The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: 
Between Centre and Periphery
Jonathan Locke Hart
Shandong University, Weihai, School of Translation Studies, 180 Wenhua Xilu, Weihai, P. R. China
264209 (also University of Toronto/Harvard)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2518-5123
jonathan_hart@harvard.edu
This article explores the literary space of Canadian literature in world literature 
and the liminal space of Métis poetry, which is distinctive in being situated 
between the European and Indigenous aspects of Canadian literature. The 
paradox is that Métis poetry and literature in Canada, long marginalized, can 
now create another space for Canadian literature, or for poets born or living in 
Canada, in world literature and comparative literature, a small literature among 
large literatures. By examining Métis poetry in Canada and analyzing the poems 
by Louis Riel (1844–1885), Pauline Johnson (also known as Tekahionwake or 
Double Wampum, 1861–1913) and Naomi McIllwraith (contemporary), the 
article can provide a sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness, even if some of these 
qualities are also present in “Métis” poetry outside Canada. Riel and McIlwraith 
occupy a literary and cultural in-between space—Riel writing in French and 
McIlwraith in English and Cree—mixing major and minor centers and part of this 
“nation within a nation” this threshold space where self, identity and other are all 
called into question.
Keywords: Canadian literature / literary space / liminality / cultural identity / Métis poetry / 
Riel, Louis / Johnson, Pauline / McIllwraith, Naomi
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.3 (2023)
The literary space of Canadian literature in world literature
Goethe was important in framing Weltliteratur or world literature, for 
example, what he told Eckermann in 1827: “National literature is now 
rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World literature is at hand, 
and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” (351) This interest 
in world literature, which continues to this day, begins in Europe even 
if Goethe also refers to other literatures: “It is pleasant to see that in-
tercourse is now so close between the French, English, and Germans, 
that we shall be able to correct one another. This is the greatest use of 
a world-literature, which will show itself more and more.” (432) The 
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82
space of world literature will unfold and Goethe emphasizes beauty 
in literature, which he sees among the ancient Greeks, and is not in-
terested in the production and reception of literature in a space based 
on nationalism and patriotism. Canadian literature and small litera-
tures did not and do not find a significant place in world literature 
and comparative literature. One aspect of Canadian culture and the 
study of literature I tried to raise in a volume edited by Eugene Eoyang, 
Gang Zhou and Jonathan Hart was the state of comparative literature 
in Canada, and in this article I am trying to show that there is another 
way to make space for Canada in world and comparative literatures, 
using the particular case of Métis poetry, which occupies a liminal 
or threshold space between the European and Indigenous aspects of 
Canadian literature and does so in French and English in a distinctive 
way (Eoyang, Zhou and Hart). Here, I explore the context and space of 
Canadian literature and culture before discussing Métis poetry. Canada 
shares English and French with other countries like Britain, the United 
States and France so is part of anglophone and francophone literatures 
and its indigenous languages are shared with the United States, except 
in instances I examine here. Thus, Canadian literature blends English, 
French and Indigenous languages in a distinctive way and that is the 
literary space I am analyzing after exploring the persistent debate over 
Canadian identity and space in its literature and culture. Given this 
context, the poetry I discuss here is from small and not small, minor 
and not minor literatures. The literary crosses borders, having connec-
tions within and beyond the nation. Marshall McLuhan, who coined 
among many phrases, the global village, saw Canada as a borderline 
case (McLuhan 226).
The article moves from the general debate over Canadian culture, 
literature and poetry and places that within the context of theories of 
literary space before examining the three poets of mixed Indigenous and 
European backgrounds (now most often referred to as Métis). Early in 
this debate, there is little or no mention of Indigenous or Métis con-
tributions. My article tries to help explore that space within Canadian 
poetry and literature as a contribution to comparative literature and 
world literature.
In On Canadian Poetry (1943), E. K. Brown, trained at Toronto 
and at the Sorbonne, who would teach at Toronto, Manitoba, Cornell 
and Chicago, writes: “There is a Canadian literature, often rising to 
effects of great beauty, but it has stirred little interest outside Canada.” 
(Brown 3) Brown explores that space, noting changes in literary taste 
and literary geography: “Saul, a huge poetic drama by a Montreal poet, 
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83
Charles Heavysege, had a passing vogue in Britain and in the United 
States, impressing Emerson and Hawthorne and inducing Coventry 
Patmore to describe it as ‘indubitably one of the most remarkable 
English poems ever written out of Great Britain.’ […] Today, along 
with Heavysege’s other works, his Count Filippo and his Jephthah’s 
Daughter, it is unknown within Canada and without.” (Brown 3–4)
There was still little space in the world for Canadian literature when 
Brown was writing, almost six decades after Riel was hanged in 1885 
after his part in the Northwest Rebellion that he had led (he was also a 
leader of the Red River Rebellion, the first being in 1869) even if liter-
ary tastes changed within Canada and without. In the 1940s, Brown 
says: “Every Canadian reviewer devotes a large part of his sadly lim-
ited space to comment on British or American books. Every Canadian 
reader devotes a large part of the time and money that he can allow 
for books to those which come from Britain and the United States.” 
