Description
Armand Garnet Ruffo is an Anishnaabe writer from northern Ontario and a member of the Chapleau (Fox Lake) Cree First Nation. A recipient of an Honorary Life Membership Award from the League of Canadian Poets and the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, he is recognized as a major contributor to both Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His publications Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (2014) and Treaty # (2019) were finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. He teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Brian D. McInnes is the great-grandson of Francis Pegahmagabow and a member of the Wasauksing First Nation. He is an author and professor of Ojibwe language and culture in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His extensive knowledge about the life of his great-grandfather and his Ojibwe culture and language informed the production of Sounding Thunder: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow.
In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Manitoulin Island to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life.
Throughout, Ruffo uses the Ojibwe concept of two-eyed seeing, which combines the strengths of western and Indigenous ways of knowing, and invites the reader to do the same, particularly through the inclusion of the Anishinaabemowin language within the collection. These are poems that challenge western conventions of thinking, that celebrate hope and that show us a new way to see the world.