She won an honourable mention, and was offered an editor and a publishing deal. After seeing an advertisement for a literary contest in the Cape Breton post in 1974, she decided to submit some of her work. Once she began publishing her poems, which received a wave of unexpected positive feedback, Rita Joe began writing a weekly column for the Micmac News on subjects ranging from Mi’kmaw medicines and home remedies to traditional stories. Her desire to write also grew out of a general sense of astonishment when her children began learning about Canadian history in their teens and brought home textbooks with incredibly negative and at times blatantly false portrayals of Indigenous people that were passed off as truthful and historically accurate. It was around this time that Rita Joe also began writing-a pastime that became a form of therapy for her because it addressed her situation, past and present, as well as the situation of her children and of her people. In 1956, they moved back to Nova Scotia and moved in with Frank’s mother in Eskasoni, and in the mid-1960s, began building their own house. Both were relatively poor when they got married, and both relied on the help of extended family members, neighbours, and the local community to support their growing family. In 1954, she met her husband, Frank Joe, who was from Eskasoni, a Mi’kmaw nation close to where Rita Joe grew up. In the years that followed, she became pregnant, travelled to Boston, and floated back and forth between different jobs, all of which seemed more or less the same with their long hours and low pay. In the years that followed, Joe struggled to acclimatize herself to life outside the residential school: she recalls that she was naïve and insecure, she began drinking, and, though she tried hard to fit in with her friends and co-workers, she had trouble in relationships. Joe subsequently sought work in a restaurant, first working in the kitchen and later as a waitress, but was fired when she refused to take a customer’s abuse. However, because her new job required her to work in an institution run by nuns, it differed little from her former residence. Hoping to regain some of the freedom, independence, and spirituality that she had lost to the residential school system, she accepted it immediately. When Joe was sixteen, she was offered a position at an infirmary in Halifax. Although she resented, for a long time, the fact that the school regimented her daily life and attempted to take away her language, culture, and spirituality, in looking back she chooses to focus on her positive experiences and to be grateful for the last four years of foster care it provided her with. Despite being ridiculed later for voluntarily enrolling, Joe maintains that she did not regret her decision. Like most residential schools, the environment was cold and demoralizing, and children were forbidden to speak their Indigenous languages. Her experience was not quite what she expected. With the intention of educating herself and learning how to cook, sew, and weave baskets, Joe wrote to the Indian Agent in Shubenacadie and asked to be admitted to the residential school there. There, she gradually became worried by her guardians’ heavy drinking. īetween 19, she returned to the We’koqma’q reserve to live with her father and her siblings, Annabel, Soln, Roddy, and Matt, but only one year later, when her father passed away from pneumonia, she was forced back into foster care with her half-brother’s family in Oxford. Although she felt closer to some families than others, she has characterized that period of her life as one of dislocation, lovelessness, and abuse. At age five, loss intruded into her otherwise happy childhood when her mother died in childbirth and Joe was sent to live in a series of local foster families. She spent her early childhood with her parents and her older brother, Soln, in an environment she described as loving, gentle, and positive, yet very poor ( Song of Rita Joe 17). Rita Joe was born on Maon a We’koqma’q First Nation reserve on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. She received numerous awards, was an important elder in her community, and has had her work featured in several anthologies. Rita Joe (born Rita Bernard) was a well-known Mi’kmaw poet and songwriter who published a number of poems, songs, and an autobiography.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |