Cut to Fortress by Tawahum Bige

I recently received Tawahum Bige’s debut poetry collection, Cut to Fortress, for review. Reading this work has been a moving experience and an educational one. Tawahum Bige writes with integrity while examining the Indigenous experience of the world and inviting all of us to an awakening.   

Stylistically, Bige uses free verse and repetition effectively; poetic prose in poems like “Envy” and “Short Talk on Diaspora” is effective as well. There are delightful alliterations at times, like “dial back on digital delicacies.” He also draws on the style of others, following, for example, Raoul Fernandes  in “Umbrella.” 

“Tawahum Bige writes with integrity while examining the Indigenous experience of the world and inviting all of us to an awakening.”

The use of imagery is powerful. Image after image builds in the consciousness; the reader does not arrive at a neat conclusion after a linear journey, but with flashes of truth and insight can affirm at each moment, “Yes! That is it. That is it, exactly.” We are left with an overwhelming sense of direction, experienced in each moment and in many ways.  

The first poem, “Origin,” employs rich imagery of earth as the source of being; this is not a manufactured reality learned from a “stone holy book” but, as he reminds us, creation comes from “muck”, not from a “manufactured divine.” With this opening, Bige establishes his context as one rooted in the earth. 
 
“Toy Soldiers” is an intense and painful read: the image of small child playing against a backdrop of parents fighting.  We consider the trauma of family breakdown and suspicions regarding family counseling.  

“Reasons to Decolonize” gives the sense of industrialization as a malignant force on the land with images like “tumorous plasma” and “where a microwave oven melts the surround wrap covering planet.” There are images of the horror and desolation of a planet gone wrong; the reference to black smoke suffocating the eagle (“she is out of breath, time”) is haunting. And appropriate.  

“Loaded Cartridge” is an amazing poem referencing artifacts of culture that rest locked in the museum’s basement. These are viewed as art by the museum, but they are not simply ornamental; they have a cultural value and purpose in the culture’s life. The museum fails to grasp the meaning, the history that is here: “You’re illiterate. Calling them just gifts, when in truth they’re documents.”  There are histories to be learned but the curator “can’t even read any of it”. 

In “Too Abstract”, Tawahum Bige tells how his writing on colonization is deemed “too abstract” by his writing professor – yet it contains very concrete images. (Really, how can a description of a very physical and real interaction be abstract?) 

The poem “Storm Call” examines the response to protest with fresh vision. The police as “castle-guard,” with “sinew-cold commitment,” are sent out to suppress the “red-hot ancestral spirit.” Bige goes on to the role of the protestors, their commitment to the earth for all peoples, with the four sacred medicines as the “storm unseen.” 

 “Law and Order” challenges imperialism: It makes exclusive claims for its figures, “Like that sacrifice was made for skyscrapers pencil pushers and supremacy papers.” It plays down the glaring violations it has made, to which his response is, “Right, Indigenous children just happened to be snatched from their beds.” References to being “Filled with dread by RCMP or some white farmer” have their realities in some very recent experiences. 

In “Wetako’s Highway” Bige again describes the machinery of colonialism, the machinery that devours the earth and the society, with healing possible through the traditional knowledge and medicines. “The secrets are hidden in our old ways.” (He speaks in “Geography Lesson” of a tectonic shift; such a change, let us remember, will shake the world to its core.) 

There is a powerful sense of affirmation with vivid and illuminating insights in the final poem, which culminates with an invitation. 

I could go on and on pulling images from Tawahum Bige’s poetry, but I suggest you read these poems in their entirety.  When you do, do not read them all at once; read them, savour them, meditate on them, and grow from them. It would not be possible to describe them truly without transcribing every poem. 

The themes arising from colonialism – social dislocation, environmental destruction, dishonouring of treaties, social repression, and genocide – receive fresh treatment in this writing. There is a sense of the toxicity of the earth in the hands of colonialism, and the complete disregard for the humanity of the first inhabitants of this country. I cannot do these poems justice here; I can only touch them and be amazed and thank the author for being a spokesperson who draws all of us into a reality where perhaps healing can begin. 


Tawahum Bige is a Łutselk’e Dene, Plains Cree poet who resides on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory (Vancouver). His land protection work against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion led him to face incarceration in 2020. Cut to Fortress is Bige’s debut poetry collection.

You can read an interview with Tawahum Bige here at TMR.

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Nightwood Editions (April 30 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0889714169
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0889714168

Anne M. Smith-Nochasak grew up in rural Nova Scotia and taught for many years in northern settings including Northern Labrador,  the focal setting for her second novel. She has retired to Nova Scotia, where she enjoys reading, writing, and country living. She has self-published two novels through FriesenPress: A Canoer of Shorelines(2021) and The Ice Widow: A Story of Love and Redemption  (2022).