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LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING
néhiyawéwin itwéwina: Loss, LISTENING, AND LEARNING
In the opening poem entitled “The Road to Writer’s Block (A Poem to Myself),”
Mcllwraith reflects precisely on her desire to learn Cree. She writes:
Turn left at desire. Take this burden
and never let go. Cling
as a burr latches onto fleece.
Be sure that your load includes
the self-imposed responsibility to learn
a threatened language: namely néhiyawéwin.*
Opening the poem and collection with these verses, she positions language
learning front and center. Moreover, these verses show the relation between a
voluntary desire to learn Cree and the great responsibility that comes with
it—since it is a threatened language due to colonial impacts that continue
today. This responsibility is underscored by her use of the imperative mood.
Furthermore, the comparison of the poem’s speaker with a burr stuck on fleece
highlights that once one has started to learn Cree it is hard to detach from it.
Once entangled in Cree words, sentences, and knowledge systems embedded
within, there is no unlearning it. Learning the language, as McIlwraith shows
in her collection of poetry, goes far beyond learning words, grammar, and
sentence structures and includes an immersion in the worldview and culture
within; language gives us “a unique way of looking at the world around us.”“
As Mcllwraith writes further along in the same poem, the responsibility is
fueled by generations of language loss among Cree people, and Indigenous
people more generally, since colonization:
Bear the millstone of language loss
the way a woman drags home the last
buffalo: paskwäwi-mostos,
as you confront the colonial tongue.*
Mcllwraith creates here a parallel between the almost extinction of bison,
or “paskwdwi-mostos,”* and of the Cree language on the Prairies. During
3 Mcilwraith: kiydm, 5.
4 Brian Maracle: The First Words, in T. Cardinal et al.: Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s
Past, Anchor Canada, 2005, 7. See also Jeanette Armstrong: Land Speaking, in H. MacFarlane
— À. G. Ruffo (eds.): Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada, Peterborough,
Broadview Press, 2016, 146-161.
5 Mcllwraith: kiyäm, 6.
16 She reflects on the structure of the word in the poem “On the Prairie,” writing: If the prairie
is called paskwdw, a cow mostos, and a buffalo paskwäwi-mostos-prairie cow-which came
first, the buffalo, the cow, or the prairie?” Mcllwraith: kiyam, 13.
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