(8) There is little room for any Canadian literature let along Canadian 
poetry. Brown does not mince words in describing the struggle for 
making a literary space in Canada: “What I have been attempting to 
suggest with as little heat or bitterness as possible is that in this country 
the plight of literature is a painful one.” (24) This is one reason per-
haps that cultures without literary space suffer a kind of suffocation or 
seek literature or poetry from other cultures. Brown sees one important 
aspect of late-nineteenth century and early twentieth-century English-
Canadian poetry: “One of the chief powers in the poetry of Lampman 
and his associates is their power in the handling of nature.” (39) There 
is, according to Brown, a national and international space for the best-
known Canadian poets: “In the United States and in England the most 
widely known and admired of our poets has been Bliss Carman. In 
Canada Lampman is the nearest approach to a national classic in verse, 
and the passing of decades has confirmed his status if it has not very 
much widened the circle of his readers.” (80) Carman and Lampman, 
both strong poets, are not much known in world literature today. 
Brown also discusses at length two other accomplished poets—Duncan 
Campbell Scott and E. J. Pratt—so that while Brown is trying to make 
space for Canadian poetry, he also shows how hard it is for Canadian 
poets to find space in Canada let alone internationally (108–152). If 
this lack of space was true for Anglo-Canadian poetry of poets of British 
descent, it was more so for those of Indigenous and Métis backgrounds 
to have a space for others to hear their voices over time.
Given globalization and shifting interests that include a relatively 
recent awareness of Indigenous cultures and literatures in Canada and 
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84
elsewhere (for instance, the United States, Australia and New Zealand), 
it may be that the literature of the mixed, Métis, mestizo in the New 
World (and worldwide) from those of mixed Native (Indigenous) and 
European (English, Spanish, French and the like) backgrounds can 
cross national boundaries and take up a prominent role not simply 
in the space of national literatures, like Canadian literature, but in 
Comparative and World literatures. Paradoxically, Métis poetry and 
literature in Canada, long marginalized, may now create another space 
for Canadian literature or poets born in or living in Canada in world 
and comparative literature, a small literature among large literatures. 
This liminal or threshold space between the European/settler and the 
Indigenous, the local and the global, bypasses what Goethe hoped for, 
the national in terms of literature.
The local, regional, national and global all interact in the debates 
about the center and periphery, major and minor (small) literatures. 
Here, I attempt to open a space for Métis poetry within Canadian liter-
ature in the framework of the internationalism, globalization of world 
literature, and Comparative literature studies (on métissage, see Glissant, 
“Métissage”; Benoist; Bonniol and Benoist). Native or Indigenous cul-
tures and settler cultures, often of European origin, meant that, in the 
New World or Americas, from the earliest times, go-betweens, media-
tors, interpreters and translators could be caught between both sides 
(see Hart, “Images”; “Mediation”).
 Here, I find a space for poetry and for Métis poetry in the space 
of Canadian literature and culture, between Native and European 
Canadian poetry. This is related to, but distinct from, Franco Moretti’s 
focus on an atlas of nineteenth-century European novels and mapping 
European literary history, Pascale Casanova’s examination of the literary 
space of world literature and national literature and Rob Shields’ con-
centration on North and South and on spatial and literary history per-
spectives work in terms of Wallerstein’s theory differentiating between 
center and periphery and also his discussions of center and margin and 
the “geography of difference” (Moretti 54; Casanova; Shields, Places 
3–11; Shields, “Spatialisations” 15–40). My space is more the space for 
writing and reading poetry that is between cultures within Canadian 
culture, a hybrid culture as part of New World literature or the lit-
eratures of the Americas. In other words, my article is about space for 
Canadian poets and writers and especially Métis poets being afforded 
space to write and to be read within Canada and abroad, being given 
some notice, their words being read, written about in practical criticism 
and literary theory. I am grounding this sense of Canadian and Métis 
Jonathan Locke Hart:     The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: Between Centre and Periphery
85
poetry in close reading of their work to make way for their words in 
Canadian poetry with the hope that such work will find an increas-
ing place or space in Canadian, comparative and world literatures as 
well as literatures in English and French. These are sometimes distinc-
tive spaces and sometimes overlapping spaces. These authors are also 
related to Indigenous literatures in Canadian, United States and world-
wide in European and Indigenous languages. Other bigger literatures 
receive more attention than Canadian, Métis and Indigenous poetry 
or literatures. For instance, Valdés and Kadir map Latin American lit-
erature and Robert Tally explores the spaces of American literature in 
his geocriticism and, in his most recent work, makes further distinc-
tions between spatial literary studies and literary geography (see Valdés 
and Kadir; Tally, Spatiality ch.3; Tally, “Spatial Literary” 317–331). 
