Biography

Known as the Poet Laureate of the Mi'kmaq people, Rita Joe is the most prominent aboriginal writer in Atlantic Canada's history, contributing not only poetry but also a personal commitment to peace and goodwill between native and non-native peoples. Born in the small village of Whycocomagh on Cape Breton Island in 1932, Joe, after her mother died when she was five, was placed in a series of foster homes. After the death of her father in 1942, the twelve-year-old Joe wrote to an Indian agent requesting to be admitted to the residential school in Shubenacadie, where she had some negative experiences, but, unlike most Native people who attended residential school, Joe looked back on those years as relatively positive. After having married and raised a family of her own, Joe began writing initially as a means of therapy and of educating the younger generation. When one of her daughters came home threatening to quit school over her history teacher's racist remark about the historical behavior of Native people, Joe resorted to poetry to turn the situation around, writing a collection of poems trying to present a more accurate view of Native people and their history. Joe's poetry is more prosaic than figurative, but its apparent simplicity often belies a stark power and a firm sense of commitment. It also reflects what critic Sam McKegney describes as her "affirmatist" stance - her positive and conciliatory, rather than confrontational attitude about the place of Native peoples in Canadian society. Joe's work provides a window to a greater understanding of her own culture, communicated in such a way as to both inform non-natives and inspire a new generation of aboriginals to engage with their history and their future. She approaches her poetry as an education, providing Mi'kmaq youth the opportunity to encounter and appreciate their culture and their language, as Joe often uses Mi'kmaq words but simultaneously offers a glossary in order for those who have lost their language. These efforts to represent and inspire her own people while communicating their experiences to the rest of Canada earned Rita Joe the Order of Canada, as well as a place on the Queen's Privy Council. Her books of poetry include Poems of Rita Joe (1988), Song of Eskasoni and Other Poems (1990), Lnu and Indians We're Called (1991) and We Are Dreamers (1999), which reprinted her first collection along with more recent material. Joe also published her life story, Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet, in 1996. She has also co-edited, with Lesley Choyce, The Mi'kmaq Anthology (1997). Having inspired a whole new generation of aboriginal writers, especially among her own people, Joe passed away in 2007 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

Bibliography

  • We are the Dreamers: Recent and Early Poetry. Wreck Cove, Nova Scotia: Breton Books, 2000.
  • Lnu and Indians We're Called. Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1991.
  • Song of Eskasoni: More Poems of Rita Joe. Nimbus Publishing, 1989.
  • Poems of Rita Joe. Out of Print. 1978.

    Other Works:
  • For the Children. Wreck Cove, Nova Scotia: Breton Books, 2009.
  • "The Gentle War." Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 10.2-3 (1989): 27-29.
  • Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
  • Joe, Rita and Lesley Choyce, eds. The Mi'kmaq Anthology. Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1997.
Selected Overviews
Lnu and Indians We're Called
Song of Eskasoni: More Poems of Rita Joe

Click on selected overview to read...

Critical Sources

  • Alba, Virgine. "Re-writing Cultures and Communities: Canadian Aboriginal Women and the Example of Slash." Canadian Issues 21 (1999): 190-212.
  • King, Thomas and Greg Staats. "Native Writers of Canada: A Photographic Portrait of 12 Contemporary Authors." Books in Canada 23.5 (1994): 12.
  • Lutz, Hartmut. "Rita Joe." Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors. Ed. Hartmut Lutz. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991. 241-64.
  • "'Talking at the Kitchen Table': A Personal Homage to Rita Joe of Reserve, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia." Down East: Critical Essays on Contemporary Maritime Literature. Ed. Wolfgang Hochbruck and James O. Taylor. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996. 278-88. McKegney, Sam. "'Analyze, If You Wish, But Listen': The Affirmatist Literary Methodology of Rita Joe." Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2007. 101-35.
  • McKegney, Sam. "'I Was at War-But It Was a Gentle War': The Power of the Positive in Rita Joe's Autobiography." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 30.1 (2006): 33-52.
  • Rasporich, Beverly. "Native Women Writing: Tracing the Patterns." Canadian Ethnic Studies 28.1 (1996): 37-51.
  • Song of Eskasoni. Dir. Brian Guns. National Film Board of Canada, 1993.
  • Smith, Gordon E., Kevin Alstrup. "Words and Music by Rita Joe: Dialogic Ethnomusicology." Canadian Journal for Traditional Music 23 (1995): 35-53.
  • Tileston, Susan. Review of We are the Dreamers: Recent and Early Poetry, by Rita Joe. The Pottersfield Portfolio 21.1 (2000): 4.
  • Williams, Kenneth. "Windspeaker Special Focus [National Aboriginal Achievement Awards]." Windspeaker 14.11 (1997).

    See also:
  • Fuller, Danielle. Writing the Everyday: Women's Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen's U.P., 2004. 157-82; 223-43.