Tag: mi’kmaw poetry

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6 Poems by Shannon Webb-Campbell

Original poetry © Shannon Webb-Campbell

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Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaw and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat
Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village) in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, Canada. Her books
include: the forthcoming Feral Mermaids (Book*hug 2027), Re: Wild Her (2025), Lunar
Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the
recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon holds a PhD in
English/Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick and is the Associate
Editor of Muskrat Magazine.

The selected poems offer a representative sample of Shannon Webb-Campbell’s poetics. In these poems, the body cannot be conceived as separated from the land: both are sites where memory, kinship and the history of the Mi’kmaq Nation are inscribed. Through images that intertwine the landscape of Ktagamkuk (Newfoundland), spirituality, and the more-than-human world, the poet moves between contemplative reflection and a critique of the enduring legacy of colonialism, exploring questions of identity, belonging and resistance.

PINK UP PARCHED EARTH

rustic delicacies formed by soft hands

textured mosses become abstract vessels

pink and white earthen echoes

biological formations

waterlogged bark where barnacles grow

reshape stone’s breath

you harness jagged cliffs

dig up frosted forest

foggy lichen under your fingernails

rocks peeling back the ocean floor

a deep philosophy of wabi-sabi

shallows in the tidal pools of your palms

water rushes over cracked earth

you retrace tides through clay

grounding mud with reversing rhythms

you see nature’s aerial view minds algae

an organic process surfaces

what flows in 

must flow out

“Pink Up Parched Earth” from Re: Wild Her (Book*hug 2025)

COSMIC WOODLAND GUIDANCE

you came to me as a valley

dreamlike in your twenties

vixen of the hunt

moon spells and birthing 

begged me to let go

gather my skirts 

dying is not the end

seven generations rallied

you lived out every little onslaught

now you are a new woman

wilder than motherhood

“Cosmic Woodland Guidance” from Re: Wild Her (Book*hug 2025). Recorded “Cosmic Woodland Guidance” at It’s OK Studios in Toronto on Queen Street West 2024 for the forthcoming album Pine, a musical collaboration between Canadian hip hop artist Ice Tha One and rapper Junia-T.

NITAP

you are made of rocky earth

run steadily through the seasons

gather strength in the woods

sun-sharp

wake before first light

honour each day

you remind me I’m made of wind

wild like a partridgeberry

born of moose calls

in our kinship conversations

your voice fills me with island

a dialect that calls me back

“Nitap” from Re: Wild Her (Book*hug 2025)

LETTER TO JOSEPH R. SMALLWOOD

After Marilyn Dumont’s “Letter to John A. Macdonald”

Dear: Joey: I’m still here and mixed

Mi’kmaq after all these years.

you’re long dead, yet

confederation couldn’t stop

Newfoundland’s ongoing 

colonial violence.

you continued to unapologetically, 

telling Ottawa there are no red Indians

Nancy April, we killed them all.

and you know, Joey, 

after all your declarations

bowing to the settlers,

we’re still here, we remain

Mi’kmaq despite stolen status cards,

none of us landless,

all of us Caribou.

“Letter to Joseph R. Smallwood” from I Am a Body of Land, 

edited by Lee Maracle, Book*hug 2019.

IF I WASN’T A FURY

I would know where I come from

I wouldn’t believe my bones

were made of shit and shame

I could walk the land

speak with ancestors

know what to carry forward

but I don’t know which plants

are good medicines

or how to braid sweetgrass

I can’t speak my language

hold a drum or sing myself home

without crying

If I wasn’t a fury 

I would know where I come from

“If I Wasn’t a Fury” from Lunar Tides, Book*hug 2022. Recorded “If I Wasn’t a Fury” in Toronto with Rae Spoon as part of Stewart Legere’s forthcoming album and collaborative theatrical production The Unfamiliar Everything at the Toronto Theatre Centre in 2027.

