Marilyn Dumont

Metis poet, writer, and Professor Marilyn Dumont teaches for the faculties of Arts and Native Studies at the University of Alberta and is proud of Metis family lines from her Mother’s – Vaness / Dufresne families and her father’s – Boudreau/Dumont families.
She was awarded the 2018 Lifetime Membership from the League of Canadian Poets for her contributions to poetry in Canada. In 2019, she received the University of Alberta Distinguished Alumni Award and the Alberta Lieutenant Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award, and in 2022 was Awarded the Alberta Queen’s Platinum Jubilee medal for public service in 2023. Her four collections of poetry have won provincial or national awards: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996); green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007); The Pemmican Eaters (2015).

I have been on a search for Indigenous life, stories, history since I arrived in Edmonton to transfer to the University of Alberta – Faculty of Arts in 1985. Back then, there was little if no physical monuments, landmarks, or place names that reflected that there had been a large and important Indigenous presence in this very place that grew from a Fur Trade fort. I felt adrift in a place that I knew had Indigenous origins, but wouldn’t acknowledge. I marvel at how quickly a history can be buried under the valorization of a later settler history.  I think of layers of history like layers of sediment or how blankets may be spread out to cover an area. Indigenous history is the blanket at the bottom weighed down by larger and heavier blankets that covers Indigenous stories, so the whiteness may be centred again.

My inspiration for poetry based on historical events comes from imaging, living through what the people then did, and I am particularly fascinated with women’s lives because they were so arduous and interesting.

One of my hobbies is creating things such as beadwork on hats or hand-made vests. My mother modelled creating items for others, and especially for the grand and great-grandchildren. I gift these items because it symbolizes something money can’t buy and affirms our kinship which is the only structure that held the Metis together culturally and politically.