Linda LeGarde Grover Poetry Reading: The Sky Watched

The Sky Watched is a collection of poetry—some bilingual—that “tells the collective story of a Minnesota Ojibwe family and tribal community against the backdrop of history that begins with creation and continues to this day.” Through poetry, Linda LeGarde Grover contributes to the continuation of Ojibwe worldview and survival in the recounting of history and family stories. In The Sky Watched, the voices of children, adults, and elders, of Indian boarding school students and traditional tribal storytellers, and of the Manidoog, the unseen beings who surround our lives every day, are given voice in a manifestation of the Ojibwe oral tradition teachings on the written page.

This is the first bilingual poetry book in English/Ojibwe: not translations, but poems using both languages. Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Sky Watched is “a poetic reaction, in a wonderfully realistic voice, of the spirit and essence of the Ojibwe people.”

Linda LeGarde Grover is professor emerita of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her books The Road Back to Sweetgrass, Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, In the Night of Memory, and Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong, all from Minnesota, have earned numerous awards, including the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award; Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards for poetry, memoir and fiction; and a Minnesota Book Award for memoir and creative nonfiction. Her book of stories The Dance Boots received the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her memoir Gichigami Hearts was the One Boook Northland read in 2022.