Sacred Role of Two-Spirit Women Told With Poetic Grace
“Sharron Proulx-Turner shakes the world around, through the teachings of Trikster and the origin of laughter, sung by the winged tip of blue black feather. An important contribution to the Canadian and Aboriginal literary canons, she walks for days inside a thousand eyes is a testament to the traditional and sacred role two-spirit persons hold within the Metisse and Indigenous worldviews.”
WINNIPEG—Sharron Proulx-Turner combines poetry and history to delve into the little-known lives of two-spirit women. Regarded with both wonder and fear when first encountered by the West, First Nations women living with masculine and feminine principles in the same body had important roles to play in society, as healers and visionaries, before they were suppressed during the colonial invasion.
she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) creatively juxtaposes first-person narratives and traditional stories with the voices of contemporary two-spirit women, voices taken from nature, and the teachings of Water, Air, Fire and Mother Earth. The author restores the reputation of two-spirit women that had been long under attack from Western culture as she re-appropriates the lives of these individuals from the writings of Western anthropologists and missionaries.
Sharron Proulx-Turner creates a new kind of epic as she bears witness to the past. With gracious concern for tradition, and sly, soaring language, she retells a vital chapter from the First Nations, and Canadian, story.
Praise for Sharron-Proulx-Turner
“What Sharron Proulx-Turner does with English must be what the Métis did to create themselves. what the auntys say is renewed storytelling, emotional, thoughtful, musical, humourous poetry. Mixing fable, autobiography, polemic and visions, her language is rich and trickstery, arriving in moments quotidian, then eternal, then horrific, then beautiful, a vivid voicing that rings and echoes. That human metissage is her message.”
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