Lina Annotates Halfe's "Red"
Annotations
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Red
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Beside the gravel drive way
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are a grove of trees.
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My husband has hung
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four red dresses.
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I watch them sway and dance
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sleeves uplifted in the branches.
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Red.
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Valentines, Anniversaries.
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Birthdays, Christmas.
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Red lipstick, nail polish,
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Shoes, dresses, purses
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accessories matched
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for love.
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My father butchering
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deer, rabbit, duck, beaver
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muskrat, moose or elk.
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Nohkom’s headkerchief.
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Nimosoom’s neck bandana.
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Smouldering hot embers
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smoking dried meat.
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An infant’s birth blood gushing
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from the tunnel of life.
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Its placenta buried
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in the root of a tree.
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The red hand paintings
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on a river’s cliffs, caves
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where people meditated
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their vision.
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Four fires tended by the oskapewisuk
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for four days mourning the truth
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at reconciliation gatherings.
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They return to the hearth.
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Prayer cloth offerings to the south
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where thunder and lightning
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rip the heavens.
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Fire bolts
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racing through the tree
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it’s arms bursting with flames.
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Red dresses hanging
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in the Canadian Human Rights Museum.
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The people’s blood
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coursing through our veins.
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I think what's really important in this particular poem is that
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it does address the missing and murdered aboriginal woman, right
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and,uh, red has become associated with, uh, that
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that terrible, those terrible things that have happened to our woman
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and I'm terribly, I feel terrible, terrible about that
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but, um, we come from blood right? and we return,
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we, uh, our, our, our, our birth canal when our child is born
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is filled with, uh blood, and, um and, we also come from a very, very long history of cave paintings
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where our ancestors left their story. The pictographs right? so yeah.
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And we also, um, when we're talking about, uh, survival as aboriginal woman,
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we have, we face so much, and people don't recognize it
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and increasingly, as I read about black women's stories, I see a lot of perill parallels
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it's really important to find this balance between what happened to our women and what happen
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that, that life giving blood that is still coursing through our veins.
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We must understand, I think, that, um, all, all, everything and anything that has ever had a, um,
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breathing apparatus here on Earth, has left their breath in the wind, so they're never,
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ever far from us. They are in the wind, and that is one of the teachings of our Elders.