Sohkeyihta by Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe

“I build this story like my lair. One willow, / a rib at a time”
— “The Crooked Good”

Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe’s work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe’s career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing.

Halfe’s own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong. She writes of coming into her practice as a poet and the stories, people, and experiences that gave her courage and allowed her to construct her “lair.” She also reflects on her relationship with nêhiyawêwin, the Cree language, and the ways in which it informs her relationships and poetics.

The introduction by David Gaertner situates Halfe’s writing within the history of whiteness and colonialism that works to silence and repress Indigenous voices. Gaertner pays particular attention to the ways in which Halfe addresses, incorporates, and pushes back against silence, and suggests that her work is an act of bearing witness – what Kwagiulth scholar Sarah Hunt identifies as making Indigenous lives visible.

Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe is nêhiyaw poet raised on the Saddle Lake Reserve in Alberta. She has travelled extensively nationally and internationally both as a poet and keynote speaker. She served as poet Laureate in Saskatchewan for two years and was given an honorary Ph.D. from Wilfrid Laurier University. In 2017 Halfe was awarded the Latner's Writers' Trust Poetry Prize for an exceptional body of work in the field of poetry.

David Gaertner is a settler scholar of German descent and an instructor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, where he specializes in digital storytelling. He is also a co-editor of Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island.