Canadian Book Review ~ The Dialogues by Armand Garnet Ruffo

 

Kingston author Armand Garnet Ruffo's staggeringly powerful poetry collection, The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow. brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories.  From Wasauksing (Parry 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. More about Armand Garnet Ruffo: Armand Garnet Ruffo is an Anishinaabe writer from Treaty #9 territory in northern Ontario. A recipient of an Honourary 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.