Duncan Mercredi has often resisted being placed in the spotlight, preferring instead to turn everyone’s attention toward the brilliant emerging Indigenous writers who have been arriving on the scene for more than a generation now—many of whom he has mentored and supported. But as we have worked together on this book, I’ve had the opportunity to visit with Duncan more often, and to gain a deeper understanding of his life, his art, and his connections to the land and the people of his home. He has given me permission to share some of the things I’ve learned in our conversations, so that you can have a better context for the work contained in these pages. Because his poetry is so closely woven into his experiences and his relationships, I feel it is important for readers to be welcomed into the sphere of those relations too. Perhaps the best way to do this is to imagine that you and I are walking together along a trapline, or a dark city street, or a wind-blown highway, and that I’m telling you about someone we are about to meet just around the next corner. His reputation precedes him, but there is so much more to learn.
Upon meeting Duncan, one of the first things you will probably notice is his generous and self-effacing approach to the artist’s life. This attitude reminds me of the Cree concept of peweyimowin: humility. Putting others forward, being generous when no one is watching, diminishing the importance of your own achievements—these are all aspects of peweyimowin as it is lived not only among Cree-speaking peoples, but also in many other Indigenous cultures of Turtle Island. It hardly needs to be said that the practice of peweyimowin is highly unusual in the contemporary literary world, and it may not always mesh well with the business side of being a writer, but it is simply a part of who Duncan Mercredi is, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Duncan is allergic to pretension and pomposity, and he has no interest in the machinery of self-promotion, preferring instead to invest all of his creative energy into the work itself, and into fostering the next generation of story-makers.
This approach inevitably shapes his poems themselves. One might say that Duncan Mercredi’s poetics are based upon a disdain for bullshit in all of its forms, and a dedication to the truth-telling potential of language. He does not seek acclaim, and yet the directness and energy of his work has made him a figure of great respect in literary and storytelling circles. Duncan’s reputation as a writer and storyteller has grown the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth spread by all those who have been captivated by his stories, his poems, and his performances. People recognize that he has lived what he writes about, and that he continues to live it. This is not to say that Duncan’s stories and poems are all documentary in nature, but that they come from a place of deep and thoughtful observation. He is well-versed in Cree and Métis storytelling traditions, and he also knows intimately the lived experience of Indigenous people in his homeland, ranging from the city to the highway to the bush. His stories and poems reflect the truths of that experience.
This valuing of truth-telling may well be connected to Duncan’s earliest training as a storyteller during his childhood in his home community of Misipawistik (later known as Grand Rapids, Manitoba). Born into a family of Cree and Métis heritage, Duncan was chosen at a young age by his kookum to be the family’s story-carrier, and this role involved a great deal of careful study and memory-work, all of which was conducted in his first language, Cree. Duncan often talks about the ka-pa-gu-ka-chick, or visitors, the storytellers who came to Misipawistik each winter carrying news of the people’s neighbours and relatives along the river. His kookum explained to him the crucial importance of remembering the stories of the ka-pa-gu-ka-chick and retelling them accurately: if there were gaps or errors in the retold story, it could distort the community’s history or damage someone’s reputation. Duncan describes the ways his kookum would test him to be sure he remembered each story, detail by detail. Mistakes would earn him extra household chores, including the most dreaded one: emptying the chamberpot. His kookum applied this teaching technique not only with the stories of the ka-pa-gu-ka-chick, but also with the traditional Métis stories she told, many of which involved the Roogaroo, a shapeshifting being that can change between human and wolf form. The Roogaroo would later come to be an important character in Duncan’s own performances as well as his poems.
Duncan Mercredi is renowned today for his tellings of those traditional Métis stories he learned from his kookum. He performs many times each year in schools, universities, and storytelling festivals, and he is especially well-known for the interactivity of his performances. There is no fourth wall in a Duncan Mercredi storytelling; audience members become participants in the story, and in a sense they also become community members, if only for the brief time of the performance. As he is telling a story, Duncan transforms himself bodily into the characters, mimicking someone’s gait, shifting the register of his voice, creeping or dashing around the room, whispering into an audience member’s ear. He shows us how the storyteller can be a kind of shape-changer too.
While many Indigenous poets are also storytellers in an informal way, and virtually all of them are devotees of Indigenous oral traditions, I know of no one other than Duncan Mercredi who is equally skilled as a storyteller and a poet. His balancing of these two practices is unique, and it is clear that his skills in both realms are mutually supportive. His stories are marked by the vivid imagery of a poet, and by a finely honed sensitivity to cadence and wordplay. His public readings of his written work are dazzling performances that go far beyond what is normally suggested by the staid term “poetry reading.” Some of his poems, like the audience favourite “this city is red,” have continued to change and evolve over many years of performance, like oral stories tend to do. Writing down the poem is sometimes a secondary activity for Duncan in comparison to the performance, which remains the forge of his creativity.