Canadian literature, which is much smaller or apparently more mar-
ginal than the literature of the United States, Spanish America and 
Brazil, finds a space, as Caribbean literature does, as a small literature 
amongst the large literatures in the United States, Brazil and Spanish 
America as well as in the Atlantic world, Pacific rim and the North 
or Arctic (circumpolar). But Canadian literature, including Canadian 
poetry and Métis poetry, is more than small or minor. This poetry 
crosses boundaries and definitions in a geography of otherness, a liter-
ary space that moves inward within Canada and outward beyond its 
boundaries, partly owing to the use of English and French.
 The Métis and Indigenous find a space in Canadian literature 
beyond Northrop Frye’s view of it as a bush garden with its garrison 
mentality, Margaret Atwood’s idea that survival is the central theme 
or a more multicultural or postmodern view of Canadian literature—
as discussed by Hutcheon and Hart—and straddles English, French, 
immigrant languages from Europe, China, India and elsewhere and 
Indigenous languages such as Cree (see Frye; Atwood; Hart “Canadian 
Literature”; Hutcheon). Otherness and the in-between, for me, means 
that the literary or poetic expands for settler and Native not simply in 
terms of alterity but through the liminal or threshold space between, 
that is the space of the Métis. The literary or poetic space of Canada 
expands its scope through these relations of settler, Native and Métis 
through centripetal and centrifugal fields in which they engage. 
Moreover, there are porous borders between Canada with United States 
in mixed, Indigenous cultures. The use of Indigenous languages that 
are from the same languages and language families in North America as 
well as the shared languages of English and French with Britain, France 
and other countries worldwide means that to make Canadian poetry 
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86
or Métis poetry Deleuze’s and Guattari’s minor literature, Casanova’s 
small literature or Ragon’s secondary zone literature is not to tell the 
whole story and take into account their intricacies (see Deleuze and 
Guattari; Casanova; Ragon). Otherness and in-betweenness, as I argue 
here, allow for other aspects and contours of the topic I am discuss-
ing. Reading the poetry closely shows that the texture and individual-
ity of these poets and the poems are other to the generalities and find 
themselves as being between theories and testing abstraction with the 
specificity of the concrete nature of a poem. This is a key point to my 
argument. Close reading is a literary space that tests, qualifies, resists 
and grounds abstract theories.
My own emphasis is on the between space of Métis poetry that 
reaches promising spaces within Canadian literature but also beyond 
and internationally. The poems have their own texture and the text 
opens up to readers beyond the Métis communities and Canada itself. 
The text is a map or space with a unique texture and so its particularity 
makes creative trouble for theory itself. The space between writer and 
reader, here the poet making and the reader reading, is a space where 
the poem is performed and where it means. Those are the contours 
and relief of poetry and literature, what I might call the geography of 
the text. Sheila Hones explores literary geography, including a reader 
and writer sharing a moment of a “text-based spatial interaction, a 
geographical event” (Hones, “Text” 1302), and discusses the ways in 
which literary spaces are real spaces, being both actual and fictional. 
Here, I argue that poetic spaces are as actual as they are fictional and 
that Canadian poetry and, more particularly, Métis poetry in Canada, 
are real spaces (Hones, Literary Geographies ch.3; cf. Hones, “Literary”; 
“Spatial”). They are a poetics of otherness (Hart, The Poetics). Like Yanli 
He, I see limitations of the minor literature of Gilles Deleuze and Felix 
Guattari and the small literature of Pascale Casanova and the second-
ary zone literature of Michael Ragon despite their important contribu-
tions (He; Deleuze and Guattari; Ragon; Conley). Like He, as well 
as David Damrosch, Marko Juvan, and Theo D’haen, I see globaliza-
tion and world literature as something that complicates and leads away 
from minor or small literatures (small being closer to Kafka’s German, 
klein, than mineur or minor are) (He; Damrosch, What is; Damrosch 
“Major”; Juvan “Peripherocentrisms”; “World”; D’haen, Routledge; 
“Major”; “Worlding”). Minor is more of a value judgement than is 
small literature, which is why I prefer the term “small” even if that term 
is not adequate. Métis poetry may have an even smaller space or audi-
ence than Canadian poetry, but it has potential, partly in its otherness, 
Jonathan Locke Hart:     The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: Between Centre and Periphery
87
in-betweenness and concrete particularity, for us to explore possibili-
ties in what Leibniz called possible worlds and Thomas Pavel deemed 
fictional worlds (see Hart, “A Comparative”; Fictional). Each poem is a 
world that opens up to the world, to world literature. The poems I shall 
read of the three poets give a slice of that world, a small but individual 
texture of the poet’s interpretation and the reader interpreting it.
