Meshake and Anderson in Thunder Bay

  • November 8, 2019

Join Rene Meshake and Dr. Kim Anderson for the Launch of their Book, Injichaag: My Soul in Story on November 8th, 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm at The Study Coffeehouse, Lakehead University.

Authors Rene Meshake an accomplished Anishinaabe storyteller and artist and Dr. Kim Anderson a distinguished Cree/Métis scholar will be joining us to share and discuss excerpts from their book, Injichaag: My Soul in Story.

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.”

Light snacks and refreshments will be provided.

This event is sponsored by the Office of Aboriginal Initiatives, The Departments of Indigenous Learning, Sociology, and Visual Arts, and the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

About the Authors

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.