Book Launch for Injichaag: My Soul in Story: Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words
Mon. Jan. 27 12:30 PM
- Mon. Jan. 27 01:30 PM
Location: Convocation Hall, University of Winnipeg
The University of Winnpeg and University of Manitoba Press are pleased to present a launch of Rene Meshake and Kim Andersons's book Injichaag: My Soul in Story: Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words
This book shares the life story of Anishinaabe artist Rene Meshake in stories, poetry, and Anishinaabemowin “word bundles” that serve as a dictionary of Ojibwe poetics. Meshake was born in the railway town of Nakina in northwestern Ontario in 1948, and spent his early years living off-reserve with his grandmother in a matriarchal land-based community he calls Pagwashing. He was raised through his grandmother’s “bush university,” periodically attending Indian day school, but at the age of ten Rene was scooped into the Indian residential school system, where he suffered sexual abuse as well as the loss of language and connection to family and community. This residential school experience was lifechanging, as it suffocated his artistic expression and resulted in decades of struggle and healing. Now in his twenty-eighth year of sobriety, Rene is a successful multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. Meshake’s artistic vision and poetic lens provide a unique telling of a story of colonization and recovery.
The material is organized thematically around a series of Meshake’s paintings. It is framed by Dr. Kim Anderson, Rene’s Odaanisan (adopted daughter), a scholar of oral history who has worked with Meshake for two decades.
This event is sponsored by the Weweni Indigenous Speakers Series and the University of Winnipeg Department of Anthropology.