May 11, 2026

calling down the sky, by Rosanna Deerchild, translation by Solomon Ratt

“there is no word for what they did/ in our language/ to speak it is to become torn/ from the choking”

A perfect and poignant Mother’s Day read this weekend was the recently released 10th-anniversary edition of Roseanna Deerchild’s poetry collection calling down the sky, with a Cree translation by Solomon Ratt. The poems are in Deerchild’s mother’s voice and tell the story of her experiences of residential schooling with a simultaneous candour and remove (“people ask me all the time/ about residential schools/ as if it’s their business or something.”) Following the deaths of her parents, Deerchild’s mother attended 3 residential schools from the age of 5 to 14, where abuse and neglect were rampant, the trauma living deep in her bones ever since, manifesting in her health troubles and memories that are hard to face. These poems stare down the brutal realities of these institutions, the inhumanity baked into the system, the depravity and cruelty inherent in the quotidian experiences of the children who were forced to live there. But Deerchild also shows the subtle ways in which the children were able to exercise subversion where they can, the title poem about the night sky and the northern lights which the children know and understand due to their own knowledge of place, but “never seen/ that priest run so fast/ as though the devil himself was chasing.”