First Principles
with Jesse Wente and Louise Bernice Halfe
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Non-Fict Memoir
Louise Halfe is a masterful weaver of language, ceremony, philosophy, and embodied experience, and in w.htamawik / Tell Them she is at the peak of her powers. These poems and essays are luminous tracks of a beautifully observed life, close to the land and close to kin. Her telling will stay with us long into the future.
How do we heal from colonialism? What are the barriers to this healing, and what can we do to move past them?
Anishinaabe writer, broadcaster, and thinker Jesse Wente, author of the national bestseller Unreconciled: Family Truth and Indigenous Resistance returns with Tough Lies: Indigenous Belonging and My Healing Through Golf. Through a lens of healing and anti-colonial thought, Jesse examines his healing path and reflects on other aspects of his life, such as grieving the loss of his closest friends, the pressure to succeed, the racism he has faced, and his own place within family and community. Perhaps most surprising to Jesse is his re-discovery of the game of golf and the role it plays.
Cree poet and kêhtê-aya (elder) Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer, return with wîhtamawik / Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, a collection of essays and poems that chronicle her childhood in a cabin on reserve, through the Indian Residential School system, and into her reclamation of her nêhiyaw language, culture, and spirituality. She tells the story of how she woke up from the trauma of separation and found the source of her inspiration: her culture and the land.
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