In this excerpt from Soft as Bones: A Memoir, Chyana Marie Sage recounts exploring the forest and fields around the trailer her family shared near Edmonton, Alberta—days she considered the happiest time in her childhood. She juxtaposes the freedom she relished in spending time outdoors with her sisters, her “bare feet covered in dirt and a T-shirt stained with sap,” with the dark cloud of her father, a drug dealer prone to violence.
Wuskoowun is when something lowers, when it is clouded, and my father tended to be just that—those darkened clouds that move quickly and hover low so that if you reach out your little fingers, you think you can touch them, but you can never really touch them, and don’t you know that people are never as simple as the worst things they do?
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Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue
“She was done playing the starry-eyed hippie. She was tired of singing dirges.”
Ottawa’s Response to the Trucker Protest Was Doomed from the Start
“Ottawa residents had had it.”
How Connie Walker Got Us Listening
“Walker was cut off mid-pitch by a producer who asked if she was talking about another ‘poor Indian’ story.”
