Translated from the French into English by Phyllis Aronoff.

This bilingual work (English and Innu-aimun) is an invitation to dialogue. Message sticks are the signs that allow the nomadic Innu to orient themselves inland and find their way. The poetry brings the language of the nutshimit (the back country) to life again, recalling the sound of the drum. Simple and beautiful, Joséphine Bacon's poetry is an homage to the land, the ancestors, and the Innu-aimun language. Charting unwritten history, it provides a vision into the intensity of the elders' words.

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

Phyllis Aronoff, a Montrealer born and bred, translates from French to English, solo or with co-translator Howard Scott. She has translated fiction, poetry, memoirs, and works in the humanities by authors from Québec and France. Among her recent translations are Message Sticks / Tshissinuatshitakana, poems by Innu writer Joséphine Bacon, and novels (co-translated with Howard Scott) by Rima Elkouri and Edem Awumey. Her translations have won several prizes, including the Jewish Book Award for Fiction and, with Howard Scott, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Translation Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. Phyllis is a past president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and has represented translators on the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada.

Phyllis Aronoff's profile page

"Joséphine Bacon has written a moving and necessary collection of poems." --Tristan Malavoy-Racine, Voir

"Bâtons à message / Tshissinuatshitakana, Joséphine Bacon's first collection of poetry, is one of those books you want to give to a friend, saying, "Here, drink in this light.'" --Denise Brassard, Inter, art actuel

"It is rare that one reads a poet as refined and precise as Bacon, a poet with an authentic and personal voice who truly has something to say, a message to transmit and share." --Jean-Sébastien Ménard, Terra Nova

"On the brink of catastrophe, the poet always finds the way of beauty." --Jade Bérubé, La Presse