To describe the writing of Marilyn Dumont is to call her a poet of reclamation and resurgence. Some thirty-five years ago she set about documenting her life as a young Métis woman and telling the story of her people, the Red River Métis, and, in the process, she has become a principal literary voice for the “Renaissance” of the Métis nation. To understand Marilyn Dumont’s work is to understand Métis culture and history, that of a people who originated in the 17thth century upon the meeting of the First Nations and the newcomers, the European voyageurs and cartographers who travelled along the great waterways of Turtle Island/ North America.
How does a Métis poet write about a country where its politicians and bureaucrats are honoured as national figures when they made family fortunes from confiscated Métis and First Nations lands? For Dumont, the answer to this question resides in telling the truth, about the present and the past. Through carefully crafted poems, Dumont takes the reader through a range of personal and historically connected experiences grounded in emotional truth. For Dumont, perception, like memory, is as much about the body as it is the mind, surfacing as visionary insight, which has become the hallmark of her poetry.
Reclamation and Resurgence contains poems selected from A Really Good Brown Girl, green girl dreams Mountains, from that tongued belonging, and The Pemmican Eaters, as well as previously uncollected poems, and includes an introduction by Armand Garnet Ruffo and an afterword, "Contradictory Co-existence," by Marilyn Dumont.

Marilyn Dumont is the author of four collections of poems: A Really Good Brown Girl (winner of the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award), green girl dreams Mountains (winner of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award), That Tongued Belonging (winner of the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and Aboriginal Book of the Year Award) and The Pemmican Eaters (published in 2015 by ECW Press). Marilyn has been Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library and in numerous universities across Canada. In addition, she has been faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Writing with Style and Wired Writing programs, as well as an advisor and mentor in their Indigenous Writers’ Program. She serves as a board member on The Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada, and freelances for a living.

Marilyn Dumont's profile page

Armand Garnet Ruffo's work is strongly influenced by his Ojibway heritage. His first poetry collection, Opening in the Sky, was published in 1994 (Theytus Books). His work has also appeared in such anthologies as Looking at the Words of Our People (Theytus Books), Voices of The First Nations (McGraw Hill Ryerson), and Native Literature in Canada (Oxford University Press) as well as numerous literary journals including Dandelion, CVII, and Absinthe. In addition to his numerous publication credits, Ruffo has written several plays.Born in northern Ontario, at the Biscotasing where Grey Owl lived, Ruffo grew up with a photo of his uncle Jimmy and Archie Belaney hanging on his wall - Archie boarded at Ruffo's grandmother's. Since then, Ruffo has travelled extensively throughout Europe, North Africa, and South America. He has worked as a harvester of wild rice, journalist, editor, civil servant, and teacher. Ruffo has studied at York University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Windsor. He now makes his home in Ottawa, where he is a lecturer and associate director of the Centre for Aboriginal Education, Research and Culture at Carleton University.

Armand Garnet Ruffo's profile page