![]() ![]() Joe subsequently sought work in a restaurant, first working in the kitchen and later as a waitress, but was fired when she refused to take a customer’s abuse. However, because her new job required her to work in an institution run by nuns, it differed little from her former residence. Hoping to regain some of the freedom, independence, and spirituality that she had lost to the residential school system, she accepted it immediately. When Joe was sixteen, she was offered a position at an infirmary in Halifax. Although she resented, for a long time, the fact that the school regimented her daily life and attempted to take away her language, culture, and spirituality, in looking back she chooses to focus on her positive experiences and to be grateful for the last four years of foster care it provided her with. Despite being ridiculed later for voluntarily enrolling, Joe maintains that she did not regret her decision. Like most residential schools, the environment was cold and demoralizing, and children were forbidden to speak their Indigenous languages. Her experience was not quite what she expected. ![]() With the intention of educating herself and learning how to cook, sew, and weave baskets, Joe wrote to the Indian Agent in Shubenacadie and asked to be admitted to the residential school there. There, she gradually became worried by her guardians’ heavy drinking. īetween 19, she returned to the We’koqma’q reserve to live with her father and her siblings, Annabel, Soln, Roddy, and Matt, but only one year later, when her father passed away from pneumonia, she was forced back into foster care with her half-brother’s family in Oxford. Although she felt closer to some families than others, she has characterized that period of her life as one of dislocation, lovelessness, and abuse. At age five, loss intruded into her otherwise happy childhood when her mother died in childbirth and Joe was sent to live in a series of local foster families. She spent her early childhood with her parents and her older brother, Soln, in an environment she described as loving, gentle, and positive, yet very poor ( Song of Rita Joe 17). Rita Joe was born on Maon a We’koqma’q First Nation reserve on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. She received numerous awards, was an important elder in her community, and has had her work featured in several anthologies. Upon her appointment to the Order of Canada, Rita Joe was described as a “true ambassador for her people, promoting art and culture across Canada and in the United States.” More affectionately known by some as the “gentle warrior” or the “warrior poet”, Rita Joe is remembered for the way her poems expose truths about residential school and about growing up Indigenous in Canada, while also speaking about peace, reconciliation and healing.Rita Joe (born Rita Bernard) was a well-known Mi’kmaw poet and songwriter who published a number of poems, songs, and an autobiography. – National Aboriginal Achievement Award (1997) (now called the Indspire Award) ![]() – Member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada (1992) In addition to a number of honorary doctorates, Rita Joe has received the following awards and honours: – The Mi’kmaq Anthology (1997) (co-edited with Lesley Choyce) – Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi’kmaq Poet (1996) – Kelusultiek: Original Women’s Voices of Atlantic Canada (1994) Upon her death, the Globe and Mail named her the Poet Laureate of the Mi’kmaq people.“I was only a housewife with a dream to bring laughter to the sad eyes of my people.” – Rita Joe She kept writing until her death in 2007, five days after her 75th birthday. Rita’s husband, Frank, died in 1989 and a year later she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Rita Joe began writing in the mid-1970s. She wrote seven books, including Poems of Rita Joe (1978), Song of Eskasoni (1988) and The Blind Man’s Eyes (published posthumously in 2015).In 1989, Rita Joe was inducted into the Order of Canada and in 1992, she became a member of the Queen’s Privy Council. She received an Aboriginal Achievement Award in 1997 and doctorates from several East Coast universities. She soon met Frank Joe and they married and started a family. Orphaned at the age of ten, she soon found herself at the Shubenacadie Residential School.įorbidden to speak her language, she endured mental and physical abuse and left at age 16. Rita Bernard was born in 1932 in Whycocomagh, Nova Scotia. Rita Joe was a famous Mi’kmaw poet who celebrated her language, culture and way of life. ![]()
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