 Until recent decades, the literary space of Métis and First Nations’ 
poetry in Canadian literature had not received the attention it 
deserved. The poetry of Canadian poets, particularly Métis poets (of 
mixed European and Indigenous or First Nations background) from 
the Prairies, that of Louis Riel, who writes in French and English, and 
of Naomi McIlwraith, who is bilingual and writes in English and Cree, 
contributes to the mapping of Canada as a literary region. These are 
layers of literary space within the Canadian cultural space. Métis poetry 
challenges the binary opposition between European/settler literature in 
English and French and Native Canadian literature or poetry.
The liminal space of Métis poetry: Riel and McIlwraith 
between center and periphery
The Métis, who have lived between European and Canadian First 
Nations culture and literature, help to map what I call “a literature 
between” in Canada—Canadian literature is its own space and not 
simply a small literature in the Americas and in the world. These poets 
map Canada (various Canadas) and beyond through their poetry. The 
context for this space within a space is part of the multi-ethnic, multi-
linguistic, multi-spatial and multicultural nature of North America in 
general, and Canada in particular.
Métissage is a longstanding debate in the French-speaking world. 
More specifically, in France during the 1930s, this term was explored in 
anthropology (Neuville; Gossard). There was a debate on this in French 
Canada and then in English Canada and there is an ongoing discussion 
(see Crépeau; Karahasan; Beaulieu and Chaffray; Ens and Sawchuk; 
Morris; Bouchard). Indigenous writers and scholars also explore thus 
world of the in-between (Gunn; LaRocque, “The Metis”; “Native”; 
King, “Godzilla”; A Coyote; The Truth; Armstrong; Owens; Lukens; 
Scheick; Silko; Vizenor). In the past half century, writers and theo-
rists have come to use métissage as a term for the recovery of occluded 
spaces, stories, histories cultures and regions, especially owing to colo-
nialism, sometimes, as in the work of Edouard Glissant, recovering 
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88
oral traditions and questioning Western concepts, something that has 
led to the recuperation of occulted histories (see Glissant, Le Discours 
462–463; Lionnet). By examining Métis poetry in Canada and analyz-
ing poetry by Riel and McIllwraith as well that by Johnson, I can give 
a sense of distinctiveness and singularity even as some of those qualities 
might occur in “Métis” poetry outside Canada.
Métis and First Nations poetry are part of a multicultural and multi-
ethnic mosaic. As we saw and as Hones and Anderson also observe, ter-
ritories are actual and metaphorical (see Hones, Literary Geographies; 
Anderson). The idea of otherness in a Canadian context includes 
native-born, bilingual and bi-cultural, Métis, First Nations authors 
from Canada, and the idea of people coming from other shores to 
settle in North America, whether by choice or by force. The otherness 
stressed here is in the liminal or threshold space between Indigenous 
and settler cultures in a Métis or hybrid space that overlaps with but 
also challenges any notion of purity. This liminal or threshold space of 
Métis poetry in Canada is a representation of reality as part of Canadian 
poetry and poetry in the literature of the Americas and world literature.
Poetry matters just as McIlwraith’s use of Cree matters in her 
poetry. In a mass and commercial society, we tend to measure matters 
by market size and sometimes by profit, which would mean that poets 
are from the small genre of poetry and do not matter. I am looking at 
the space between, a threshold space, for those who were sometimes 
crushed between cultures or literatures, who sought to find space to 
express themselves. Riel was both Native and French and McIlwraith 
is Cree and Scottish. Riel and McIlwraith are poets and may also be 
writing to express themselves, irrespective of their place in literature in 
Canada or the world. Reception and categorization are more a matter 
for scholars than for writers and even for readers. Indigenous literatures 
and hybrid literatures, written in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese 
or Indigenous languages such as Cree and Maori deserve more atten-
tion, and that is even truer for poetry, which apparently has little use in 
a utilitarian society or profit in cultures given to money.
I introduce Riel and McIllwraith with another poet, of mixed 
background who identified herself with the Indigenous peoples and 
who wrote between the time of these two poets. Pauline Johnson 
(Tekahionwake) explains the title of her collected poems: “so both flint 
and feather bear the hall-mark of my Mohawk blood” (Johnson xvii) 
and the biography in the collection describes her: “E. Pauline Johnson 
(TEKAHIONWAKE) is the youngest child of a family of four born 
to the late G. H. M. Johnson (Onwanonsyshon), Head Chief of the 
Jonathan Locke Hart:     The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: Between Centre and Periphery
89
Six Nations Indians, and his wife, Emily S. Howells,” born in Bristol, 
England, who emigrated to Canada (xiii). Pauline Johnson is proud 
of her Native family as well as someone who performed her poetry in 
England as well as in Canada and the United States.
