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Books

THE GOOD MIND, by Karenna’onwe Dr. Karen Hill - Ojistoh Publishing 2026

Review: Irena Kegansky-Young. July, 2026

I first heard Dr. Karen Hill read from her new book The Good Mind during GritLit, a popular Literary Festival in Hamilton Ontario. I was instantly intrigued and captivated by the intricately woven storylines and themes of disability, spirituality, healing and compassion. Particularly when it comes to the authors’ own mother, who was born during the Depression on Six Nations of the Grand River. This award-winning Mohawk physician and advocate for traditional Indigenous knowledge, doesn’t just tell stories, she opens doors for the reader to come inside and takes you on a journey through the waters of peace, friendship and Intergenerational connection.

From it’s very first lines The Good Mind wraps the reader in this warm, endearing narrative that carries with it a sense of tradition, relatability, vulnerability and home. The image of the Two Row Wampum: two purple lines of quahog shells speak of the Rotinonshnni People and their commitment to holding onto what is good and true; their language, customs, social norms and cultural truths. The second line is shown as the Newcomers. Each one is facing their own struggles when it comes to moving towards the future. The quandary then lies in reconciling these two realities where one must become part of the other yet remain autonomous. That image never leaves you. It is the heart of The Good Mind. The book reads like a sweeping saga that keeps coming back to what the author calls the Original Instructions: Peace, Power and kindness; the choice to stay connected to communal values and love. It doesn’t just name these values, it shows us how to practice them through the relationship with family, community and Creation itself. That makes the book both a story and a set of instructions we can actually live by.

Dr. Hill weaves Indigenous communities, values, and cultural manifestations into something that feels both intimate and vast. It’s an almost impalpable peek into lives, loves, principles, and tenacity of a nation. It’s like an echoing where her voice steps in and out of the stories, gently refocusing the lens on medicine, kindness, and creation. It feels like hearing an elder speak, then hearing your ancestors answer you back. The reader becomes witness to rich conversations, dialogues and reflections amongst family. The Good Mind leaves you with some important questions that marginalized communities need to wrestle with: Where do we stand when it comes to getting the answers we need? Can we choose to reconcile our differences through healing rather than stereotypes? The answer is relational; it's in the relationships we choose to sustain by virtue of that which we are.

If you want a book that will teach you, humble you, and leave you quieter inside, read this one. It is medicine.

TOTEM POLES AND RAILROADS, by January Rogers - ARP Books 2016

Review: June Halliday, The Malahat Review

Up in the air, closer to Creator, seemed to be the perfect place to experience Janet Rogers’ latest collection of poems. I voyaged through Totem Poles and Railroads on a return flight from the West Coast to Sin City for a dear friend’s wedding. After ascending into the atmosphere, I pulled the book from the seat pocket in front of me. As many Canadians will, I immediately recognized both Emily Carr and Sonny Assu’s work—Assu’s graffiti-esque formline juxtaposed upon Carr’s silhouetted welcome pole—in a “digital intervention” called We Come To Witness. The visually striking cover invites the reader into the fray of the ceremony. As the title suggests, much of the book addresses the dark corners of Canada’s history.

Totem Poles and Railroads consists of thirty-six poems on numberless pages, which alternate between black and white backgrounds with contrasting lettering reminiscent of historical photographs (and their negatives). Artfully typeset text (primarily lower case) and all caps titles add to the whispered shout of the poems. Bold swathes of empty space leave room for the silence between words. In his back cover blurb, Gregory Scofield refers to the poems as “formidable winged” blackbirds “whose eyes allow us the vision we so often cannot see ourselves.” As I read, we soared over lush greenery, unceded territory, cascading mountains, invisible borders, Lewis and Clark’s serpentine trail, reservations, lakes, red rock and desert, leaving only a disappearing contrail in our passing. Rogers covers many of these landscapes and concepts in the collection she called her “surprise pregnancy” during a CBC interview. In an online interview with The Malahat Review, she acknowledges the traditional territory upon which she wrote many of the poems (at the University of Northern B. C.), as well as the Ontario College of Art and Design. Once she came to the realization a collection was forming, “the rest flowed like a river.”

