Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium

2024
•
Author:

Marcie R. Rendon

Poem-songs summon the voices of Anishinaabe ancestors and sing to future generations

In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon summons her ancestors’ songs, and her poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations. Bringing memory to life, the senses to attention, she breaks the boundaries that time would impose, carrying the Anishinaabe way of life forward in the world.

Marcie R. Rendon gifts us with a meditative journey pulsing with the rhythms of life in Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium. Her moving words are lyrical and powerful, and they touch our ‘aloneness’ with vivid, beautiful images that carry dreams in song—connections with those who came before and are yet to come.

—

Gwen Nell Westerman, Poet Laureate of Minnesota

The ancestors who walk with us sing us our song. When we get quiet enough, we can hear them sing and make them audible to people today. In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon, a member of the White Earth Nation, summons those ancestors’ songs, and so begins the dream singing for generations yet to come. “The Anishinaabe heard stories in their dream songs,” Ojibwe author Gerald Vizenor wrote, and like those stories once inscribed in pictographs on birchbark scrolls, Rendon’s poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations.

Through dream-songs and poem-songs responding to works of theater, choral music, and opera, Rendon brings memory to life, the senses to attention—to see the moonbeams blossoming on the windowsill, to feel the hold of the earth, to hear the echo of grandmother’s breath, to lie on the bones of ancestors and feel the rhythms of silence running deep. Her singing, breaking the boundaries that time would impose, carries the Anishinaabe way of life forward in the world.

Marcie R. Rendon, White Earth Ojibwe, was included on Oprah Winfrey’s 2020 list of thirty-one Native American authors to read. She has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Cash Blackbear mystery series, the third volume of which, Sinister Graves, was a 2023 Minnesota Book Award finalist. In 2020, she received Minnesota’s McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, and in 2017, with poet Diego Vazquez, she received the Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with incarcerated women in the county jail system.

Marcie R. Rendon gifts us with a meditative journey pulsing with the rhythms of life in Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium. Her moving words are lyrical and powerful, and they touch our ‘aloneness’ with vivid, beautiful images that carry dreams in song—connections with those who came before and are yet to come.

—

Gwen Nell Westerman, Poet Laureate of Minnesota

Marcie Rendon is tired, too. But not too tired to do the hard labor of loving other human beings, and the earth, and the songs of her ancestors. As a fellow poet from the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, I could say that this collection is essential to the complicated song that is Minnesota, and that would be true, but also everyone, everywhere, needs to spend time with this book and find their own way to sing along with it or sit quietly and listen deeply to its songs.

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Bao Phi, author of A Different Pond and Thousand Star Hotel

This collection undoubtedly sings through and for generations to come! These powerful poems ask us to trust the wind to catch and carry our songs and prayers. Through each page, Marcie R. Rendon guides us to radically dream a future of strength and reminds us that ‘Win or lose, there’s dancing to be done.’

—

Tanaya Winder, author of Words Like Love

Contents

Author’s Note

I. Dream Songs

II. Performance Songs

Acknowledgments

Publication History