Margaret Noodin

Margaret Noodin explains in the preface of her new poetry collection, What the Chickadee Knows (Gijigijigaaneshiinh Gikendaan), "Whether we hear giji-giji-gaane-shii-shii or chick-a-dee-dee-dee depends on how we have been taught to listen. Our world is shaped by the sounds around us and the filter we use to turn thoughts into words. The lines and images here were conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English. They are an attempt to hear and describe the world according to an Anishinaabe paradigm." The book is concerned with nature, history, tradition, and relationships, and these poems illuminate the vital place of the author's tribe both in the past and within the contemporary world. What the Chickadee Knows is a gesture toward a future that includes Anishinaabemowin and other indigenous languages seeing growth and revitalization. This bilingual collection includes Anishinaabemowin and English, with the poems mirroring one another on facing pages. In the first part, "What We Notice" (E-Maaminonendamang), Noodin introduces a series of seasonal poems that invoke Anishinaabe science and philosophy. The second part, "History" (Gaa Ezhiwebag), offers nuanced contemporary views of Anishinaabe history. The poems build in urgency, from observations of the natural world and human connection to poems centered in powerful grief and remembrance for events spanning from the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850, which resulted in the deaths of more than four hundred Ojibwe people, to the Standing Rock water crisis of 2016, which resulted in the prosecution of Native protesters and, ultimately, the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred land. The intent of What the Chickadee Knows is to create a record of the contemporary Anishinaabe worldview as it is situated between the traditions of the past and as it contributes to the innovation needed for survival into the future. Readers of poetry with an interest in world languages and indigenous voices will need this book.

What the Chickadee Knows

Modern Anishinaabemowin poetry in conversation with English translation.

Weweni

Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature combines literary criticism, sociolinguistics, native studies, and poetics to introduce an Anishinaabe way of reading. The four Anishinaabe authors discussed in the book, Louise Erdrich, Jim Northrup, Basil Johnston, and Gerald Vizenor, share an ethnic heritage but are connected more clearly by a culture of tales, songs, and beliefs.

A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature

Bawaajimo

Modern poems conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English.

Depending on dialect, the Anishinaabemowin word “weweni” expresses thanks, exactitude, ease, and sincerity. In addition, the word for “relatives” is “nindenwemaaganag”: those whose “enewewe,” or voices, sound familiar. In Weweni, poet Margaret Noodin brings all of these meanings to bear in a unique bilingual collection. Noodin’s warm and perceptive poems were written first in the Modern Anishinaabemowin double-vowel orthography and appear translated on facing pages in English. From planetary tracking to political contrasts, stories of ghosts, and messages of trees, the poems in Weweni use many images to speak to the interconnectedness of relationships, moments of difficulty and joy, and dreams and cautions for the future. As poems move from Anishinaabemowin to English, the challenge of translation offers multiple levels of meaning—English meanings found in Anishinaabe words long as rivers and knotted like nets, English approximations that bend the dominant language in new directions, and sets of signs and ideas unable to move from one language to another. In addition to the individual dialogues played out beween Noodin’s poems, the collection as a whole demonstrates a fruitful and respectful dialogue between languages and cultures. Noodin’s poems will be proof to students and speakers of Anishinaabemowin that the language can be a vital space for modern expression and, for those new to the language, a lyric invitation to further exploration. Anyone interested in poetry or linguistics will enjoy this one-of-a-kind volume.

David Stirrup

Gordon Henry Jr.

A celebration of Anishinaabe intellectual tradition. Enduring Critical Poses examines the stories, poems, plays, and histories centered in the Great Lakes region of North America, where the Anishinaabeg live in a space Basil Johnston referred to as “Maazikamikwe,” a maternal earth. The Anishinaabeg are a confederacy of many communities, including the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, and Algonquin peoples, who share cultural practices and related languages. Bringing together senior scholars and new voices on the Anishinaabe intellectual landscape, this volume specifically explores Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi culture, language, and literary heritage. Through a tribal-centric framework, the contributors connect various branches of Native American literary studies and celebrate Anishinaabe narrative diversity to offer a single, overarching story of Anishinaabe survival and endurance. Gordon Henry Jr. is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and Professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at Michigan State University. His books include Afterlives of Indigenous Archives: Essays in Honor of the Occom Circle (coedited with Ivy Schweitzer) and The Light People. Margaret Noodin is Professor of English and American Indian Studies and Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her books include Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature. David Stirrup is Professor of American Literature and Indigenous Studies at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His books include Picturing Worlds: Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishinaabe Literature.

Margaret Noodin

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