Gregory Scofield

Canadian poet, playwright, teacher, and activist Gregory Scofield was raised in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon. He is a Métis of Cree, Scottish, English, French, and Jewish descent. Scofield’s poetry, prose, and activism center around indigenous experience, and he is an advocate for social and racial justice for indigenous communities. His books of poetry include The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel (1993), which won the BC Book Prize and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; Native Canadiana / Songs from the Urban Rez (1996); Love Medicine and One Song (1997); I Knew Two Métis Women (1999); Kipocihkân: Poems New and Selected (2009); Louis: The Heretic Poems (2011); and Witness, I Am (2017).

Speaking with CBC Radio about the genesis of Witness, I Am, Scofield says, “With my poetry, I always begin with the title—the title becomes the sacred lodge of where the poems are going to be. Witness, I Am really came about with this idea of where we're sitting right now, the contemporary reality of Indigenous people. It's partly my own testimony as an Indigenous individual in this country. It's the testimony of my auntie, who cannot speak. It's the testimony of my mother, who cannot speak. It's the testimony of generations of my family that were left voiceless. It's also a ceremony of those things, of bringing the names together, of talking about the things that each of us witness.”

Scofield is the author of the acclaimed memoir Thunder Through My Veins (1999) and was the subject of the feature-length documentary Singing Home the Bones: A Poet Becomes Himself (2007). He has been writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba and Memorial University of Newfoundland.