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 Kim Anderson, Rene's Odaanisan (adopted daughter), a scholar of oral history who has worked with Meshake for two decades. Full of teachings that give a glimpse of traditional Anishinaabek lifeways and worldviews, Injichaag: My Soul in Story is "more than a memoir."

Author: Rene Meshake
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 10/11/2019
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.69h x 7.21w x 0.84d
ISBN13: 9780887558481
ISBN10: 0887558488
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Artists, Architects, Photographers
- Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | Indigenous
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Native American Studies