Message Sticks

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. The language echoes Nutshimit, the language of the region, chanted by the drum. The history of the First Nations people resonates in their rightful anger and their struggles for dignity, the rights to their territory, and cohabitation. Simple and beautiful, Joséphine Bacon?s poetry is an homage to the land, the ancestors, and the Innu-aimon language. This poetic testimony recounts the unpublished areas of history. A cosmogenic vision that plunges us into the intensity of the elders? words: the voyage of the bearer of dreams and visions, the horizons of the guide women, the courage of the huntsmen, the children, guarantors of the endurance of the voyage and the trees, unfaltering witnesses of the journey.