“A Nation of Indigenous Midwives Delivered This Country” by Marilyn Dumont (from ROOM 43.2 Devour)

Due to a confluence of factors, Room Magazine is posting this Indigenous History Month feature later than planned. However, Room holds that Indigenous histories, presents, and futures are to be honored year-round, and post this feature now to assert that.

What is a country? What do we understand of the story we tell ourselves, the stories we are told?

For our 2025 Indigenous History Month feature, we’re revisiting Marilyn Dumont’s “A Nation of Indigenous Midwives Delivered This Country,” first published in Room 43.2 Devour.


 

A Nation of Indigenous Midwives Delivered This Country
by Marilyn Dumont

brown bent women
singing water circles
rain-suckling
minnow-threading

babies licked to sleep swinging
drifting their threads
through wiwip’son

babies wrapped in heavy flannel
through ropes strung
corner to corner
of the room
within easy reach of a brown hand
lulling awasis to sleep again

dark women circles
brooding litters
women with strong minds
and swings across their beds
suckled minnows to sleep
through water veins

water webbed
suckled minnows threading
through swoop fluid diving
brown hands massaging the belly of the motherland
steeping wild raspberry tea
for the coming labour

 


Check out our Indigenous History Month Statement and Reading List
, or revisit Room 43.2 Devour

Metis poet, writer, and Professor Marilyn Dumont teaches for the faculties of Arts and Native Studies at the University of Alberta and is proud of Metis family lines from her Mother’s – Vaness / Dufresne families and her father’s – Boudreau/Dumont families. She was awarded the 2018 Lifetime Membership from the League of Canadian Poets for her contributions to poetry in Canada. In 2019, she received the University of Alberta Distinguished Alumni Award and the Alberta Lieutenant Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award, and in 2022 was Awarded the Alberta Queen’s Platinum Jubilee medal for public service. Her four collections of poetry have won provincial or national awards: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996); green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007); The Pemmican Eaters (2015). A fifth collection surrounding Indigenous history of Edmonton, called South Side of a Kinless River was published by Brick Books in 2024.

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