Celebrating talented local writer Irvin Provost

Irvin Provost (center) with LRSD Ward 1 Trustee John McKee and Ward 3 Trustee Shannon Scherger

"Livingstone Range School Division (LRSD) and Matthew Halton High School (MHHS) are proud to announce that grade 10 student Irvin Provost is a silver medal recipient of the Indigenous Shining Student Award." - LRSD press release

Chris Davis, with supplied material - On April 3 Matthew Halton High School (MHHS) grade 10 student Irvin Provost was announced as a silver medal recipient of the annual Indigenous Shining Student Award, which celebrates First Nations, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) students who are shining examples in their communities "through embracing and respecting an Aboriginal perspective or world view." He was one of over 60 students nominated from schools across Alberta this year. According to an LRSD press release (excerpted extensively in this article), "Provost is the eldest of four children and has ancestry from both the Piikani and Kainai Nations. He is characterized as an optimistic and deeply thoughtful student with a positive work ethic and strong leadership skills. He has also demonstrated a gift for writing." Provost was honoured at the FNMI Youth Summit which was held at MHHS on Wednesday, April 5.

Annora Brown: Educator

Totem, Tipi and Tumpline

by Olive M. Tyner and Clara L. Fisher, illustrated by Annora Brown

image from Amazon.ca

Joyce Sasse - Annora Brown was a teacher, as was her mother. Teachers convey ideas to their students and through their students. She did this by choice of subject matter and the belief that her world was vibrant with possibility.

Book by U of L professor focuses on immigration experiences in small cities

University of Lethbridge - A new book co-edited by Dr. Glenda Tibe Bonifacio digs into immigration and immigrants’ experiences in small cities in Canada.  Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities is a collection of essays by scholars who study immigration in smaller communities across the country.

The Circle

Allen Joe Sera

Wandering aimlessly midst the dunes with not a tree in sight

nor a blade of grass

nor a flower

nor a drop of water

The mist has lifted

Phil Burpee 

   The mist has lifted. The Seven Sisters hang as close as fiery birds flocking against the zillion fathoms of the night’s inky sea. This air pries open my lungs with icy fingers such that surely even the blood in there becomes a momentary slush as it rushes past to snatch the enabling oxygen. I render my own small mist as I breathe, a quickly-cooling cloud that rises into transparency even as it too becomes this very night. Sound itself seems an imposition, and struggles to make its way amongst the heavy molecules so strict and uncooperative, as though the very idea of vibration is somehow an affront to the bright, crisp stillness and serenity. Yet this is an illusion, for from afar, so far afar, comes the coyote’s call – ululating soprano so pure and so high. My eardrum thrums and I turn my head towards the voice. But now it comes from elsewhere and I turn again, only to turn again as the song spirals and corkscrews from anywhere/nowhere and belies the very notion of direction. Quantum howling – no source and every source, no time and all time, challenging the void to explain itself as though emptiness is really just a slander, and the serenade of the little wolf swells to become the very music of the spheres, easily filling the vaulted limitless with a rich and living suchness.

The Feather and Bullet

Irvin Provost (as read during Matthew Halton High School's 2016 Remembrance ceremony)

I swore allegiance to the queen to fight
Letting my hair fall in pieces to the ground
Bearing the queen’s will and might
I let my culture fade into the fight.

Like a mother's love

Multiply the Gift by Ann Weems

Joyce Sasse, Spiritual Gleanings

Can you imagine how fear must have crushed the heart of the youngster? Ann Weems paints a poetic picture in her book Multiply the Gift.  “It was a family treasure, that vase, that golden vase that belonged” to my great-grandmother, my grandmother and now to my mother.  We can visualize little fingers reaching up … as the youngster stood on tiptoes to lift the object of beauty and curiosity off the mantel.

She knew it was special, and planned how she would handle it ever so carefully. But it was heavier than she thought and it slipped and fell as she, too, fell.

