Conversation on Indigenous Identity at The Walrus

Liz Howard and Armand Garnet Ruffo discuss their mutual upbringing in Chapleau, Ontario and the ways that the formative years appear in both of their poems at Toronto-based publication, The Walrus. Howard leads the conversation, explaining that Chapleau is "a former fur-trading outpost tucked just inside the Arctic watershed. It is a very complicated place: geographically isolated with anglophone, francophone, and First Nations communities and also an often-ignored residential-school past. It always seemed to me a pretty unlikely place to have produced a poet, let alone two." Picking up from there: 

I want to tell the story of how I’m pretty sure I first came across your work, again in such an unlikely place: on the Toronto subway. At the time, I was a psychology student and had been writing poetry in secret for years, and one day on my way to class, I saw a poem in place of what would have been an ad in the subway car I was riding.

The Fallout
Armand Garnet Ruffo

I never asked my auntie what she learned
in Residential School. What comes to mind
is her beading and sewing, the moccasins
she made for us, the precision.
What I don’t recall are any hugs or kisses
like my European relatives lavished on us.
As though the heirs of Columbus has a special
claim to affection for those like us
caught in between.

Even more surprising was the bio beneath it that told me the poem was written by an Armand Garnet Ruffo, a poet of Ojibwe descent originally from Chapleau, Ontario. I was absolutely stunned. I, of course, immediately looked up your work after class and was thrilled to get to finally meet you years later.

I tell this story by way of opening up a conversation around how our poetics are tied to place and the different ways we have used them to explore complicated identity. For example, in this poem that appeared on the ttc, taken from your book At Geronimo’s Grave (2001), you speak directly of family members on both sides of your family, European and First Nations, and reference that your auntie attended residential school. In my own writing, my First Nations heritage always emerged as a troubled, occluded, coded presence very much as it was in life, as I was estranged from that side of my family. Did you always write about family and/or “identity,” “Nativeness,” or “mixedness” in poetry? Is it something that always came through your work, something you sought to explore through the medium, or was it something that was born out of your poetic practice itself? Can you talk about how the medium and subject came about for you and how it has evolved?

Read on at The Walrus.