Meshake and Anderson at UManitoba

  • January 28, 2020

University of Manitoba Press and the Institute for the Humanities are pleased to present Rene Meshake & Kim Anderson launching Injichaag: My Soul in Story / Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words.

This event features Warren Cariou, who directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, teaches in the Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media, and is a writer/visual artist.

Join us for art, music, and bannock/jam!

Date: Tuesday, January 28, 2:30 pm
Location: Cross Common Room, St. John’s College (92 Dysart Road), University of Manitoba.
Cost: FREE

About the Book

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 life changing, 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.”

About the Presenters

Rene Meshake is an Anishinaabe Elder, visual and performing artist, award-winning author, storyteller, flute player, new media artist and a Recipient of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Kim Anderson is a Cree/Métis writer, a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Relationships, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph. She has published six books, including Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine and Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration.

Warren Cariou was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan into a family of Métis and European heritage. Though he has lived away from Meadow Lake for many years, his art and academic work maintains a focus on the cultural and environmental questions that have preoccupied the people of his homeland. His books, films, photography and scholarly research explore themes of community, environment, orality and belonging in the Canadian west, with particular focus on the relationships between Indigenous stories and the land. Warren directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba, where he also teaches in the Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media.

About the Institute for the Humanities

The University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities (UMIH) was established in 1990 to foster research and scholarship in the Humanities at the University of Manitoba, to promote cross-disciplinary research in the Humanities, and to help obtain external funding for Humanities research.

The Institute addresses the needs and interests of researchers in a broad range of subject including literature and languages, film and visual culture, philosophy, history and religion, and also the literary, philosophical, theological and historical aspects of the social and physical sciences, mathematics, the arts, and professional studies. It also supports an annual graduate fellowship worth up to $3000.

UMIH supports two or three research clusters and two or three research affiliates. The Institute is located within the Faculty of Arts but is intended to serve the entire Humanities constituency in the University and the general community. The Institute is accordingly committed to community outreach through programs and lecture series for the general public. UMIH is involved in various interdisciplinary, humanities-themed research initiatives.