Johnson also writes about history in her poetry, including the 
Northwest Rebellion of which Riel was a leader and for which he was 
hanged, facing some of the Protestant-Catholic politics that Thomas 
D’Arcy McGee had faced. Johnson ends her poem, “A Cry from an 
Indian Wife,” which alludes to rebellion in the Northwest, thus:
Go forth, nor bend to greed of white man’s hands,
My right, by birth we Indians own these lands,
Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation
low …
Perhaps the white man’s God has willed it so. (Johnson 19)
There seems to be a call to arms against white greed and, through 
rhyme, the implied image that white hands have taken “Indian” 
lands. Moreover, Johnson uses verbs to express this unfair situation—
“starved, crushed, plundered” (Johnson 319). The last line appears to 
be ironic as if this situation resulted from the will of the God of the 
white man. Johnson, part Mohawk and part English, born in Canada, 
is someone who might now identify as Native or as Métis (an intri-
cate matter in terms of official and personal identity) (see Lawrence). 
This space between European/settler and Native culture is fluid and has 
changed over time. Johnson’s poetry is often concerned with represent-
ing Natives, their lands and their points of view.
Louis Riel, a Métis leader and poet and perhaps the best-known 
Métis in Canadian history, spent time in Montreal 1858–1866, the Red 
River 1868–1873, Quebec and New England 1874–1878, Minnesota 
and Dakota 1878–1879, Montana 1879–1884, Saskatchewan 1884–
1885 (see Campbell), the movement of a life on both sides of the bor-
der (see Durnin). Although Riel did not always date his poems, which 
he wrote in French and English and in these various places, I am fol-
lowing the numbers, dates and places that Glen Campbell, the editor, 
assigns to the poems without certainty and I maintain the spelling and 
grammar of the original. It seems that in the Red River (Rivière Rouge) 
(70/05-08), Riel wrote a lyric poem/song “La Métisse,” which begins: 
“Je suis métisse et je suis orgueilleuse / D’appartenir à cette nation (I 
am Métisse and I am proud / To belong to this nation)” then con-
tinues: “Je sais que Dieu de sa main généreuse / Fait chacque peuple 
avec attention (I know that God with his generous hand / Treats each 
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90
people with care),” proceeds to “Les métis sont un petit people encore / 
Mais vous pouvez voir déjà leurs destins / Etre haïs comme ils sont 
les honore (The Métis are still a small people / But you can already 
see their destinies / To be hated as they are honour them)” and ends 
with “Ils ont déjà rempli de grands desseins (They have already ful-
filled great designs)” (Riel 88, lines 1–8). Although the syntax is a little 
thorny, even as the destinies of the Métis are to be hated, they should 
be honored (expressed in an imperative). In a time of racial theories 
and racism not friendly to the Métis, Riel represents the situation, the 
lack of space with the expansion of the settlers, and attempts to seek to 
create a larger space in poetry and discourse—an imaginative space—
for this small people or nation under threat, to give this Métis woman 
pride in her nation whom God has made with care as he has with each 
people or nation. The stanza has the rhyme scheme ababcdcd and the 
rhyme emphasizes, in this poem in the first person, the speaker’s self-
representation of herself as proud to belong to this nation and her voice 
representing God’s generous hand, making with care or attention each 
people and the “petit peuple” (small people) of the Métis full of grand 
or large designs. The smallness of the Métis can be enlarged through 
design and, by implication, by Riel’s poem and song.
Probably writing from Beauport or New England between 1874 
and 1878, Riel begins one of the poems (4-074): “Le Sang Sauvage 
en moy rayonne: / Et je louange mes aïeux (The Wild Blood shines 
in me: / And I praise my ancestors)” (my translations here, above and 
below, Riel 178, lines 1–2). “Sauvage” in French, as it does in six-
teenth and early seventeenth-century English (“salvage”), means wild, 
and “savage” in English came to be pejorative, so I prefer the “Wild” 
here. Campbell says that Riel was one eighth Native from his pater-
nal grandmother (“bisaïeule paternelle”), a “Montagnaise-Chippewan” 
(Campbell 180, note 2). Riel is proud of this Indigenous ancestry. 
