This edition of The Sky Watched, which was first published by Red Mountain Press in 2016, is a revised and expanded collective memoir in poetry of Anishinaabe/Ojibwe people of the western Great Lakes regions. The poems include spiritual teachings, experiences of individuals ages ago and yesterday, the impact of European and American settler cultures on traditions and religious practices as well as the lives of individuals, families, communities, and tribes. Interwoven throughout, I hope, is that uniquely Ojibwe way of looking at the world in the context of walking the road of Bimaadiziwin, the living of a good life. Ojibwewag walking that road meet all they encounter with those values that have been handed down from generation to generation: humility, gratitude, generosity, and an awareness of the world around us.
The Sky Watched is organized into four parts, in acknowledgment of the time-honored significance of the number four in Ojibwe tradition and belief. The pattern is evident and constant in our lives: there are four directions, four sacred colors, four seasons. There are four sacred medicines (tobacco, cedar, sweetgrass, and sage) that are the grandmothers of all the other medicines. The four parts of The Sky Watched follow the four human ages, intertwined with the ages of the Earth: Oshkabinoojiinh awi, Abinoojiinh awi, Anishinaabewi, and Gichi-Anishinaabewi (infancy, childhood, adulthood, elderhood).
Part I, Oshkabinoojiinh awi, introduces Daadibaajimoowinini, the storyteller manifest in a turtle sculpture by Gordon Van Wert, who guides us into poems about Ojibwe histories and spirits, establishing a worldview that will be damaged but not destroyed. In Part II, Abinoojiinh awi, poems speak of the impacts of the Indian boarding school era on Ojibwe lives, individual and collective, and on the destruction of practices and relationships that had held the world together for generations. The poems in Part III, Anishinaabewi, interpret life after the end of boarding schools—the picking up of pieces, the searching for lost pieces, and the hopeful but realistic endeavors to survive and continue in the midst of tremendous loss. Part IV, Gichi-Anishinaabewi, addresses contemporary issues that are linked to both the beauty of the teachings in Part I and the destructions and means of survival in Parts II and III.
One of the threads running through and connecting all four parts is the consideration of what it means to be Anishinaabe: what did it mean in earlier times, and how have those foundational beliefs morphed, and morphed again, seeming to change and shift shape yet always returning to Debwewin, the truth.