Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium
Poem-songs summon the voices of Anishinaabe ancestors and sing to future generations
The ancestors that 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 birch-bark 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 and way of seeing forward in the world.
Marcie R. Rendon, White Earth Ojibwe, was included on Oprah’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, Rendon, with poet Diego Vazquez, received the Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with incarcerated women in the county jail system.