In the same poem, he raises the issue of cruelty: “Les espagnols ont 
du courage. / Mais leurs exploits sont effrayants. / Tant d’autres sont 
durs au sauvage, / Tout en paraissant vrais croyants (The Spaniards 
have courage. / But their exploits are frightening. / So many others 
are tough on the wild, / While appearing to be true believers).” (Riel 
179, lines 29–32). Riel begins with representing the Spanish as hav-
ing courage, but then says that their exploits cause fear and many are 
hard on the Indigenous peoples while also representing the Spaniards 
as people who seem to be believers or Christians. For Riel, the Natives 
have harsh Spaniards in their space. In another poem (4-106), Riel 
writes in English in Helena, Montana (82/06-09), and opens thus: “I 
Jonathan Locke Hart:     The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: Between Centre and Periphery
91
can sing in my poetry / Right and wealth.” (Riel 279, lines 1–2) In 
another language, Riel is creating another space. The power of poetry 
is different here: “My poems can show the big trains / Run by the 
Northern Pacific / Over Hills and through rowling plains: / I can cel-
ebrate their traffic.” (Riel 279, lines 5–8) Like Whitman, Riel can sing 
a song of America and its changes, here the railroad across the plains in 
which the bison roamed. At St. Peter’s Mission (83/08), Riel writes an 
ode, “Le people Métis-Canadien-français (The Metis-Canadian-French 
People),” a poem that represents Métis, Natives Canadians, French, 
Canada and the United States (4–114; Riel 319). The opening of the 
poem gives a sense of Riel’s hope: “J’aime sans mesure et j’admire / Les 
Métis-canadiens- français: / Ce people nouveau qui se mire / Déjà dans 
se brilliants succès (I love without measure and I admire / The Metis-
Canadians-French: / This new people who is reflected / Already in bril-
liant successes).” (Riel 319, lines 3–6) The first-person speaker cannot 
measure the love and admiration he expresses for this new people—
Native and French, French-speaking—in what is now Canada and the 
United States. Riel’s celebratory poetry pays homage to the Métis and 
the new culture and space they have forged and his poetry continues 
to forge for them, a space that is part of Native, settler and mixed or 
hybrid poetry in Canada and the United States. Riel creates new spaces 
within Canadian and world poetry and literature.
The Canadian prairies can provide a good example of the bilin-
gual and how that affects geography, otherness, mapping, center and 
periphery in terms of language, poetry, culture, the personal and the 
public. Cree, English, French and other languages co-existed on the 
Canadian prairies, which came to have an artificial border between the 
United States and Canada in a region (the Great Plains), which had 
no natural boundary and certainly not in terms of these two polities. 
Naomi McIlwraith is writing in Edmonton on land under Treaty 6, 
between the Crown and Cree, Assiniboine and Ojibwa on 23 August 
1876 and on 9 September 1876, its boundaries extending to what now 
constitutes parts of central Alberta and Saskatchewan. McIlwraith has 
a mixed background of Cree and Scottish—what is now often called 
Métis culture to include people who are partly British as well as the 
original meaning of those who are partly French as “half-breed” has 
come to be much less used. She explores, in kiyâm, boundaries and 
spaces, personal, familial, social, historical, cultural and political, 
between cultures. This is a hybrid and contested space in language, 
memory, identity, representation and much else. This is a territory 
about lost territory, the lands of the Cree being wrenched from them, 
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92
their language lost and reclaimed slowly by the speaker and the author. 
Their own center has become their periphery, and the periphery of 
Europe has come and claimed as the Europeans’ own the very center of 
the Cree lands. The British authorities and then the Canadian govern-
ments after independence have made the Cree other to themselves; the 
Cree have had their language taken away. McIlwraith finds herself on 
both sides of this divide, trying to understand her family, cultures and 
herself, reclaiming Cree culture, language, remembrance. She is trying 
to undo misrepresentation, to remap center and periphery, to offer a 
new geography of otherness.
The reader follows McIlwraith’s journey. Her book begins with the 
section, “Family Poems,” with the poem, “The Road to Writer’s Block 
(A Poem to Myself),” which opens as follows:
Turn left at desire. Take this burden
and never let go. Cling
as a burr latches onto fleece.
Be sure that your load includes
the self-imposed responsibility to learn
a threatened language: namely nêhiyawêwin.
Go home: kîwê.
Head north: kîwêtinohk itohtê.
Take a route unknown to you.
