The White Feather

          I met an exceptional poet this week. She has passed from this world, but I had the privilege of shaking Rita Joe’s calloused and gentle hands through her carefully chosen, often translated words. Comparing them to her history, you wouldn’t know they originated from the same person—that the inspiring poems, though tinged with sorrow, were written by the Mi’kmaq woman with the tragic life story. One of her favorite analogies was that of a white feather, symbolic in their culture of compassion, love, healing, wonder, and the spirit, all things good. Writing was that for her.

            Born in Whycoconagh, Cape Breton in 1932, Rita Joe was the sixth of seven children. Her mother died when she was five, scattering the family. The next eight years were a series of one foster home after another. She experienced abuse of every kind, even from her kin. Her overwhelming craving for approval meant young Rita kept quiet about what men and women alike did to her. In 1942, her father died and she went to live in her first non-Native community. Upon leaving, Rita went to Halifax and did everything from cleaning hospitals to babysitting children, just to stay afloat.

After marrying Frank Joe in 1954, the couple had eight children, later fostering two boys, and though Frank drank much of his life, beating her and seducing other women, the couple remained very much in love until his death in 1989. Rita’s dance with words began in her thirties, when she wrote a monthly column for Micmac News. She used “native” words, writing to record her—and her people’s—true story, not the one that had been negatively portrayed for so many years up to this point. Shortly after entering her first writing contest, she was presented with an offer for publication, which became Poems of Rita Joe.

The rest is history.

She wrote about everything, except her beatings, and she gives innumerable accounts of people coming up to her in tears, sharing how her works have impacted their lives. To this day, she is called the Poet Laureate of her Mi’kmaq people.

Rita’s life and works have been made into plays (The Ecstasy of Rita Joe), a bio pic, and even a symphony by a Dutch composer, showing the far-reaching influence on those of all nationalities. In the words of Rita Joe herself: “I leave behind the memory of an orphan child, picking herself up from the misery of being nobody, moving little grains of sand until she could talk about the first nations of this land” (169).

After drinking in the sensations that made up her world, the gritty sand underneath my fingernails, smoke from a wigwam, and her resilient, optimistic spirit, I can honestly say I will never see the world the same way again—

She left a white feather in my heart.

 

Joe, Rita. Songs of Rita Joe. Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1996. Print.