From the publisher:
Calling Down the Sky is a poetry collection that describes deep personal experiences and post-generational effects of the Canadian Aboriginal Residential School confinements in the 1960’s when thousands of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in these schools against their parents’ wishes.

Many were forbidden to speak their language and practice their own culture. Rosanna Deerchild exposes how the Residential Schools systematically undermined Aboriginal culture across Canada and disrupted families for generations, severing the ties through which Aboriginal culture is taught and sustained, and contributing to a general loss of language and culture.

The devastating effects of the residential schools are far-reaching and continue to have significant impact on Aboriginal communities.

rosanna deerchild, calling down the sky

people ask me all the time
about residential schools
as if it’s their business or something

ever since that white guy
nete in ottawa said he was sorry

as if
he knows anything about those places

he wasn’t there
he doesn’t know

he wasn’t there
when i needed comfort
when i cried

he doesn’t know
what that priest did
what those nuns did

you can’t say sorry
for those things
for what happened there

he’s got no right

share your story he says
what does that even mean

boy these misti-gu-su
and their fancy talk

share your story
as if it’s that easy

anyway
it was a long time ago

fifty years since those days
fifty years i said nothing

the words
they get caught right here
in my throat

where the nuns would grab
when we spoke Cree

as if grabbing a dead duck’s neck
haul us up in front of that class

stand there so long,
we pissed ourselves

you learn pretty quickly
to stay quiet after that boy

no
we never talk about it

not back home
not with each other
not even when it was happening,

you just tried to forget about it
leave it behind

some of us did
some of us are still trying

it always finds you though
drags you back

don’t make up stories
that’s what they told us kids

when we went back home
told them what was going on
in those schools

still got sent back
every year
less of us came home

still they said nothing
until we were nothing
just empty skins

full of broken english
ruler broken bones
bible broken spirits

and back home
became a broken dream

no damage done
for all but five years

that’s what it said in the letter
about my residential school story

dear claimant
no records
no proof

sorry

nine years
that’s how long
they kept me in there

i was just a baby
when they came for me

father died on the trapline
mother in the tb sanatorium

didn’t even get to say goodbye
never saw them again

nine years
you know what i got for that

deaf in one ear
blind in one eye

scars all over my head
my legs don’t work
arthritis

diabetes
from what we ate there
you know i never once saw fruit

can’t get no damn sleep
the dead keep me awake eh
ask me for forgiveness

but you can’t forgive and forget
the unnameable

there is no word for what they did
in our language

to speak it is to become torn
from the choking

money got no cure for that

now
i’m almost seventy

and you want me to
share my story

ok then
here it is
here in the unwritten
here in the broken lines
of my body that can never forget