User:Cullen328/sandbox/Scofield

Identities
Scofield sees himself as a "community worker" who reflects his various identities through his writing. As a disadvantaged child living in poverty, he felt no clear identity. The identities that emerged as he matured include Métis, gay and Jewish.

He initially felt shame at learning of his Métis ancestry because the Canadian school system denigrated Métis history and heritage, and mocked its heroes such as Louis Riel. Instead, he yearned for a pure Cree identity, conscious that his own grandfather had denied his own Cree/Métis identity due to shame. In an early poem "Between Sides", he wrote:
 * "I move in-between
 * Careful not to shame either side"

He learned to take pride in the Métis aspect of his identity after participating in an annual Métis cultural gathering and festival called "Back to Batoche Days".

Scofield once feared that his gay identity might destroy his Native community connections. He initially tried to compartmentalize these identities, but came to understand that embracing both together helps with his community work, especially supporting gay Native youth. He mentions that his generation "didn't have the opportunities to learn about courting and respect", and hopes that his poetry and writing can help the younger generations come to terms with their own identities. . His poetry in Offerings constitutes gay Native erotica:


 * "I lie over him
 * a sacred mountain
 * where black bear
 * paws the Earth, sniffs
 * for songs".

Scofield's father, Ron Miller, abandoned his family when Scofield was a baby, and died in 1998. Scofield learned that his father Miller was Jewish, and had grown up in Winnipeg's Jewish community. In his poem, "The Unorthodox Funeral of Ron Miller", Scofield examines and embraces his newly discovered Jewish heritage in his poetry, while rejecting orthodoxy. Instead, he "weaves together the ancient and the contemporary". In that poem, Scofield evokes traditional Jewish burial rituals, combining the word images with his own age in years as he wrote it:


 * "I have washed and cleaned
 * your body, thirty-nine years
 * I've wrapped you
 * in white linen, thirty-nine years."

ISSN:

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature

In 2013, he was among many Canadians who received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

In 1998, Scofield's aunt was killed in an unsolved crime, and his deep concern about missing and murdered aboriginal women informs his recent poetry. Most days, he tweets the story of a missing or murdered woman.

Jeffery Donaldson, Karen Solie, Katherena Vermette

In a review of Scofield's book Witness, I Am, Nicholas Bradley wrote, "Scofield is an observer, especially of tragedies, and his poems explore, with speech that verges on song, the meaning of knowing one’s place in the world. Muskrat Woman, the first section of Witness, I Am, is a long poem about a flood—in Scofield’s words, 'a retelling, a reimagining of a much longer âtayôhkêwina—Cree Sacred Story'." Bradley also wrote, "The poems concern the living and the dead—those who have survived forms of colonial brutality, and those who must be remembered. Scofield’s distressing acts of testimony, mourning, and dissent suggest convincingly the importance of the literary arts to public discourse about matters of grave consequence."