Eeyou (Cree) writer Margaret Sam-Cromarty’s work captured in James Bay Memoirs and Other Stories is the eighth and newest offering in the First Voices, First Texts series from the University of Manitoba Press.
Seeing her work collected and printed 30 years after publishing her first book is a “good feeling,” said Sam-Cromarty, and wholly unexpected. “I didn’t think it would happen because…I lived in a different era.”
First Voices, First Texts “reconnect(s) contemporary readers with some of the most important Aboriginal literature of the past, much of which has been unavailable for decades,” writes series editor Warren Cariou, who is Métis. The series provides newly re-edited texts “presented with particular sensitivity toward Indigenous ethics, traditions, and contemporary realities,” he explains.
James Bay Memoirs and Other Stories is comprised of Sam-Cromarty’s books—James Bay Memoirs: A Cree Woman’s Ode to her Homeland (1992), Légendes et poèmes indiens/Indian Legends and Poems (1996) and Contes et poèmes cris/Cree Poems and Stories (2000).
It also includes some of Sam-Cromarty’s editorials and poems contributed from 1993 to 1998 to The Nation, an independent magazine of the Crees of Eeyou Istchee, as well as her contributions to Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice (1996) and to Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods (1998).
Sam-Cromarty revisited her work before it was published in the new collection. She made no changes and said she found the content to be “amazing…I was not really surprised, you know. What I wrote was real. I lived it.”
Sam-Cromarty’s first book A Cree Woman’s Ode to Her Homeland was originally edited by Georgia Elston. She framed it as an “activist project.” Written between 1985 and 1992, Sam-Cromarty’s work captured her family’s and community’s forced relocation from Fort George Island to Chisasibi because of the first phase of Hydro-Quebec’s James Bay project. Sam-Cromarty writes about her time both before and after relocation.
“Elston’s editorial decisions reflect a certain vision of what Indigenous literatures are, as seen through the lens of a non-Indigenous bias,” write Isabella Huberman and Élise Couture-Grondin, editors of James Bay Memoirs and Other Stories.
One of the intents of the First Voices, First Texts series is to provide insight into the cultural contexts of the author’s work and present it in the author’s voice. The new editors point out that Elston’s framing was based on stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as protectors of the environment and Sam-Cromarty as a spokesperson for the Cree.
“I had no intention of anything. I just wrote down what I had in my mind. I didn’t even intend it to be a book,” Sam-Cromarty told Windspeaker.com. “It’s just simple language, just simple writings of me and when I was in the bush.”
Sam-Cromarty laughs at the idea of “activist literature,” saying, “I didn’t know anything about literature…until later.”
Her two poem collections were printed by small presses in Quebec in both English and French. Légendes et poèmes indiens, published by Jean Ferguson, also bought into the Indigenous stereotype, with Ferguson saying Sam-Cromarty’s writing was “representative of the ‘kind of mystical impulse specific to Northern peoples’.”
“His presentation is also coloured by a certain romanticism,” write Huberman and Couture-Grondin.
Whether stories or poems, Sam-Cromarty’s work is all in verse.
“I thought of writing a novel first. But it was too hard. So I thought, ‘Why not in verse?’ It’s simpler. And people like it. When you don’t know enough English, you write in verse,” she said with a laugh.
Much to her great pleasure, her “own people” like her work. It surprised her because “they’re not literary minded. They’re not into literature.” But she thinks they liked her writing because “I was one of them” and they could relate to her words.
Through the First Voices, First Texts series, Sam-Cromarty will see her work placed in the hands of the mainstream contemporary audience she did not reach the first time around. Her work will also be circulated more broadly in university classrooms.
Sam-Cromarty believes her work does have a place in today’s society.
In the poem “Life,” she writes, “In this time/of steel/and of speed,/we need/poetry./…A new dawn:/in its blue-shadow world/things move so fast./Now moving faster and faster.”
That poem, written in 1989, still holds true today, she says, and poetry is still needed “because it’s peaceful.”
James Bay Memoirs and Other Stories, published by University of Manitoba Press, is available in April. It can be ordered through https://uofmpress.ca/books/james-bay-memoirs-and-other-stories
