Indigenous
In Our Own Aboriginal Voice 2
The Aboriginal Identity, by Jeremy Ratt
Being raised in alienation of your own culture is a very strange experience, to say the least, and the coming together of many individuals to celebrate their culture's history was something I could never feel truly ingrained with. There was a sense of dissociation throughout my childhood, where I found myself in a position that belonged to neither side, but somewhere in the middle. And with more and more birthday candles being placed on the cake, I developed an askew perspective of my own people and the people around my people.
New Ways, by Connie Fife
now as a grown woman
I have passed through the brief solitudes
brought on by the changing of another season
the slow movement of shifting colours
and the loping arrival of winter
your absence has been replaced
by the warmth of full bellied poems
who have slept nestled against my spine
their tongues peeling back on old skin
I am trying to find new ways to live
original means by which to feel alive
the breathing in and out of a
politic by which to free a heart
that the stars have already caught in their throats.
Kiskajeyi- I AM READY
RESURGENT HOPE
Hope is a vision
of unknown circumstances
disguising itself
on moments of
reconstructed monologues
seldom heard in public
do not restrain
be heard
feel the strength
of Mother Earth's
magnetic anomalies
renewing visions
carefully placed alongside
our common goals of survival
listen to her drumbeats
of collective sorrows
drumbeats of healing
soft-petal collisions
we manage to uphold
as a way of recognizing
how we need
to behave in this world