Many of the poems in this collection are also concerned with witnessing Indigenous history and documenting the injustices of colonialism. Like the stories of the ka-pa-gu-ka-chick, these poems are directed toward telling and preserving the community’s own truths, outside of the distorting mechanisms of colonial history. Some poems, such as “Gabriel (Buffalo Hunt),” gesture back several generations to celebrate the traditional ways of life on the land. Others examine Indigenous experiences of colonial violence in many forms, especially when these histories are largely unacknowledged by settler-colonial culture. Nearly a quarter of a century before the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, Duncan’s poems “Black Robe” and “Forgotten Words” powerfully represented Indigenous people’s experiences of abuse, language loss, and cultural disorientation caused by Canada’s residential schools program. Ten years before the province of Manitoba issued an official apology for the failure of the justice system in the case of Helen Betty Osborne’s brutal murder, Mercredi’s poem “Betty” issued a haunting condemnation of the conspiracies of silence that have for so long preserved the fictions of Canada’s innocence and benevolence.
One crucial event in Misipawistik’s history has had a particularly large impact on Duncan Mercredi’s life as well as his poems and stories: the construction of the Grand Rapids Dam. Begun in 1960 when Duncan was nine years old and completed in 1968, this Manitoba Hydro megaproject drastically changed life for the people of Misipawistik.1 The land itself was massively altered, with the flooding of vast areas of hunting and trapping territory, sacred sites, homes, and hunting camps. Even the river was diverted, and the rapids that gave Misipawistik its name were silenced forever. The influx of thousands of construction workers from the south also dramatically affected the community, bringing racism, social inequity, alcohol, and violence, including widespread predation upon the community’s women and girls. The traditional hunting and fishing economy was devastated. English became the majority language, and a hierarchical class system began to create divisions in the community. Soon after the river’s flow was interrupted, the ka-pa-gu-ka-chick no longer brought their stories to Misipawistik.
While there is no single representative “Hydro poem” in mahikan ka onot, the impact of Hydro is pervasive throughout the collection. In his storytelling practice, Duncan divides the history of Misipawistik into two different eras: Before Hydro and After Hydro. He also sees the same division in his own life—his traditional Cree/Métis childhood interrupted by the juggernaut of colonial modernity. Soon after the dam became operational, Duncan left Misipawistik, first to work in bush camps and eventually to make a home in Winnipeg. While he has now developed an intimate connection to what he calls his “urban trapline” on the streets of Winnipeg, still he does not forget his early life in Misipawistik and the changes he has lived through. In many of his poems, there is a before and an after, gesturing toward the two phases of Mercredi’s life that are bisected by the construction of the dam. In “A Remembering Smile,” the narrator walks city streets that are “full of strangers with eyes distant / unseeing,” but as he navigates this hostile environment, he takes solace in memories of his childhood, when he lived close to friends and family and he played on a familiar and living landscape, “still hearing the river / the river wild and free / alive.” The poem is punctuated by the different sounds the river made throughout the seasons of the narrator’s childhood, and it becomes clear that the river itself was a living companion, perhaps even a storyteller, for the people of the community. It is devastating to read this poem with the knowledge that the Saskatchewan River at Misipawistik no longer makes any of those sounds—that the rapids themselves are gone. Nonetheless, for the narrator, his memory remains a conduit of connection to the land, even when the voice of the river has been silenced by the construction of the dam.
The city is often the landscape of “after” in these poems: after the dam, after displacement, after the residential schools, after environmental damage, after every other symptom of colonization’s arrival and entrenchment. Nonetheless, the city is also a place of dreams, of camaraderie, and of burgeoning solidarity, as Indigenous people connect there and form a new kind of community. Duncan Mercredi’s work provides a rare look at the history of urban Indigenous people’s struggles for empowerment, and their continued efforts to maintain their relationships to the land. Today, more than half of Indigenous people in Canada live in urban centres2, yet the experience of urban Indigenous people remains underrepresented in literature, film, and music. Duncan’s poems resonate with the emotions and the politics behind this statistic. His portrayal of the city is sometimes wary—alert to the omnipresent possibility of discrimination and violence—but also equally open to the energy of Indigenous resistance and resurgence that coalesces on the streets, in coffee shops, in bars. This energy is often expressed in dancing, which is portrayed in these poems as a claim of relationship to the land and to community—a decolonial performance of urban belonging. In “this city is red,” his great anthem of Indigenous Winnipeg, he writes “we laugh, we cry, we heal, we dance, we sing, our heartbeat is the drum.” While the city is definitely the place of “after” in these poems, this “after” is emphatically not a time of cultural erasure, but a time when resistance and resurgence become the most important modes of Indigenous life.
