Voices in the Circle: An Evening with Rene Meshake and Kim Anderson

  • January 27, 2020

McNally Robinson Booksellers, The Winnipeg International Writers Festival & University of Manitoba Press are pleased to present Rene Meshake & Kim Anderson launching Injichaag: My Soul in Story / Anishinaabe Poetics in Art and Words.

This event is co-presented by the Winnipeg International Writers Festival as part of their Voices in the Circle initiative celebrating Indigenous writing in Canada.

Date: Monday, January 27, 7:00 pm
Location: McNally Robinson Booksellers (1120 Grant Avenue), Winnipeg.
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 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.

About Voices in the Circle

Voices in the Circle: Celebrating Indigenous Writing in Canada, an initiative of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival (WIWF), was one of 200 exceptional projects across the country, funded by the Canada Council’s New Chapter grant. Throughout 2018 and 2019, the WIWF showcased Indigenous writers on stages around Winnipeg, and created mentorship opportunities in schools and community centres in communities throughout Manitoba as well as in Nunavut. We also partnered with CV2 and Prairie Fire to publish ndn country, an anthology of new Indigenous writing, edited by Katherena Vermette and Warren Cariou. Moving forward, Voices in the Circle continues as a partnership between WIWF, McNally Robinson Booksellers, and other community partners committed to celebrating the vitality, creativity, and insight Indigenous writers are contributing to our culture.