About Margaret
I am an author of poetry and memoir, a hiking guide, and an independent scholar—a teacher and ever a learner—based in Chuwapchipchiyan Kudi Bi (Canmore, Alberta), in Treaty 7 territory.
Since I was a young child, I have felt safer, more myself, and more alive in wild spaces. This connection—to rivers and oceans, to mountains, ravens and prairie grasses—is a persistent root that anchors my writing, outdoor education, academic research, and my commitments to reconciliation as a settler person of Irish and German ancestry. Land anchors my understandings of healing and wellbeing, for myself and in my offerings to others.
How can settler peoples become strong enough for the difficult work of becoming better relatives on the Indigenous lands that sustain us? I once heard Mi’kmaw Elder and hereditary Chief Stephen Augustine call for all us in Canada to look to land as both mother and government and I wondered, What kind of listening would this entail? Through my PhD research at the University of British Columbia, I sought to know what such a relationship might feel like in my body, what the seeking could teach me, and how writing this journey in poetry and story would transform me.
I was born in water from the river the Cree call kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, “swift flowing river” (the North Saskatchewan River). I grew up in a community of social justice activists in inner city Edmonton. Many of our neighbours were houseless and experiencing addiction and many were Indigenous. Not knowing differently, I took their pain into my body. Only later, did I learn how the pain I witnessed in my Indigenous neighbours was an embodiment of generations of colonial violence. This was the violence of residential schools and of historical and ongoing land dispossession, the violence of systemic racism. Only much later, did I see how these traumas of others had entwined with my personal and ancestral traumas; my body was strung with wires. My heart was rigid and tight instead of pliable and open, leaving me trapped in my head with little capacity to think with my heart.
I began learning from Indigenous teachers in Western Newfoundland when, as an outdoor educator, I collaborated with Mi’kmaw cultural teachers to indigenize the program and took up invitations to participate in ceremony and community gatherings. I am still growing into these teachings and those that came later; I am learning about walking alongside and supporting the resilience, healing and activism of Indigenous peoples while rooted in my own physical and spiritual wisdom, and guided by my own relationships to land and ancestors. I invite other settlers to walk with me.
I have been growing into my voice. For decades, I wrote in secret until, in 2011, a good friend convinced me to read at a tribute event, this one-hundred-strong audience forming the second “person” I’d shared my poetry with. I have continued sharing my poetry through readings and in literary journals, including Newfoundland Quarterly and The Prairie Journal. My writing is published in academic journals and book collections and I am the co-editor of Language, Land and Belonging: Poetic Inquiries (Vernon Press, 2023), a collection of poems of and essays through which authors explore relational repair.
I am currently completing a hybrid memoir, Pray Where Waters Meet: A Settler’s Spiritual Journey with Land. This book and a parallel collection of poetry stem from my doctoral work. They trace my healing and learning as I face childhood trauma, learn about colonialism as a relational violence that (disproportionately) harms both survivors and perpetrators, and seek to be changed by Indigenous teachings and listening to the land.
In my writing, research and teaching, I am passionate about supporting settler peoples to learn to think with our heart—to find strength in the land, in the gifts of our ancestors, and in our creativity so we can listen deeply, speak and act truthfully and become better relatives to the land and to Indigenous peoples.
