Settler Education
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A tone-perfect elegiac meditation on the impossibility of engaging with painful history and the necessity of doing so." – Margaret Atwood, Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for Poetry
In the stunning poems of Settler Education, Laurie D. Graham vividly explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, Settler Education reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is a complicated book: well-aimed, well-researched, and well-written, but flawed. Graham (Rove) is an excellent poet, but the collection suffers when she attempts to tackle historical damage done by periodically slipping into the metaphorical skin of First Nations voices, reconstituted from primary and secondary sources. In so doing, Graham, who is white, slides deep into appropriative territory. Much of the book addresses the Plains Cree Frog Lake Uprising of 1885 and surrounding events. Graham is conscious of the colonialist history she addresses, and seeks to examine historical narrative and show how that history's repercussions are still felt, and in that the book succeeds. The acknowledgements and notes speak to Graham's attempts to engage First Nations sources and scholars. The poems, primarily a mix of found poetry, prose poetry, and free verse, go a long way toward speaking with a conscientious, if not insider, voice. And yet, despite that careful aim, Graham's work may leave readers with a sincere discomfort in the presentation of the poems not tied to her own lived perspective. The collection is worth reading for how and where it succeeds, despite its stumbles.
