Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge: Armand Garnet Ruffo’s The Thunderbird Poems

Abstract

In this article, I analyze Armand Garnet Ruffo’s book The Thunderbird Poems (2015) as a communal act of cultural and territorial redress, in which, as Ruffo states in his essay “Why Native literature?” (1997), Indigenous literature addresses “Native people themselves so that they can empower and heal themselves through the real story” (p. 143). Ruffo describes his poetical work as the result of a communal partnership with Norval Morrisseau, since the poems emerged after his encounters with the artist to listen to his life story, which resulted in the biography Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird (2018). Ruffo’s poetic reading of Morrisseau’s painting The Land (1976), which is called “The Land (Land Rights)”, exemplifies how the partnership between the Anishinaabe visual artist and the Anishinaabe poet turns their artistic works into a collective performance that reclaims Indigenous knowledge.