Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Poetry Native American

A Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat

by (author) Joséphine Bacon

translated by Donald Winkler

Publisher
Bookland Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2017
Category
Native American, Canadian, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781772310351
    Publish Date
    Jan 2017
    List Price
    $16.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

In this poetry collection, Joséphine Bacon challenges our traditional notions of culture and perception, landscape and wilderness, the limits of experience, and the nature of human being. With a surreal blend of emotions and memories, "A Tea in the Tundra / Nipishapui Nete Mushuat" portrays a complex and ever-shifting landscape of possibilities. The author passionately reveals a finely wrought sensibility, which elevates the subtle scenery of life's everyday events. The French-language edition of this book was shortlisted for the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

About the authors

Joséphine Bacon is an Innu poet born in 1947 in Passamit, Nitassinan / Québec, and now living in Montréal. An icon of Québec literature, she writes in Innu-aimun and French, and has been invited to read her poems in many countries. She has also worked as a translator, community researcher, documentary filmmaker, curator, and songwriter.She spent her early years on the land with her family, living a nomadic life and hearing the stories passed down from her Ancestors. At the age of four, she entered residential school in Mani-Utenam (Maliotenam), where she remained until she was nineteen. She later moved to Montréal and became a translator and transcriber for anthropologists interviewing Innu Elders and knowledge keepers in Labrador and Québec.Her poetry has won many awards, including the Indigenous Voices Award, the international Ostana Prize (for writers whose mother tongue is a language of limited diffusion), and the Prix des libraires du Québec, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. She received an honorary doctorate from Université Laval in 2016 and has been inducted into the Ordre de Montréal and the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec. She is the subject of the documentary film Je m’appelle humain (Call Me Human), by Kim O’Bomsawin.Joséphine Bacon has said, “The poems I write are for those to come, so that they do not forget their origins in a land that will recognize their footsteps.”

Joséphine Bacon's profile page

Donald Winkler was born in Winnipeg, graduated from the University of Manitoba, and did graduate study at the Yale School of Drama. From 1967 to 1995 he was a film director and writer at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, and since the 1980s, a translator of Quebec literature. In 1994, 2011, and 2013 he won the Governor General Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the prize on three other occasions. His translation of Samuel Archibald's short story collection, "Arvida," was a finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Donald Winkler's profile page

Related lists