Bear Bones and Feathers

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island.

This book introduces the reader to specific phraseology in a language
that some thought existed only in spoken usage. But Cree, like
Mi’kmaq, is an agglutinative, highly inflected language, and Halfe has
wisely provided a glossary of parallel terminology whereby the diligent
can savor the nuances of both English and Cree.

The stanza “Morning Song” is a refreshing aubade. In these poems,
the author reflects on different phases of her earlier life. Her
scathing comments on the residential school to which she was sent have
an all-too-familiar ring. It is chastening to think that the
boarding-school world, still so successful elsewhere, could go so
grievously awry in the Indian aboriginals’ case, simply because it
overlooked that tenacious attachment they had (and still have) to a
deeply rooted way of life, to familial bonding, to traditional spiritual
values.

All this belongingness is portrayed in Halfe’s poems, which are by
turns tender, bitter, saucy, light-hearted, earthy. The only poems a
reader may feel uncomfortable with are those wherein she adopts,
presumably for comic effect, a “deep South” mimicry (specifically,
she substitutes the consonant d for the voiced phonemic th). Some of the
poems in this collection have appeared in magazines and anthologies.