Do not plan too far
into the future. Do step forth with mute
naïveté. Invent a folktale so fantastic it can’t
be disbelieved. Do this in the same way
you would mould green truth from fact, tender
as the first prairie crocus—wâpikwanîs. (McIlwraith 5)
The striking half-line is the opening of a set of directions the poet writes 
to herself. Why she should turn left and not right, she does not say, but 
it arrests the reader and the poet mid-line. The alliteration of “Turn” and 
“Take” are part of the order of direction, an imperative to the self over-
heard by the listener or looked on by the reader. Ear and eye absorb this 
imperative of directions or directives to self and other. “Take this burden / 
and never let go” involves enjambment so it takes a turn to the other line 
to discover the second imperative, a surprising exhortation as well as an 
order “never” to “let go.” Here is an imperative of determination and te-
nacity. The next word “Cling” also awaits, through enjambment,” comple-
tion, “as a burr latches onto fleece,” this simile showing how the “Cling” is 
like “a burr,” nature’s inspiration for velcro, latching to this “fleece.” These 
imperatives “Turn” and “Take” and “never let go,” combine with the 
Jonathan Locke Hart:     The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: Between Centre and Periphery
93
imagery to show that the burden is taken on with a stubborn defiance and 
not as a weight leading to defeat. McIlwraith turns to more imperatives of 
solidity and steadfastness: “Be sure” and “Go home.” She speaks to herself 
as other by referring to herself in terms of “your” and “you.” The speaker 
insists that “your load” also comprises of “the self-imposed responsibility” 
that McIlwraith defines as learning “a threatened language,” which the 
poem and her glossary define for the unilingual reader. As a supplement to 
the poem, McIlwraith explains as she translates and the reader learns from 
“Cree-English Correspondences”:
nêhiyawêwin the Cree language, speaking Cree
kîwê go home
kîwêtinohk itohtê go north, northwards
 (towards the north wind)
wâpikwanîs flower (McIlwraith 125)
Her translations are sometimes a little different here or a little more 
expansive than what she provides in the poem. The commands in this 
poem are a mixture of positives and negatives. For instance, she says: 
“Do not,” “Do” and “Do.” She commands herself not to plan too dis-
tant in the future, to step forward mute and naïve, to invent such a fan-
tastic folktale it cannot be disbelieved, as if to “mould green truth from 
fact,” which McIllwraith elaborates on with a striking image, “tender / 
as the first prairie crocus,” much more specific and memorable than the 
“flower” in the translation from the Cree in “Correspondences.” These 
self-imperatives define the speaker in language and culture.
In “Reclamation Poems” McIlwraith begins with “Cree Lessons,” 
a poem that explores linguistic boundaries in English and Cree about 
other differences and opens thus:
We are keen, though some of us have better ears than others.
The teacher’s voice inflects the pulse of nêhiyawêwin as he teaches us.
He says a prayer in the first class.
Nouns, we learn, have a gender.
In French, nouns are male or female,
but in Cree, nouns are living or non-living, animate or inanimate.
A chair, têhtapiwin, is inanimate. tohtôsâpoy, or milk, is also inanimate.
But the breast it comes from is animate. (McIlwraith 43)
The speaker once more represents how keen she is (and the group is too 
here) to learn Cree. She makes a voice the teacher has to inflect the pulse 
of the language and distinguishes French from Cree in the context of 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
94
an English-Cree poem. French is given to gender, Cree to living or not. 
The speaker finds part of herself in language, in a lesson her ancestors 
knew and she thinks she must learn. For her and in her ears and on her 
tongue, nêhiyawêwin is gaining a place and its cadence and rhythm and 
sounds are becoming part of McIlwraith’s poetry. This is the space of 
her music, the heuristics of her linguistic geography.
McIlwraith begins the section, “A FEW IDEAS FROM amiskwacî-
wâskahikanihk,” with “The Young Linguist,” a poem that begins as 
follows:
A girl, perhaps five,
whose father will later tell me she speaks
English, French, and Armenian,
approaches me at Fort Edmonton Park.
“How do you say ‘Hi’ in the teepee way?”
she asks. (McIlwraith 73)
Language is part of the encounter at work, or the space between peo-
ple and cultures. Armenian now comes into the conversation along 
with English, French and Cree. The young and not so young exchange 
through linguistics. The poem ends with a bilingual explanation:
“Around here,” I reply, “the Cree say,
‘tânisi,’ or if you want to say,
‘Hello, how are you?’
we say, ‘tânisi kiya?’” (McIlwraith 73)
Often the speaker is the student, but here she is the teacher. The poem 
also represents the eagerness of the child to learn language, which im-
plicitly is the opposite of the impulse that repressed Indigenous lan-
guages such as Cree. There is space for Cree and Armenian in this ge-
ography of otherness, in a map without center and periphery.
The final grouping of the poetry is “History Poems.” The last in this 
section is the title poem, “kiyâm—Let It Be.” McIlwraith begins the 
poem thus:
The dictionary tells me
it means “think nothing of it,” and
“let’s go then,”
“so much for this,”
“let there be no further delay,”
and a few other things like that. (McIlwraith 119)
Jonathan Locke Hart:     The Liminal Space of Métis Poetry: Between Centre and Periphery
95
Here is another language lesson. The speaker learns about the Cree of 
some of her ancestors, and shows in this opening but throughout the 
poem, the richness and multiplicity of the word, kiyâm, which begins 
as “let it be” but resonates in so many ways. This one word, which is 
also the title of the collection, shows, as in a grain of sand, the extent 
of the multiple meanings and nuances of Cree. McIlwraith, in ending 
this section and her book of poetry, makes space for Cree in English, 
in her bilingual and multi-polar, multivalent geography of otherness. 
