Marilyn Dumont (Amanda Yakem)

“Colonialism is an absence that widens,” writes celebrated poet Marilyn Dumont in “misāskwatо̄mina,” the first poem of her new collection, South Side of a Kinless River.

The collection, divided into three sections, opens with a dedication: “to all my relatives who struggled to make space for those who came after them.” This dedication sets the tone of the collection: a devotion to kin and community, making space for them to fill the absence created by the colonial past.

There is a cyclical pattern to the collection (which reveals itself from the first line of the first page) and a weathered honesty that holds brave, bare eyes to a densely detailed past. Steeped in history, Dumont’s collection encompasses feminist history, multiplicity of identity, and the complexities of motherhood, among other themes.

Particular attention is given to Indigenous women and their lived experiences, their life-giving legacies, place in community, and particular power, anointed by motifs of water, star, and gold. The portraits of women such as Louise Lizette Umphreville and Victoria Calihoo Belcourt are imbued with dignity, understanding, and even playfulness. There is an unabashed joy in “Victoria’s jig,” and a deep understanding in “Lizette, ‘Shining Star’”: “Did you stoke your clay pipe after sex / filled with red willow and kinikinik / or did you recite your rosary and pray?” These portraits sit side by side with the truth of the in/visibility of Indigenous women in common historical accounts; the text’s biting tone is appropriate given the betrayal of the omission: “Men engraving their names everywhere / while nameless / strong-faced women / of no consequence / helped them survive.”

Each part of South Side of a Kinless River entwines with the others. The secrets of each section title are scattered across the various sections, so the reader has a sense of searching, foraging, for meaning. “Flat rocks rasp their stories,” the title of the second section, appears in a poem in the first section, “Flour-sack dresses billow in the wind.” “Throwing the language dice,” the title of the third section, appears in the second. And, tying it all together, “Flour-sack dresses” returns in the final section, which is not really a finale at all, but rather the closing of a loop.

The poems in the first section read like incantation and instruction, evoking a strong sense of place and time. As the collection progresses, the poem titles shorten, the poems themselves grow more contemplative, philosophical, and almost yearning in their deep, wide, river-like understandings. We’re led into vulnerable ruminations: beliefs about language, archives, and inspiration. For example, the conceit of the poem “I come sounding after,” is that an aurality of language creates identity. The third section also addresses Canada’s reconciliation rhetoric with obvious contempt for its “relational platitudes” – given the histories the poems have laid out so clearly.

We arrive then, at the final question of the final poem, a question that the many poems of the collection keep circling: Who am I? Who are we? It is a legal, historical, personal, and philosophical query made palpable by the Cree distinction between āpihtawikosisānak and otipēyimisowak: the poem defines them as “the half sons of Cree” and “the people who own themselves,” respectively, while the glossary at the back of the book (compiled by Dumont) defines them as “Métis people” and “Métis people; those who are free.” This subtle distinction is a reverb, an echo, a question tucked inside the language itself. The final poem, appropriately titled “mihcēto-pīkiskwēwak,” meaning “speak many languages,” gestures to this quality, this many-ed-ness of language that reflects the many-ed-ness of people, history, and place. This multiplicity is integral to the text and its myriad questions of identity, history, power, kinship, and more. Layering meaning in this way is key to Dumont’s skilful poetics, both in form and in substance.

As I read Dumont’s collection, I could not help but feel a sense of dichotomy: the love at play with the loneliness; the horror integral to certain desires; life-giving power pitted against land-stealing control. Yet, the poetry of the collection emerges in the recognition of these oppositions not as contradictions at all, but as undulating facts of life. In the felt reality of these north and south sides, these magnetic pulls of the experience of colonialism and womanhood Dumont so dexterously describes, there is a release: a realization that what seems cacophonous is, in fact, natural, at once dissimilar and integral, disparate and deeply connected. She offers letting things be as they are instead of a solution or resolution; let the questions remain unanswered, but let us have more. Let history remain blurred but let us look closer, and uncover what we can and honour it by seeing it truly. This openness – embedded by stylistic choices like the total elimination of periods, no ending to any sentence – is a choice of dignity to allow these fragmented, fierce (hi)stories their wholeness.