Victoria’s third Poet Laureate (2012-2014), Rogers is an eminent Mohawk/Tuscarora writer, orator, and artist who has resided on Coast Salish territory since the mid-nineties. She is truly an uncompromising multidisciplinary artist. This collection is experiential art. Rogers’ poetry is song: a chant, an oral story in written word. The songs take flight with her aural acoustics and active language—she both bends and blends form. Up in the ether, it was clear that Rogers’ poetry is part of the uni- (one) verse (song), as the recently departed Richard Wagamese reminded us in One Story, One Song. Rogers takes a bird’s-eye view of Canadian history, truth, and reconciliation—influenced by and well timed with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the sesquicentennial anniversary of Canadian confederation. The collection contains no introduction or acknowledgements—the poems speak for themselves, soaring from the page with a sense of urgency, as in “Red Earth, White Lies”:

I am writing
new histories
absent of
white lies
from this
brown face

The collection takes off with the sensual “Body Song” and lands softly with “Bear Love.” Throughout the journey, Rogers explores the turbulent themes of identity, land, missing and murdered Indigenous women, communication, residential schools, resistance, and the beauty and mystery of reclaiming our shared history, change, growth, and evolution: “dancing on debris / knowing eight generations.” On the flight home, I gazed out the window and noticed the stitched scar of train tracks slashed across the land.

Although the collection has a hard edge—due in large part to the poet’s unwillingness to avert her eyes from the truth—there is also a lot of love. She honours many strong women from Pauline Johnson to Pocahontas. She highlights our shared humanity—“we are made of nature”—with a Ferguson shooting victim in “We Are All Michael Brown.” Her humanity speaks to our commonalities rather than our variance. The forms of the poems have a beauty on the page: expansive, artistic, playful, hard; which helps to reflect the lyricism of Rogers’ performance roots as well as suggest movement. “Antecedent” is like a slash across the page. The uniquely black and white poem “Lemme See Ya Dance” imbues movement with words. The first stanza of “Reckless” offers thoughtful pauses:

reckless ness
exists
in creation
random
and
spiritual esque

These poems are a marriage of life energy and experience and are “Calls To Action.” In “December,” Rogers intones: “there is / a time for intensity / and a place / to express it / there is / a time for calm / contented periods / but this isn’t it.”

By the time we touch back down on our home and Native land, my copy of Totem Poles and Railroads is fluttering with red flags marking wisdom, like “when entering troubled waters / make sure to wear turquoise” and words to remember: “celestial / connections.” Poems like “Where Are Your Guts” fill me with gratitude and courage: “we have hands to give thanks / our feet leave tracks.” The acknowledgement of the imperfection of the last 500 years helps us to see the humanity within one another, and that together we can do better—for our people and for our land. Reconciliation begins with recognition; these poems serve to both validate and educate us about the truth of our collective history as Canadians.

Read this book. Sing it, dance it, experience it. Bear witness, say a prayer, and pass on the knowledge. When you are sung awake by the ceremony, you become a participant in the process of healing.

PEACE IN DURESS, by January Rogers - Talon Books 2012

Review: Patricia Killelea, University of California, Davis,
Transmotion Vol 1, No 1 (2015)

Peace in Duress is Janet Rogers' fourth poetry collection available from Talon Books (214). As a recent poet laureate of Victoria, British Colombia, Rogers hails from the Mohawk-Tuscarora Nations and engages a staggering range of timely themes such as environmental justice, First Nations sovereignty and struggles for decolonization, gender and sexuality, oral traditions (see "Sky Woman Falling" and "Red-Black" especially), critiques of capitalism and more. This list is hardly exhaustive and the collection itself resists easy reductions, as hers is a powerful, edgy voice that simultaneously thunders and soothes, aggravates and celebrates-- sometimes in the very same breath. Hers is a voice that thunders as it demands political change—"We want more/And we want it now"—and she urges readers/listeners to do the same in "Move Like a Mountain," writing "you better walk loud." Yet even as she painfully points our eyes to the "Fractures/In the Sacred," and reminds us that we are, "standing on stolen territories," Rogers likewise declares that the people are "Singing new songs" and implores the audience to "Resist the hate/keep praying." Whether she is taking aim at attacks on the land and tribal sovereignty, or rejoicing in a kiss or other act of human kindness, Peace in Duress is overflowing with the spirit of resistance to confining notions of both poetry and indigeneity.