ECOLOGY OF BEING

in this thinner air

there is no need to ingest crystals

we are surrounded by the boreal forest

at the breakdown of natural order

within the great chain of chaos

we exist as intervention 

between land and sky

only to return from a journey 

to a place of familiarization

forgot the power of selfhood

paint is singular –

it triggers memorable experiences

if you embody new occult poetics

between the self and this other thing

we make a clearing to find meaning

travel to trembling aspens

and come upon medicines

we remember this leaf

make connections

experience seasons at their breaking point

and reinvent our skin cells

“Ecology of Being” from Lunar Tides (Book*hug 2022.) Duo Concertante, Ecology of Being, Marquis/Amazon, released March 22, 2022. Duo Concertante plays the works inspired by the climate emergency by Melissa Hui, Dawn Avery, Carmen Braden, Ian Cusson, Randolph Peters, and Bekah Simms. Poetry by Shannon Webb-Campbell. Listen in Spotify. Duo Concertante also released Ecology of Being in 2019, a short-film directed by Nicola Hawkins.

Original poetry © Shannon Webb-Campbell

~ Siwar Mayu, August 2026

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3 poems by shalan joudry

© Dan Froese

Original poetry © shalan joudry

 
shalan joudry is an award-winning Mi’kmaw writer, oral storyteller, podcast producer, drummer/singer, and ecologist. Using her theatrical background, shalan brings Mi’kmaw stories to a new generation of listeners, as well as recounting personally-crafted narratives that follow Indigenous storying methodologies. shalan has published two books of poetry, Generations Re-merging (Gaspereau Press 2014) and Waking Ground (Gaspereau Press (2020). Waking Ground was shortlisted for numerous poetry awards.  Her next poetic book, Kmitkinu (our homeland), is one poem in five parts, describing the need for communal healing from colonial histories. This poem was translated 12 times and all together will be published in a limited run by Running the Goat Books and Broadsides. shalan lives with her family in their community of L’sitkuk (Bear River First Nation), Nova Scotia, where she is reclaiming her Indigenous language.

“Regrowing” is from Generations Re-merging (Gaspereau Press, 2014) while the two other poems are from Waking Ground (Gaspereau Press, 2020).

Regrowing

after a great devastation

when the land is singing itself back

it is sometimes the unfortunate fate of the red spruce

to know two worlds

having been born into a system

when white birches and aspens blanket

where it had been broken or burned

an orchestra of sprouting and falling

competing for light

but they held together underground

everything was known

had its place

those red spruce who survived

dropped branches

reached up

grew harder

everything became renamed

re-spaced among the hemlocks and us still redding

how my father will tell stories of those days

when being Mi’kmaw was a dreaded fate

now everything’s grown damp

new scents to tell the weather by

who’s reaching for the light, daughter?

we don’t mind the shade now, father

though i know how he laboured for light

when there wasn’t any room

it is sometimes the unfortunate fate of the red spruce

to have grown up in a known land

cycled through to something else

Where were you then? 

you are remembering

when alliances were baptized

before the war spilled across the atlantic

landing on our shores to navigate

the barricades and trenches of faith

the first set of quakes held some together

tied knots, hid children

sent snipers in for each other’s return

yet the decades of strife quivered the mind

fatigued the fingers

from holding 

to letting go

when forced to abandon the land

which you had learned to entangle yourselves with

you left us staring down the barrels

alone

when we had nowhere else to run to

roped onto rocky hills, outlawed

and severed from coast and territory

where were you then?

as you trickled back

were granted other lands to start anew

ours was repeatedly shrunk

our voices denied

our children kidnapped

but where were you then?

now that we finally have a footing

stitching the seams of possibility

reclaiming a livelihood

returning voice to our children

here you are

wanting to be in-lawed, re-membered

then show us what it means to be come-unity

be here when the novel fan-fare ends

Ceremony for the end of the day

when the herons fly home-bound at dusk

lifting the last current of warm air

the river route is long and arduous

when the hardship of flight has peaked and tempered

go ahead, remove your ornaments

watch your hands articulate the unlayering

a ceremony of undoing

hang your garments with certainty

acknowledging how many generations survived

and how today you held space

walk barefoot to samqwan *

inhale with the force of gravity

rattle loose the fragments lodged

where you never thought you’d heal

let your breath reach all the places

you didn’t trust to keep you steady

sip water from your cupped hands

roll it over you like a thunderstorm

and exhale

so slowly that every bit of you melts

sap going back to  ground

roots throbbing from thirst

herons shake their feathers

fold their wings

and rest

~~~
* samqwan, water.

For more about shalan joudry

 Original poetry © shalan joudry ~

Siwar Mayu, april 2025

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