Moisie
By Lisa Jeanne Jodoin

For Marie-Jeanne and Tibasse St. Onge

Beneath the ice of the Moisie river
the water rolls in Innu-aimun,
tshiashi-innu-mashinaikan
if you listen, the wind speaks
the breath of ancestors,
the blood coil of DNA that runs
vein to vein. But language settles
the body, and subepidermal
Jesuits still spread alveolar
with their books to sharpen tongues
into rib bone arrows
that sever man from woman
with surgical pronoun precision,
and split our blood
into absure mathematics.

By tongues and by laws
we were made distant relations,
but we refuse to scar.
Our bodies know
the secrets of a world
our tongues cannot shape,
ussimeu, the words are not dead,
8,000 years of blood
come rushing through our heads.

**This poem appears in the Summer 2013, Issue 96 of Matrix Magazine titled INM (Idle No More).

Moisie River, Katchapahun Rapid with Fish Ladder Source: wikipedia.org

Lisa Jeanne Jodoin is an emerging writer of Innu, French, and Italian lineage. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of New Brunswick, where she also researches representations of the body and sovereignty in First Nations and Métis Gothic Literature.

Her poetry has appeared in The Artery and Algoma Ink. She also has poems forthcoming in an anthology of Thunder Bay, Ontario writers titled Fuel.