Skillfully blending images and rhythms of contemporary urban experiences with Original Instructions and "the Great Laws of being" (28), Rogers' pages present "Raven/dancing on fresh concrete" (53) alongside "Visions of medicine/Dropping like acid on the skin" (38). The poet reminds the People early on in the collection that "Our greatest asset/is memory" (6) in a colonial world forcefully urging cultural and spiritual amnesia. Here, Rogers is a poet-warrior writing from the trenches, bearing witness to the epidemic of disappeared First Nations women in "Move a Mountain (Walk a Mile in Her Shoes)," which picks up the discourse of the Walking with Our Sisters activist campaign as the speaker darkly narrates, "If we could really walk in her shoes/ [We'd be] running for our lives." The poet later intones, "Come back," repeating impassioned phrases meant to return the disappeared women and heal both self and community, a rebalancing poetics that links with another piece in the collection, "Giving a Shit." Here, in the second to last poem, the reader finds Rogers' telling account of the Idle No More movement, particularly a description of a round dance addressing Canadian Prime Minister Harper's failure to address Chief Theresa Spence's (Attawapiskat) request to meet with First Nations peoples to discuss the government's failures to honor the treaties and the earth. Rogers writes, "Have you nothing to say" and warns that, "The movement has just begun."

But Peace in Duress is far more than a catalogue of violence against peoples and the earth, for even as her poems offer harsh testimonies, "telling the stories, willingly," these are also pages filled with sensuality and love. For example, in "The Sexual Revolution Will Be Televised," Rogers speaks of the rejection of colonial shame surrounding sexuality and the reclamation of positive conceptions of erotic, what she calls "the rez-erection." Here, the very personal is very political as, "we can have power over our own bodies/Imagine: we can have authority over our own skin." The book is likewise brimming with celebration and "powerful pleasure" (85) from front to back, resulting in a collection centered on (re)balancing and forging connections even in the midst of so much disruption and disconnection.

Rogers' rhythms pulse on the page, and I was immediately drawn to the musicality of her repetition and galloping cadences, like in "Three-Day Road" and "Forty Dayz," where "dirt doesn't want to stay down" and "welcome winds whip." Even the earth itself moves to the rhythm of the poet's voice, as "this land is my favorite song that skips at my favourite part." For these reasons, it is no wonder that Janet Rogers identifies as a spoken-word artist and maintains an active Soundcloud page devoted to experimental vocal-musical performances (Rogers, "Janet Marie Rogers Stream on Soundcloud"). Although her digital poems unarguably complement any reading of Peace in Duress-- sometimes even offering exciting, alternate versions of the written text-- they also function as stand-alone works in their own right, suggesting that one element of Rogers' activism as a poet is ultimately structural in nature since she not only resists easy binaries in her content but also in terms of genre as she fluidly moves from the page to the air. Some of Rogers' performances of poems in the book utilize microbeats that sound like anxious heartbeats or drops of rain hitting the sidewalk, but all along the focus still remains on her voice and the materiality of language itself. Many of Rogers' spoken works turn to reverb and delay vocal effects (see especially "Love and Protection"), which emphasize and elongate critical lines and syllables, creating haunting and, at times, chaotic and dreamlike, sonic atmospheres. Such repetitions reinforce the lingering nature of Rogers' content, where issues like violence targeting First Nations women and the destruction of nature are ongoing, or in other places where the listener is made to dwell on a single word in all of its sonic permutations. In this way, Rogers as an artist is a master of echoes, both on the page and in performance, where her poems talk back to the listener/reader as well as to each other, and necessary visions retrace their steps, audibly stumbling into one another again and again.

In these ways, Janet Rogers' Peace in Duress and her accompanying spoken performances on Soundcloud come together to form a sonic tour-de-force of contemporary indigenous resistance. They will appeal to readers and listeners interested in works that are both experimental and at the same time accessible, as well as audiences eager to engage narratives of survival, resistance, and strength from an unwavering voice that isn't afraid to speak the truth no matter the cost.

Poetry

Award-winning poet joins Western as new writer-in-residence

By Jo Jennings, Special to Western News, July 26, 2022

Read Article

Debunking the White Lies in Janet Rogers’s Poem “Pocahontas”

By Noor Zaid Farajullah, Kurdish Studies, December 2023

Read Article

Theatre

Ojistoh Cabaret: January Rogers Builds a House You Want to Stay In

Review: Irena Kegansky-Young. October, 2026

January Rogers walks on stage in a colourful traditional dress, intricately beaded moccasins that catch the light, and speaks with the calm of someone who knows exactly what house they are building. I find myself watching her feet and those fabulous moccasins while waiting for the room to settle, not out of reverence, but out of recognition. This is a woman who has been building houses for other people for decades and has finally decided to walk through her own home.

