acclaimed poet Marie Annharte Baker as she reads and discusses her latest collection Miskwagoode (New Star Books). Presented by Our Line in the Sand Manitoba, the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, and co-presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers as part of THIN AIR 2022. Featuring a conversation hosted by Diane Driedger.

The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream featuring live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

Taken from the Anishinaabe for “woman wearing red,” Miskwagoode is an unsettling portrayal of unreconciled Indigenous experience under colonialism, past and present.

Miskwagoode, the woman in the red dress, is Annharte, and she is Annharte’s mother, who disappeared when the poet was a girl. Miskwagoode is Annharte’s new book about her mother loss, her “mothermiss”, about all the women “buried in common enough / cross-generational graves”.

Marked with her characteristic sharp eye and humour, and hard earned wisdom about the “ominous progress ahead”, Annharte’s fifth collection encompasses the poet’s experiences as an Anishinaabe Elder, “witness not survivor”, writing of the weight of a present and persisting colonialism.

Annharte (Marie Baker) is Anishinaabe (Little Saskatchewan First Nation, Manitoba). She is the author of four previous books of poetry: Being On the Moon, Columbus Coyote Cafe, Exercises in Lip Pointing, and Indigena Awry. Her book of essays, a/k/a, was published in 2012 by Capilano University Editions. She lives in Gypsumville, Manitoba.

Speaking on behalf of Our Line in the Sand, a group of concerned citizens advocating to protect the Watershed in Eastern Manitoba, will be one of its founders, Janine Gibson.

Diane Driedger is a poet who has published two poetry collections. Her latest poetry book is Red with Living: Poems and Art (Inanna, 2016). Her edited book, Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader was published by Inanna Publications in 2021. She teaches in the Interdisciplinary Master’s Programme in Disability Studies at the University of Manitoba.

 

Miskwagoode

– by ANNHARTE

Taken from the Anishinaabe for “woman wearing red,” Miskwagoode is an unsettling portrayal of unreconciled Indigenous experience under colonialism, past and present. Miskwagoode, the woman in the red dress, is Annharte, and she is Annharte’s mother, who disappeared when the poet was a girl. Miskwagoode is Annharte’s new book about her mother loss, her “mothermiss”, about all the women “buried in common enough / cross-generational graves”. Marked with her characteristic sharp eye and humour, and hard earned wisdom about the “ominous progress ahead”, Annharte’s fifth collection encompasses the poet’s experiences as an Anishinaabe Elder, “witness not survivor”, writing of the weight of a present and persisting colonialism. In her sly, cheeky riffs on life behind the “buckskin curtain” at the margins of settler society, Annharte tells us about granny circles, the horny old guys, and getting your hair done. But these poems about rez life and the community and belonging it offers are set against the background radiation of the poverty and the sicknesses, despair, violence, sexism, and sexual abuse, the legacies of unequal relations. Miskwagoode concludes with “Wabang,” a suite of short poems comprising Annharte’s own thumbnail transcontinental Indigenous mythology.