McIlwraith has helped to open up the mapping in Canada in relation 
to itself and to other spaces and cultures.
Conclusion
The poetry of Native and Métis poets has mapped the region of the prai-
ries, and a wider Canada, in ways that differ from “traditional” Western, 
perhaps English, French and European notions of Canada and North 
America—the New World. This essay contributes to studies of center 
and periphery in geography, history, and culture, including literature 
while discussing European settler, Métis and Native poetry to map and 
remap this multicultural Canada, North America and the Americas. This 
discussion has explored the ways in which the poetry of Canadian au-
thors, particularly Métis, who identify as of mixed Native and European 
backgrounds who are acutely aware of language or are bilingual or mul-
tilingual, have contributed to the mapping of Canada as a literary space. 
I have discussed theory, criticism, fiction and especially poetry to show 
that poetry and other literary forms play a role in mapping regions and 
that, having provided a context, Métis and First Nations poems, not to 
mention their theoretical, critical and fictional writing, are a good ve-
hicle for exploring this practice. The focus on Métis and Native poetry, 
in the contexts of European poetry in Germany, Canada and the United 
States, is an original route to explore the idea of literary mapping of ter-
ritory. The individual poems I have read closely qualify, through their 
very particularity, the tendency of many theories, including those of 
space and its geometry of center and periphery, to abstraction. Theories 
are ways in, hypotheses, but the poems themselves explore similar mat-
ters in distinctive and concrete ways. The making of the poet and the 
reading of the reader are where the meaning ultimately lies and this very 
specificity relates to and qualifies, with poems, the generalizations and 
abstractions of theory. In the poems, between the poet and reader, a 
distinct texture occurs and bears a relation to theories that try to define 
that space and its connection with context.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
96
The Métis poets, such as Riel and McIlwraith, forge a private 
and public space for themselves that allows space for this hybrid or 
mixed group. In fact, other poets, such as Pauline Johnson, might 
well be considered a Métis poet, now that we often use the term to 
include British-Native poets, once called half-breeds. Mourning Dove 
or Christine Quintasket is sometimes said to be a Native writer and 
sometimes Métis, so that European, Metis and Native poetry crosses 
borders and overlaps and creates its own poetics of space (Center for 
the Study of the Pacific Northwest; Srivastava; Lukens). Although 
McIlwraith includes Cree with her English and Riel writes French and 
English poems, much of the Métis and Native poetry is in English 
or French in Canada. A “small” literature like Canadian literature 
had and has a hard time getting space in Canada and elsewhere in 
the world, a place in world literature. Moreover, poetry gets even less 
space, so that Métis and Native poetry in Canada, even while crossing 
borders, has an even harder task getting notice over time and find-
ing space in Canadian and world literature. Métis poetry is a liminal 
space between center and periphery and has implications for hybrid 
and mixed as well as Indigenous poetry, literature and culture world-
wide. These mixed and hybrid aspects of local, regional and national 
literatures have implications for world literature, the poetics of space 
and the poetics of otherness.
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Liminalni prostor poezije Métis: med središčem in 
obrobjem
Ključne besede: kanadska književnost / literarni prostor / liminalnost / kulturna 
identiteta / poezija Métis / Riel, Louis / Johnson, Pauline / McIllwraith, Naomi
Članek preučuje literarni prostor kanadske književnosti v svetovni književno-
sti in mejni prostor poezije Métis, ki se na prav poseben način umešča med 
evropski in avtohtoni vidik kanadske književnosti. Paradoks je ta, da lahko 
poezija in literatura Métis v Kanadi, ki sta bili dolgo marginalizirani, zdaj v 
svetovni in primerjalni književnosti ustvarita nov prostor za kanadsko litera-
turo, za to majhno med velikimi literaturami, in pesnike, rojene ali živeče v 
Kanadi. S tem ko preučujemo poezijo Métis v Kanadi ter analiziramo pesni-
štvo Louisa Riela (1844–1885), Pauline Johnson (znane tudi kot Tekahion-
wake ali Dvojni Wampum, 1861–1913) in Naomi McIllwraith (sodobnica), 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
100
kreiramo občutek posebnosti in enkratnosti, čeprav se nekatere od teh lastnosti 
lahko pojavijo tudi v poeziji »Métis« zunaj Kanade. Riel in McIlwraith zase-
data literarni in kulturni vmesni prostor – Riel piše v francoščini, McIlwraith 
pa v angleščini in algonkinskem creeju – ter prepletata malo in veliko središče, 
kot del tega pa tudi »narod v narodu«, ta mejni prostor, kjer se prevprašujejo 
sebstvo, identiteta in drugi.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK  821.111(71).09 
821.133.1(71).09
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i3.05