One question that remains is: who or what are the howling wolves (mahikanuk ka onot) of this book? There is not a simple answer to this question, but there are several possibilities. Certainly, the wolf as a character is crucial to Duncan Mercredi’s work, as the titles of all his books indicate. In his first book, Spirit of the Wolf: Raise Your Voice, the wolf’s howl is a kind of call to community, a prompt for other Indigenous voices to join in, to stand up for themselves and to be a part of the group. Anyone who has heard wolves howl will know that this is exactly what they do: one starts the song, and then the others join in. This is particularly meaningful given that the book came into being in the summer of 1990, during the Oka crisis, when the Mohawk community of Kanesetake was under threat from the Canadian army, and a groundswell of support from Indigenous communities across the country forever changed the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. As I have argued in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, 1990 is probably the most important year in Canadian Indigenous literary history, because the Oka crisis and its aftermath sparked a flourishing of creativity among Indigenous writers that continues to this day.
Duncan Mercredi came of age as a writer during that tumultuous summer, and in many ways his first book is a direct response to that galvanizing moment, a voice raised in solidarity with his relatives from across Turtle Island. He recalls being part of an extraordinary Indigenous writers’ workshop organized by Pemmican Publishers and held in Winnipeg that summer, led by Maria Campbell, Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, Jordan Wheeler, and several other luminaries of Indigenous literature. The workshop concluded with a public reading at Winnipeg’s West End Cultural Centre, where more than 200 audience members witnessed the beginning of a new era in Indigenous literature. It was Duncan Mercredi’s first performance as a poet. He signed the contract for his first book with Pemmican Publishers shortly afterward, and he published three more books with them in the following decade.
Another version of the wolf in these poems is the lone wolf, a figure that is reminiscent of many of the narrators—a solitary character who mostly shuns society, but who also observes it from a careful distance. This is especially true of the poems set in the urban space and in the world of labour, where racist reactions to the narrators’ Indigeneity often seem to create an uncrossable barrier. The work poems here arise out of Mercredi’s many years labouring in the largely non-Indigenous contexts of bush camps and highway survey crews. Some of these pieces reference blue-collar solidarity that crosses the boundaries of settler colonialism, but more often, the narrators of these poems are made aware of their cultural difference, as in the poem “scraps of paper”:
the sudden silences when he enters rooms
his brown face alone stands out
the furtive looks, whispers about men in long hair.
In this poem, the narrator turns to his writing as a response to this sense of isolation and judgment, creating “memories on scraps of paper” as a way of asserting and validating Indigenous presence in these “small towns and villages / dying under the prairie sky.” If the writer here is a lone wolf, he is also the one who knows how to use stories to survive.
A very different iteration of the wolf in these poems is the creature of urban sociality and celebration, as represented most clearly in the blues ethos of Mercredi’s fourth book, Duke of Windsor: Wolf Sings the Blues. Titled after a popular Winnipeg blues bar and Indigenous meeting place, this book is alive with the rhythms and themes of the blues, drawing upon African-American traditions of lament, resistance, and community solidarity. In this context, it seems more than possible that mahikan ka onot is a Cree/Métis incarnation of Howlin’ Wolf, the famous bluesman who adapted Mississippi Delta blues into the urban context of 1950s Chicago, and transformed American music in the process. One of Howlin’ Wolf’s great contributions was to bring the rural Black sensibility of Delta blues into an urban, electrified milieu, reflecting a new mode of Black empowerment that came into being in the era of The Great Migration. Thus it is no surprise that Chicago blues was enormously attractive to Duncan Mercredi and many other Indigenous people who moved to the cities in the 1960s and ’70s. Duncan’s poetry attempts a similar fusion of gritty urban life with traditional stories and life on the land. As he writes in “yesterday’s song,”
even though my feet are concrete hardened
and my spirit tells stories of neon and blues
i am the son of muskeg and spruce
i still dance to the music of yesterday.
The final kind of wolf that haunts this book is the Roogaroo, the character so prominent in the Métis oral stories that Duncan learned from his kookum. As I mentioned above, the Roogaroo is capable of changing from wolf to human form, usually at will. It is often shunned in polite society or associated with mysterious or destabilizing forces, including the powers of women. At the same time, many Roogaroo stories also show a strong sympathy for this character—so much so that the Roogaroo can be seen as an oft-misunderstood Métis culture hero in works like Maria Campbell’s “Roogaroos” and Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild. In Duncan Mercredi’s own oral stories, the Roogaroo is sometimes a beautiful young woman, sometimes an old lady, sometimes an indeterminate shape that leaves canine tracks in the snow. It seems to be capable of time travel, and it reflects our own selves back to us when we gaze at it. Always in these stories, the Roogaroo is the core of a mystery that the audience is asked to solve. To me this is reminiscent of the many appearances of mahikanuk in this book. The wolf is never presented as an explanation or a straightforward symbol in these poems, but instead it arrives as a witness and as an embodiment of mystery, an invitation for readers to ponder their own place in relation to the story. mahikan is watching us with its otherworldly eyes as we explore the meaning of the poem. Perhaps it is even testing us.
—Warren Cariou