This creative thesis is written in nêhiyawêwin (Cree) and English. It explores the skill of storytelling in Cree culture and examines how that can be done through poetry. The collection of poems is a story about the experiences and beliefs of an Indigenous woman, mother, student, teacher, daughter. This thesis is broken into three thematic sections: “acâhk” (spirit), “niya” (me), and “askiy” (land). Each section contains a series of poems that delves into the teachings shared by elders, parents, and grandparents. Three themes are braided into each poem – relationality, nêhiyaw worldview, and personal experience.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Thesis (M. Mus.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1938. / Typescript; ms. musical examples. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (1 leaf at end).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 482-495).

Thesis (M. Mus.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1943. / For orchestra. Holograph.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-63).

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of poems in fulfillment of the MFA degree. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

This poetry collection engages with the mutable nature of memory and its instantiations: memory as artifact, memory as place, memory as story, memory as compulsion. Influenced by the lyric meditations of Robert Hass and Li-Young Lee, the intellectual clarity of Elizabeth Bishop, the place-oriented imagism of Bashō and Gary Snyder, and the reflexive, self-conscious impulse of Sharon Olds, the poems tackle a vast geography of recollection—from Kyoto to the Okefenokee to the turnings and obsessions of the author’s mind itself. Using a sequence of date-stamped prose poems as narrative fence posts, the collection addresses multiple modalities in memory by weaving together longer meditative lyrics, shorter narrative and place-based poems, and deconstructed lyrics that employ slashes as syntactical place markers. In testing memory’s capacity for multiple truths, and in discovering its inherent limitations, this collection grapples with the simultaneity of memory as an act of self-preservation, self-creation, and relentless re-creation.

No description available.

The thesis has two parts. Part I is a critical essay entitled "Lessons Under the Amfalula." Part II is the collection of poems entitled "Animals That Die."