Lightning in Our Roots by Avis Blackbird

In Lightning in Our Roots, Avis Blackbird invites the reader on a journey to feel Indigenous fluidity of space and time, the impact of colonization, enduring connections to the land, lived urbanized experience, and finally the rising hope of Indigenous communities and cultures to thrive. Inspired by Tommy Pico and Kae Tempest, these short lyric poems draw from Blackbird’s personal experiences of her youth in the city, removed from Indigenous traditions, to her adulthood, where she and her family healed their connection to their cultural pride.

The underlying sentiment of strength and love defies the injustices inflicted upon communities for generations. Her poetry is wholehearted as she soars in the company of birds and reconnects to her ancestral Salish heritage. As she imagines a rightful place for youth waiting in the wings, the ancestors dance with her.

Praise for Lightning in Our Roots

“Avis Blackbird’s poetry is an act of witnessing. Gently beginning, she builds momentum: gathering kindling / untangling vines of twisted narratives / building courage to speak into the fire of unspoken truths, all for healing. As her audience, we witness a return: to voice, to strength, to ancestral language, and to the foundation of her roots.”―Nicola Campbell, author of Spíləx̣m: A Weaving of Recovery, Resilience, and Resurgence

“Change fuels Avis Blackbird’s poems in Lightning in Our Roots. ‘The land calls for congruency,’ she writes, ‘the blue moon is coming,’ and ‘Far off, the wave has started as a pulse.’ Following ‘moons that guide paths,’ she walks through fear and loneliness. Memories, dreams, and abundant more-than-human presences―among them so many birds!—companion her. Entangled in the land’s capacity for transformation, urged on by sprouting dandelions and ‘the frog calls of change,’ she connects to the ancestors, community, and her own gifts. The land underpins everything. In revealing―and seeking redress for―the legacies of colonialism, these poems proclaim the land is alive, and reclaim an attunement to the world we badly need. Reading them I’ve felt admiration, pain, fear, despair, humility, gratitude, hope, and finally, joy.”―Maureen Scott Harris, author of Slow Curve Out

“These poems move through the quiet territories of the self, where silence is a teacher, sound is a warning drum, and the hidden realm presses close. Each piece listens to the land inside and around us―the places where fear gathers, where breath thins, where something ancient urges us to break open. Moving like weather across a living territory, this collection honours the struggle to breathe, to listen, and to rise again with the land as witness.”―Allison Hotti, Indigenous Educator, Halfway River First Nation, Treaty 8 Territory, Northern BC