Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women over Black Coffee

Color Drawing by Anonymous (collected as Tsimshian Art)

Interview with Ojibwe Poet David Groulx by Black Coffee Poet

“I remember as a kid, dreaming about a poem. There was a huge hand coming out of the clouds writing on a scroll, a poem about an aboriginal man, man it was the most beautiful poem I’ve ever read, I was reading it as this hand from the clouds was writing it and a voice from behind me told me to get up and write it down, I said I would do it later as I wanted to finish reading it and I couldn’t remember a word of it by morning, maybe I’ve been looking in my mind for that poem ever since.”

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I have a deep yearning to visit the office of a highway connected to the missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. I am outraged, yet powerless without any direct contact with the victims or their communities. I am not local, yet I find an office which oversees one of the most afflicted highways. I walk in, and am immediately distracted by an environment of mundane administrative and bureaucratic office work. I wait among a few chairs, deeply incensed by the seeming apathy. There is no information or any immediate signs which would point to the atrocities being committed under their watch. I am called up. The two office workers appear as under a guise of extreme passivity and banal normalcy. My presence is reacted to with equal monotony. They review maps of the highway layout with me, and yet their striking imbecility leads me breathless with an introverted silence. I leave disappointed with myself.  

For creative sources on social justice and arts activism dedicated to the missing and murdered Aboriginal women of Canada, start with More of Black Coffee Poet 

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"to the foreign drum of an impenetrable toxicity

left unconsumed and needed by feet

lit under concrete sustained magic

of the urban disillusioned,

northern mind

bringing the steady rings of a consciousness

prepared as the instrument of a government culture

performing the theatrical stronghold of minority no-release

fish-burdened town of extracted marrow

through procedural temperaments

that go unled and steam up

with chaotic strictures

that demean the meaning

of man and woman

or masculine-

feminine time"

- excerpt from "Northern mind"