Walking in the light with Joséphine Bacon

Audio 48:30

Joséphine Bacon is the author of numerous collections of poetry and continues at 74 years of age to teach her language Innu-aimun.

© Benoît Rochon

By: Céline Develay Mazurelle Follow

2 min

Meeting with a nomad from the tundra, a rare poet who travels through words, and thus shows us the way.

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Joséphine Bacon is a great voice of francophone poetry, a great Aboriginal voice too. Born in Quebec in 1947, in Pessamit, on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River, Joséphine illuminates the world and those who want to listen to her with her words and her deep humanity, honoring and shining the light on her culture. Innu. For years, Joséphine Bacon has followed in the footsteps and stories of the ancients, interpreting her culture and her community to linguists and anthropologists from Quebec.

In 2009, she published her first collection “Batons à message.

Tshissinuatshitakana ”by Éditions Mémoire d'Encrier;

and since then, the one who accidentally calls herself a poet has never ceased to hand us the talking stick, always writing Innu-Aimun and French in her language that she learned "quietly", she says with modesty, in a boarding school.

She has received numerous distinctions, including the Samuel de Champlain Prize for Canada in 2019.

In October 2021, Joséphine Bacon was the guest of the Albertville Documentary Film and Book Festival “Le Grand Bivouac”.

On site, the 74-year-old grande dame led poetry workshops and presented the film “Je m'appelle humaine” dedicated to her.

This fair and sensitive documentary, directed by Kim O'Bomsawin, received the Media Prize of the Grand Bivouac.

To read :

- Message sticks.

Tshissinuashitakana

, Montreal, 

, 2009

- 

, in collaboration with 

, Montreal, Mémoire encrier, 2011

- A tea in the tundra.

Nipishapui nete mushuat

, Montreal, Inkwell memory, 2013

- 

, Montreal, Inkwell memory, 2018.

Find out more:

- On Innu culture, the

site

is a mine of information and knowledge

- Sur

, a publishing house founded in 2003 in Montreal which publishes the works of Joséphine Bacon

- Sur

, an indigenous production company that produced “Je m'appelle humaine”, a documentary by Kim O'Bomsawin devoted to Joséphine Bacon.

This film received the Media Prize at the Grand Bivouac Festival

- On the prize list of the 2021 edition of

.

Céline Develay-Mazurelle, producer of So Far So Close, is a member of the Media Prize jury.

© Inkwell memory

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Joséphine Bacon for the anniversary of the Librairie québécoise de Paris