Rita Joe (1932–2007) was a Catholic Mi’kmaw poet from Unama’ki (Cape Breton) and fairly well known throughout Canada. On this Thanksgiving (in Canada) and Indigenous Peoples Day (in the U.S.), I’d like to just draw a small amount of attention to one poem that she wrote in her earliest collection, then revisited and reworked in her last period. It could serve as a thematic connection between the two days on both sides of the border, not to mention give a good artistic centrepiece for the Synod on Synodality currently working through some final stages in Rome.

In the earlier (1970s) version, Rita Joe writes:

She spoke of paradise
And angels’ guests.
Niskam [ = God] and the Holy Spirit.
She spoke religiously
Of man’s true brotherhood.
Yet once when she must sit beside me,
She stood.[1]

In the revisited and revised version (2000s), the poem goes like this:

She spoke of paradise
An angel friend.
She spoke of Kisu’lkw [ = Creator]
And weji-uli-Niskam [ = Holy Spirit]
The names I always knew in mind
Completing the picture
But of man’s true brotherhood
Her practice was not mine
Today I teach
To love is to sit with me[2]

These are two poems that I like—for lack of a more original expression—to sit with.

There are similarities and differences, of course. In both cases, the poem recalls an encounter with someone who was all talk, no action. That’s true even though the action required is merely to sit together. In the first poem, after waxing religious about common humanity, the woman won’t sit with Rita Joe, an Indigenous woman. In the second, Rita Joe remarks that she always knew the religious things that the woman was speaking of, but their way of enacting the spoken-of reality was different: the poet’s way is to actually sit together, i.e., the woman’s wasn’t.

Two poems, the same message—but however sharp the original version with its ending rhyme, more conventional rhythm, and negative verdict, there is something remarkable about the later version with its heavier reliance on Mi’kmaw language, freer verse form, subtle non-identity of words like “mind” and “mine,” and positive declaration of the poet’s own teaching.

I like both versions individually. And I like to put them side by side, too. I invite you to sit with the poems yourself.

At the end of the day, for my part, I wonder if the redaction history is one for our times. In an earlier age, it’s the problem that’s diagnosed, the division. Towards the end of her life, Rita Joe is proposing that we sit together (and share together). She’s clear that she isn’t just judging the woman’s hypocrisy. Maybe that won’t get us where we need to go. At some level, the poet thinks the same thing as the other woman does; her terms are unequivocally and unapologetically laid out as Mi’kmaw, and that challenges the fact that the woman needs to teach her everything. And she does sit together with others, even if this woman won’t be one of those with whom she shares a rest, a circle, or a table.

In my own personal experience, these are poems for many seasons—but especially, I imagine, this time of year every year and the moments of life that are a synodal journey. Every traveller needs a respite. There’s no walking together without also sitting together.

[1] Rita Joe, We are the Dreamers: Recent and Early Poetry (Sydney, NS: Breton Books, 2017), 77.

[2] Ibid., 4.