Ms. Rogers, 63, explains that Ojistoh Cabaret is a collection of pieces drawn from the last two years of her practice — song, poetry, media, performance — and it plays like a mid-career retrospective that refuses to behave like a retrospective. There is no linear memoir, no chronological slideshow. Instead, she works like the conceptual architect she is: start with a big, uncomfortable question about being human, then figure out how to make it visible. The question here seems to be: How do you carry grief and joy in the same hands?

Much of the work is extremely personal. January honours the loss of her sister and niece with songs and stories that pay homage to family as a continuous, living thing. That is where her humanism lands hardest. One minute she is honouring her mother, the next she is holding up her Mother's Buddha, a small symbol of peace that should not make sense next to beaded moccasins and a moving toy train, and somehow absolutely does. The train is the stroke of genius. On another night, a train might be a cute prop. In Rogers' hands, with her spoken word looping about tracks and distance, it becomes an unflinching, almost mischievous metaphor for colonialism and how far Tuscarora generations have had to travel toward reconciliation. She never says it that bluntly. She doesn't have to. She lets the toy do the work. This is what makes Rogers a master blender of traditional and experimental.

A new aspect of Ms. Rogers’ work that she brings to the show is vocal performance. In her own words, January confesses, "I could not figure out a good way of introducing vocals into the rest of my work as a multimedia artist, publisher and poet until now." She gives us vocals that are lived-in and low—a poet's singing, with impeccable timing and phrasing that lands like a good line break. Paired with her dancing, which is both traditional-inflected and completely contemporary, she commands the room without ever raising her voice.

And then there is the humor. Anyone who has spent time in Rogers' creative presence knows humor is her ethic, not just her punchline. Midway through a piece about ancestral languages and values, she deadpans: "My dad Karl Rogers, who was very much into cars, has named my brothers and sister Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet Rogers." The audience roars because it's funny. It is not a throwaway; it is a methodology. Rogers injects humor and collective experience to keep you from turning her life into a tragedy you can pity, if she allowed for it. Poetry however is where Ms Rogers truly lives.

Free verse that snaps into concrete poetry, surreal images, metaphors that turn literal, non-linear storytelling, and themes she has circled for decades—alienation, collective consciousness, technological advancement, breaking free from chains, the beauty of the vast, unknown cosmos—are all here, but filtered through a clearer, more domestic lens. Her voice remains analytical and deeply humanitarian while talking about the most emotional things with a profound, clearheaded perspective. Does it all cohere? Not perfectly, and that's the point. A cabaret, by definition, is pieces. Some transitions between video, song, and spoken word feel deliberately loose, like flipping through a photo album on stage. If you want a tight three-act narrative, this isn't it. If you want an overview of a practice—what it looks like to be an artist at this stage in a career, carrying language, family, loss, a Buddha, and a toy train all at once—it is remarkably honest. You see gratitude in how carefully she places each object, each sound, each cue.

On a giant multimedia screen that dominates the upstage, we get moving images that reflect contemporary themes of Indigenous Peoples' journeys, not archival trauma but strife and togetherness, community and belonging, kids laughing, roads, kitchens. In front of it, downstage, the small moving toy train makes its stubborn loop and her Mother’s Buddha. If you are waiting for someone to explain the train, you will wait a long time. Rogers doesn't. She layers spoken word and storytelling over the sound of the tracks — click, click, pause — and lets you make the connection yourself. For this reviewer, the train tracks mirrored through her words became a sly, devastating symbol of colonialism: steel lines laid over land, telling people where to go, how far the Tuscarora generations had to travel on their way to reconciliation. She never says that sentence. She lets the toy do the politics. That is the ever-so-subtle socio-political statement the show promises, subversion by scale. The massive system, reduced to a toy you could pick up.

Rogers says her wish is simple: that the audience would leave with a sense of joy and a sense of being entertained. She gets her wish. You leave Ojistoh Cabaret not with a lesson about Indigenous trauma—thankfully, she refuses to make art for that appetite—but with a sense of a woman who has built her house and is inviting you in, on her terms. It is grateful, mindful of nature and the things around us, as she says of her culture, but also subversive, funny, and ever so subtly socio-political. She dissects human nature from a distance, then pulls you close enough to laugh with her. Go for the beaded moccasins. Stay for the train.