Safe like a Storm

Justine Jorgensen

Your imagination is like a thunderstorm pounding
inside a classroom
like someone wearing cleats has stepped on a snake
like a slender shadow creeping
across the base of the Statue of Liberty
to slip into the ocean with a splash
like blood red apples raining from the sky
to explode on grey cement and fill the air with sickly sweet
like metal being cut by scissors, like a cloud
passing over a full moon
a silk ribbon in sinking sand

the crackle of glass in a forest fire
like pebbles exploding in a bowl
like chemicals in a silver jar, like a whisper
singing in the walls
like shining spider webs spreading
as the mirror cracks in the heat
a drop of blood on a feather, like cockroaches drowning
like a lone melody sinking through ink
like walking on thin ice in the center of a pond
like a knife cutting through stone, like a thousand hailstones
shimmering in molten lava
like a white moth fluttering in the moonlight
like the thoughts I had after I was told a strange story
and could not sleep all night

Under an ocean of poppies

Tijl Vercaemer, Wikimedia Commons image

Justine Jorgensen

Under an ocean of poppies

Above souls, safe and sound

Lie memories, deep scars

In an old battleground

Through the soft, crumbly earth

Rest traces of a flood

Of broken hearts and dreams

And rivers of blood

The leaves in the trees

Move with whispery calls

Remnants of shuddered last breaths

As eyes slowly fall

In the crimson stained petals

Of flowers full and bright

Linger feelings of hatred

Blind rage and fright

On the shoots of green grass

Rest imprints we don’t see

As soldiers lie in hiding

Praying they won’t have to flee

In the sun, we find memories

Of a bright flashing light

As the end of the tunnel draws close

Many men’s very last sight

The silence reminds us

Of the loved ones we lost

Who fought and died

Our freedom the cost

Under an ocean of poppies

Above souls, cold and asleep

Lie secrets and stories

The earth’s own to keep

French language Mobile Collection available at Pincher Creek and District Municipal Library

Pincher Creek Municipal Library

The Médiathèque of Lethbridge is honoured to bring communities together with the acquisition of a Mobile Collection that will help patrons from the Pincher Creek and surrounding communities to improve their French reading and listening skills. The Mobile Collection contains French language books, CDs, DVDs, and other resources for both children and adults. The majority of items are for children/youth.

Because of these new Mobile Collections, Pincher Creek and District Municipal Library has greater access to French materials to better serve the area. The Collection will change on a rotational basis as the different blocks of materials travel between libraries in communities that have French Immersion programs in their schools (for example, St. Michael’s School, Pincher Creek). To view and borrow the French language materials, please visit Pincher Creek and District Municipal Library.

Rocket to the moon

Another tale of loss and affirmation

Phil Burpee

     Let me tell you about this man I know who's building a rocket to the Moon. He's not a physicist or a scientist or any goofy, grinning, billionaire Richard Branson type. He's a cattle producer and barley farmer about an hour and a half's drive outside of Medicine Hat, along a big bend of the Red Deer River. There's nothing much to suggest his place is anything like Cape Canaveral - just a slightly worn old house behind a green ash shelter belt, an old barn, several outbuildings and sheds, some corrals, some farming machinery of varying vintages, and a good size quonset with about a forty-year old Caterpillar bulldozer parked out front. His name is Henry Lafreniere, and he came out of Saskatchewan with his parents in 1953 when he was six years old. He stayed on the place when they died with his wife Ruth.

Change

Justine Jorgensen

My relationship with them was a hand
helping me dress
a firm admonition
a sweet piece of praise
lips brushing my hair
as I fell asleep
eyes that smiled and crinkled
at the corners
a leg to hide behind
feet that raced mine
a voice that read the words
a hand turning the page
arms holding me close, safe
from the world

Alone

Justine Jorgensen

A pair of feet thumped down the weathered steps of the porch. Limp strands of grass were flattened as the figure cut across the lawn, while the sounds of shouting faded the farther he got from the house. Dark clouds hung low in the sky and droplets of rain fell like tiny pebbles through the muggy air. The world was quiet – not a sound except for the faint patter of water on metal. The young boy meandered through the sombre town, kicking at rocks and wishing he had someone to talk to. Occasionally, a dog would bark from a side street, but the sound would fade away almost as quickly as it had begun.

