Rita Joe

Rita Joe (born March 15, 1932 in Whycocomagh on Cape Breton Island , † March 20, 2007 ) was a Canadian poet and songwriter from the Mi'kmaq people . She tried to change the perception of the Mi'kmaq and to replace the late colonial stereotypes with a positive image . As she herself restricted it: "But all I do is a gentle persuasion" (All I do is a friendly persuasion).

One of her best known works is Song of Rita Joe. 1996 Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet , and We Are the Dreamers. Recent and Early Poetry from 1999, as well as The Mi'kmaq Anthology , co-authored with Lesley Choyce (born 1951) .

life and work

Origin, relatives and youth

The Indian Residential School of Shubenacadie, 1930

Her parents were Josie (Gould) Bernard and Annie Bernard, b. Googoo, but she was an orphan in 1942 . Her birth name was Rita Googoo. She had three brothers named Soln, Matt and Roddy. Soln, the eldest, looked after the younger sisters, the other two brothers were in the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School , and therefore almost always absent. Matt was named in the municipality Moqnja'tu'wi what about are the sugar on things mean. At the residential school , however, he was called Misekn, which means rag . Rita's sister Annabel had lived with her grandparents on the reservation since she was three , as had Roddy before he went to school. As Rita remembered, she was beautiful, with long hair, while she was skinny and always had sore eyes, "the ugly duckling in the family."

Her mother died when she was five years old, her father when she was ten. In the morning, when her mother was dying, she was supposed to go to the grandmother (Kijinu) with her older brother Soln. Annabel took her to school, where she heard the church's death knell. When they got into the house, mother was dead, grandmother blamed Rita, a reproach she never forgot. The mother, nine months pregnant, had probably got too cold while fishing. At first Rita lived with her father and Soln with her grandparents, but the tension was too great.

So she grew up in different families outside and inside the reserve , seven of which were created after World War II: Membertou, Eskasoni, Whycocomagh, Barra Head, Nyanza, Afton and Pictou Landing. First she went to the Membertou reservation near Sydney . From there, her father took her to Pictou Landing . She learned Indian prayers from an old man and attended school for the first time. After she got lost in a swamp and almost drowned, she was taken from this family when she was seven, although she felt comfortable there. Then it went to the Millbrooke Reservation. There she was abused by the husband of the woman she loved. To protect herself from this, she crawled into a tight corner where no one could follow her. When the abuses came to light, she was also taken from this family, again the woman blamed her, even though she was only seven years old. When she heard much later that the perpetrator had died, she only said "Ein Glück" (Good riddance!). She was never able to explain the connection to her husband, and she dreamed of this time into old age. She was taken in by another family in Millbrook. She helped the old woman in her garden and later remembered that she was rude to everyone, only she was treated well by her. She looked after her husband, who suffered from tuberculosis , and provided him with food. She and the woman attended St Anne's Day for the first time , a festival celebrating the Mi'kmaq saint. Hundreds of Indians gathered for this , as in 1923 when 75 wigwams were standing around the church of Whycocomagh alone .

The next day they hurried home because they heard the man had died. She changed families again, but there she didn't have to eat on the stairs, as her foster father had seen. She finally stayed with this couple for a long time, and she got on very well with their daughter of the same age, with whom she had a long friendship.

At 9 she lived again with Soln, Roddy, Annabel and her father in Whycocomagh. Matt, on the other hand, who was in the residential school until he was 16 , lost sight of Rita. She didn't see him again for 20 years in Maine . The older siblings looked after Rita, who was considered a mta'ksn (baby), as best they could in the face of poverty. She sought advice from Soln, Roddy, who was eight years her senior, was completely carefree, and Annabel became pregnant at 15. But she was not allowed to marry the Saskatchewan Indian she loved because he had a different religion - he was not a Catholic. She gave birth to the boy in the next house and he was like a little brother to Rita. Her father read to her from a book whose script she did not know. Her friends used this script to write letters to each other, and she was annoyed by the allegations that the Mi'kmaq had not developed a script.

