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| Professor emerita Linda LeGarde Grover |
Professor emerita Linda LeGarde Grover shares a collection of poems through The Sky Watched, reflecting the Ojibwe community worldview, history, and path forward. Ancient stories of creation and reinvention converge with the long-forgotten suffering of children and grandmothers amid the Indian boarding school era. The poems in Ojibwe and English are structured in four parts, aligning with the sacredness of the number four in the Ojibwe belief system. They tell of wondrous realizations and harsh truths garnered through small moments of kindness and comfort in the most unexpected ways.
The first set of poems in The Sky Watched focuses on Indigenous legends and myths of old, drawing ancestral wisdom. Poems depicting separation, isolation, sorrow, and loss in Indian boarding schools are the hardest to read. Children were demanded to “forget the language of their grandparents,” and they often considered “so many ways to die.” Escape was futile, even with the certainty of death. Hope and resistance grace the rest of the poems, assuring readers that the voices and spirit of the Ojibwe have endured.
Survival and resistance assured the continuation of the everlasting Ojibwe story. //The Sky Watched// is truly a gift of collective memory through generations broken by genocide and colonization. Poetry is the medium most suitable for speaking truth and bearing witness to suffering, naming the unspeakable psychological, emotional, and physical abuse experienced by Indigenous children. Family is central to Grover’s extraordinary flair for expressing the unimaginable prospect of reclaiming joy and hope to overcome intergenerational trauma.
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