Hunger is

Phil Burpee

Hunger is a living thing --
it lopes around the neighbourhood
like a half-wild dog
showing ribs
showing teeth
showing cold contempt
for all the careful trappings
of our careful lives
and our soft-bellied spaces

My Boarding School experience in Outlook, Saskatchewan

Justine Jorgensen

My name is Justine. I have lived in Pincher Creek for eleven years; I enrolled in the French immersion program at Saint Michael's School in grade one and stayed until grade ten, minus the year I spent homeschooling in fourth grade and the half year I spent in New Brunswick in sixth grade. Then for the 2013-2014 school year - my grade eleven year - I packed my bags and headed off to small town Outlook in Saskatchewan for boarding school.

Jerry's Bones

Phil Burpee

     I heard the owl off in the half-light - ha-hoo, ha-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Probably one less cat at the milk bowl this morning. I'd heard the yowling in the night and figured somebody was right in somebody else's business for sure. But I knew she had young to feed, and so long as it wasn't Scratchy or Long John I didn't really mind. Any time I pulled apart her pellets I saw there was a couple less mice running free, or maybe a gopher or two. I placed that old bird at about twelve years of age. From her viewpoint, she had easily as good a claim on this piece of prairie as I did. Neighbours are neighbours. She'd had plenty of chance to take my eye out on the way to the chicken house, and I still had two of 'em. Pretty soon she'd be calling it a night and heading home to that old, crippled cottonwood down by the creek. And there she'd hunker down to suffer the snot-nose insults and general impertinences of the magpies. No rest for the weary.

The bath, circa 1970s

Toni Lucas

The house that I grew up in was a busy place.  Throughout my growing years our home contained six people, umpteen cats, a variety of dogs, hamsters, rabbits, guinea pigs, gerbils, fish, and hermit crabs.  That was just what lived in the house.  The kicker was that there was only one bathroom.  The rules of not monopolizing the bathroom where strict and enforced. Before you had a bath you announced it so that everyone else had the chance to go in first, and it really only lasted as long as another persons bladder capacity.  For someone who liked long baths this seemed to be about three and a half minutes after the tub was filled.  I was around thirteen when my mom was going into town, and everyone else in the house was going with her.  I talked with her about staying home, borrowing her beauty products and taking long, luxuriating soak uninterrupted by knocking and banging at the door.  My mom said that if it was what I really wanted to do, that was fine with her.  My mom checked to make sure that I really didn't want to come when everyone got ready to leave.  "Just you and your dad, then."  Mom said.

Liberté

Justine Jorgensen

Une légèreté du cœur

Les épaules fièrement mis

Un sens de contrôle

Les pensées exprimées

La fierté dans ce que tu crois

Quand tes différences sont acceptées

Cela, c’est la liberté
     

Walking the robot

Toni Lucas

Nostalgia is a strange thing that hits you in the oddest ways. Chris and I were having a quiet walk through the pretty green space of our condo complex in Calgary. It was twilight, making the rolling lawn a dark lake, the pathways bridges to other lands.  It felt like the city had breathed that sigh of contentment that is heard so often after a hard task finished.

Australia

My grandparents' old house

Justine Jorgensen

My mother was born in a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean, in a country called Papua New Guinea. Whereas I spent my early childhood buried in the December snow and running through the June grass, she spent hers in the perpetual equatorial heat. After six years, she moved south to Australia. Now, I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life and the province has its beauty: the sunsets over the never ending expanse of the prairies, the jagged reflection of evergreens on a lake, the overwhelming presence of the snow-capped mountains. But to me, Australia is especially beautiful – it is a different kind of beauty.