Marie Annharte Baker
Canadian poet & author (born 1942)
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Marie Annharte Baker (born 1942) is a Canadian Anishnabe (Ojibwa) poet and author, a cultural critic and activist, and a performance artist/contemporary storyteller.[2]
Through books, poetry, essays, interviews and performance Annharte articulates and critiques life from western Canada, with a special focus on women, urban, Indigenous, disabilities, academic, and poverty-centric (or "street") awareness and issues/foibles.
Life
Baker is from Little Saskatchewan First Nation and she was born in 1942 and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba.[3][4] Her father was Irish and her mother was Anishinabe. Marie Annharte Baker was considered to be part of a specific Anishinabe nation, the Obibwa. She would spend her holidays with her Anishinabe grandparents on a reservation in Manitoba.[5] She received what she considered an unsuccessful education at Brandon College, the University of British Columbia and the Simon Fraser University during the 1960s. Baker considers herself self-taught but she did return to education in the 1970s and this included a degree in English for the University of Winnipeg.[5] After graduating, Baker became involved in Native American activism, and taught Native Studies at multiple colleges in Minneapolis. Baker was one of the first people in North America to teach a class entirely on Native American women. After her teaching career, Baker returned to Winnipeg and began to work as a community family advocate.
She has been associated with (studied or taught at) the University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg, Brandon University, Augsburg College, and University of Minnesota.[6] She has collaborated with or co-founded numerous groups of community-based writer activists, including Regina Aboriginal Writers Group and the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba. She was a founding member of the Canadian Indian Youth Council. Presently, she is organizing Nokomis Storyteller Theatre which features comic/clown and puppet performances.[2] She also volunteered for Vancouver weekly radio program, When Spirit Whispers, interviewing Native people while discussing the bounds of Native art forms.
Works
- Being on the Moon, Vancouver: Polestar, 1990; Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2000
- Coyote Columbus Cafe, Winnipeg: Moonprint, 1994
- Exercises in Lip Pointing, Vancouver: New Star Books, 2003
- Indigena Awry, Vancouver: New Star Books, 2013
- Too Tough, 1990
- "Porkskin Panorama" Callalloo
- "Medicine Lives"
- "Borrowing Enemy Language"
Awards
- 1990 National Film Board grant for Too Tough, her film celebrating the spiritual power of Native women to counter media victim image.
- 1991 City of Regina's writing award for Albeit Aboriginal, a script reclaiming voices of Native women.
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