To escape the endless chain of surrogate families, she asked the Indian agent in charge to find her a place in a residential school. When she was twelve, Rita went to Shubenacadie Indian Residential School . There she defended herself for the first time against the degradation of her person and the culture of her people. She left school when she was 16.

Marriage, ten children

On January 16, 1954, she married Frank Joe, whom she had met in Boston . They moved from there to Eskasoni on Breton Island in the province of Nova Scotia and lived in the Eskasoni First Nations Reserve . The two raised ten children, including two adoptive children. Frank Joe died on August 14, 1989 in Calais , Maine .

Poems

Rita Joe has been writing poetry since the sixties, the focus of which was the native experience , the experience of the Indians within the framework of the dominant Canadian culture. One of her best known poems was The Drumbeat Is the Heartbeat of the Nation . In 1990 she wrote her Oka song during the Oka crisis . Her first posts appeared on Micmac News , where she was a regular contributor to a column entitled Here and there in Eskasoni . In 1978 she published her first book Poems of Rita Joe . She traveled to schools and gave public lectures and readings, and in 1988 Song of Eskasoni was released. More Poems of Rita Joe , finally Lnu and Indians We're Called in 1991 .

honors and awards

In 1974 she received the Honorable Mention Award , then the Nova Scotia Writers Federation Prize, and on April 18, 1990, eight months after the death of her husband, she became a simple member of the Order of Canada / Ordre du Canada , one of the highest civilian awards in Canada . In 1997 she received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in the arts and culture. She was also a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada / Conseil privé de la Reine pour le Canada .

In 1993 she received an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie University in Halifax . She taught from 1997 at Cape Breton University , which she received in the same year with another honorary doctorate, as did Mount Saint Vincent University in 1998 .

When she returned to her home reservation - she had Parkinson's disease - she honored the Eskasoni First Nation on Cape Breton Island with a pow wow held just for her .

Works

• Poems of Rita Joe . Abanaki Press, Halifax 1978
• Song of Eskasoni. More Songs of Rita Joe . Nimbus Publ, Halifax 1989
• Lnu and Indians We're Called . Ragweed, Charlottetown 1991
• Kelusultiek: Original Women's Voices of Atlantic Canada. ( We speak ), Institute for the Study of Women, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax 1995, a compilation of works by Mi'kmaq women.
• Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet . University of Nebraska Press, 1996
• Rita Joe, Lesley Choyce: The Mi'kmaq Anthology . Nimbus, Halifax 2005 (first 1997)

The poems of 1978 and later poems can be found in:

• We are the dreamers. Recent and Early Poetry . Breton Books, Wreck Cove, Nova Scotia 1999

literature

• Joe, Rita , in: Encyclopedia of literature in Canada , University of Toronto Press 2002, pp. 554f.
• Gordon E. Smith, Kevin Alstrup: Words and Music by Rita Joe. Dialogic Ethnomusicology , in: Canadian Folk Music 23 (1995) 35-53.

Movie

• Brian Guns: Song of Eskasoni. Reflections of Rita Joe ., 1993

Web links

• Rita Joe ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia .
• Dr. Rita Joe ... She made a difference
• Mi'kmaq poet laureate Rita Joe dead at 75, in: globe and mail, March 21, 2007 ( Memento of October 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

See also

• Residential Schools (Canada)
• First Nations history

Remarks

1. ↑ An alphabetical list of the "Native American Authors" can be found here ( memento of the original from January 20, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ The Mi'kmaq Anthology , Nimbus Publishing 2005.
3. ^ Song of Rita Joe , p. 19.
4. ↑ Songs of Rita Joe, pp. 36f.
5. ↑ S. " poet conquers hearts with kindness " ( Memento of 23 December 2008 at the Internet Archive ), archive.org, March 23 of 2008.