collage

The challenge I set for myself here was to incorporate a necessary wordlessness into that which is made of words. This is the paper version, impossible to publish. So the one-of-a-kindness suggested textile collage, prototyped here.

Buffalo Alberta had a population of 3 in 1991, the teacher, the postmistress and her husband. There was a school, a grain elevator, a tiny church, a post office; everything else was boarded up or torn down.Soon enough these buildings would be gone, even the prairie sentinel – the grain elevator. The average population density

To say that tens of millions of buffalo (Bison bison) vanished from the prairies in the late 1800s is to whitewash a slaughter of historical proportions. American hunters sparked a demand for bison hides and bones, which Canadian hunters filled in their turn. The bison carcasses were left to rot; their skeletons littered the plains;

By the time the Canadian Pacific Railroad was completed in 1885, only 23 homesteads had been claimed along the 400 miles from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan to Calgary, Alberta. Captain John Palliser, a British government surveyor, had surveyed the area in 1859 and deemed much of the area a semi-desert, unfit for agriculture. But at the

Those who know me are familiar with my disdain for greeting card holidays. Even the woman who lobbied for the creation of Mother’s Day regretted the results and tried to undo it. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, should we be thankful that Mother’s Day doesn’t last all year? So, my post today is happenstance, a work

Born without storm into autumnal gold, baby Elsie wore mystery, veiled in her caul, seeing only the love in our fathomless eyes. Dispatched with an angel’s kiss, she arrived in Thanksgiving’s low glowing sun. Yet the lore of the caul conjured mystery drawn from a shadowless night. Untroubled by her tumultuous journey into the light,

on this wave of ten-thousand-year old moraine sheltered by grandmother pines planted by long-ago school children this land loved by the Anishinaabe bow down give wordless greetings silent thanks she who is bigger than boundaries greater than nations remember her honour her bend and weave as basket willow ripple flow with water and air listen