Listening to Bones That Sing: Orality, Spirituality, and Female Kinship in Louise Halfe’s Blue Marrow

Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe/Sky Dancer informs readers of her book-length poem Blue Marrow that the writing was guided by powerful spectral presences: “The prairie is full of bones. The bones stand and sing and I feel the weight of them as they guide my fingers on this page”. For Halfe’s persona, however, the haunting is doubled, reciprocal, because she both invokes the kôhkomak, the Grandmothers, whose bones sing to her, urging, “Haunt us / with your cries” (2, 73), and indicates her spirit is preoccupied with the Grandmothers’ narratives:¹

ê-pêcimakik. I haunt them. My wailing stories.

(52)

The resultant voice dancing of what, in an interview with Esta Spalding, Halfe calls “ancestral memory,” works at the oral-written interface to reconstitute fur-trade history from Cree women’s perspectives.² Halfe challenges the authority of the written colonial narrative by using oral forms and stories to evoke a tradition of oral history that has its own conventions and has always paralleled settler-centered written history. She does so, however, by hybridizing the oral and the written while exemplifying the way in which oral stories can serve as the basis of what Cree scholar Neal McLeod calls “the anti-colonial political imagination that struggles to preserve the Indigenous political system and identity” (78).

Invader-settler culture is further challenged by Halfe’s subversive appropriations of Roman Catholic liturgy in a countermovement to the ghosting of Indigenous spirituality: “Our songs [were] taxed, / silenced by tongues that speak damnation and burning” (98). Moreover, Blue Marrow makes clear that the ghosting of Indigenous peoples has been a gendered process. The cover of the second edition (2004) features Halfe’s kôhkomak, or grandmothers, in and above a band of Northern Lights, or Sky Dancers, which represents Halfe’s continuity with her female forebears and the Eternal Woman spirit. Both this cover and the dedication to one kôhkom and Halfe’s mother point to an even stronger revaluing of older Cree women, of nôtokwêsiwak (“female Elders”), in the revised version of the book-length poem than was evidenced in the first edition (1998). The latter’s cover reprinted a picture of Halfe’s great-grandparents, and its dedications, while headed with an honoring of “all iskwêwak [Cree women]—the beautiful browns” and singling out her daughter, Omeasoo, conclude with mention of both male and female members of her “Rainbow Family” and “all children born into the Rainbow.” In both editions, however, the centering on female kin animates the retrieval of female stories from the colonially imposed silence, thus recuperating Cree women’s power as the life-giving force acknowledged in her people’s oral creation stories and other forms of oral history (98), and as important guardians and transmitters of Cree culture.³ Halfe honors her female relatives, then, in ways analogous to those nêhiyaw-Métis-nahkawè critic Janice Acoose enacts in her essay for the Native Critics Collective, “Honoring Ni’Wahkomakanak,” asserting of these relations that their “spiritual presence continues to influence my life and work” (219; emphasis added). Halfe’s Blue Marrow thus corrects multiple biases in its representation of repressed Cree orality, spirituality, and gender balance, working to strengthen Cree nations, particularly their women, for the future.

In cracking ancestral bones to feed on their marrow (78), Halfe’s book lays bare historic Indigenous experiences still haunting contemporary lives and producing hybrids neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. But the partially autobiographical persona is deeply nourished by that marrow so that in retelling this history, she asserts revived possibilities for the Cree, or nêhiyawak, especially Cree women. At the same time, she gives voice to the Grandmothers, making clear that they cannot pass on their teachings unless they, too, are nourished:

We do not talk until we are fed.You’ve wanted us yet you ignore us.Dream us. Feed us.

(54)

Halfe thus manifests an understanding of her specters as communicating the kind of “something-to-be-done” that...