This book is one woman's examination of her role as an otepayemsuak, a Métis, in this 500-year era of resistance and change. We are in a time when many Indigenous prophecies are reaching into the present - those of the ancient Mayan, the Hopi, the Iroquois, the Cree, the Métis. As with the ancient Mayan, where December 12, 2012, marks the end of the long count calendar, according to the prophecy of the Mohawk's seventh generation, we have reached the time to restore Indigenous stewardship of the land. The words that follow the title of the first chapter of the trees are still bending south, are those of Louis Riel: "My people will sleep for one hundred years. When they awake, it will be the artists that give them back their spirit."

Sharron Proulx-Turner is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Originally from the Ottawa river valley, Sharron is from Algonquin, Ojibwe, Mohawk, Wyandat, Mi'kmaw, French and Irish ancestry. She's a two-spirit nokomis, mom, writer and community worker. Where the Rivers Join (1995), a memoir (Beckylane), was a finalist for the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction, and what the auntys say (2002), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Prize for poetry. Sharron's work appears in several anthologies, including Oxford Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, Crisp Blue Edges, Tales from Moccasin Avenue, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, and in literary journals, including Gatherings, Yellow Medicine Review and West Coast Line. Sharron has two more recent books, a mixed-genre-historical-fiction called, she walks for days/ inside a thousand eyes/ a two-spirit story (2008), and a book of dedication poems called, she is reading her blanket with her hands (2008). She is currently transcribing the recorded lifestory of Lakota Elder Beverly Little Thunder, who, together with her daughter Lushanya Echeverria, leads the only all-women's Sundance on Turtle Island. the trees are still bending south is Sharron's fifth book.

Sharron Proulx-Turner's profile page

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is a member of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, on the Saugeen Peninsula in Ontario. Kateri is an Assistant Professor, teaching Creative Writing, Indigenous Literatures and Oral Traditions in the English Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. She has taught creative writing and Indigenous literatures at the University of Manitoba, the Banff Centre's Aboriginal Arts Program, and the En'owkin International School of Writing in partnership with the University of Victoria. Her publications encompass poetry, fiction, non-fiction, radio plays, television and film, libretti, graphic novels, and spoken word. Her teaching and creative work is firmly decolonial, a practice of cultural resurgence, affirmation and survivance. She is a recipient of a REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award for writing, her 2015 book of short stories, The Stone Collection, was a finalist for the Sarton Literary Book Awards, and her collaborative recording A Constellation of Bones was a nominee for a 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Award. Kateri was the 2011-2012 Poet Laureate for Owen Sound and North Grey. She founded and coordinated the first Honouring Words: International Indigenous Authors Celebration Tour in 2003 and initiated and was a co-organizer for the first Indigenous Comics Symposium in 2021. She is the founder, publisher, and art director for Kegedonce Press. (Re)Generation: The Poetry of Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, selected and edited by Dallas Hunt, was released in August 2021. She is currently completing work on a new collection of poetry and a collection of humourous short stories.

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I walked into this woman's dreams through the pages of this book searching for the ghosts that inhabit these pages. I met Louis for the first time in a woman's voice, a strong voice, a proud voice that had not sung for more than a hundred years. I entered and was able to see from the other side of the mirror. The songs, the words, come from within, deep, mournful, yet they are full of joy, sadness and pain, Êmuch of what you experience in a Sundance and a vision quest. This book is filled with all of this and much more. - duncan (Keewatin) mercredi In the poems in 'the trees are still bending south', the words of the English language burgeon with a different life, one lived on Turtle Island. Though it is a girl, a lover, a grandmother, a mom, who is telling these stories, singing these songs, her voice probing or celebrating the personal, the familial, the communal, the political, the mystical, her throat swells with the guidance of the Island's other inhabitants - monarch butterflies, spiders, snow owls, the one-footed bodies of snakes toward hope and wisdom. love is very powerfulshe hears those snakes sayand has the power to revive peoplefrom the deadThese poems are another sign of the cultural spring, the awakening of the sleeping spirits Riel predicted.-Daniel David Moses (Poet and Playwright of "Almighty Voice and His Wife")