Halee Kirkwood is a writer from the western Gitchigami region, now living in Minneapolis. They were an inaugural and returning Indigenous Nations Poets (IN-NA-PO) fellow, a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant recipient. Kirkwood is the winner of the 2022 James Welch Poetry Prize, published with Poetry Northwest. Their poetry and prose can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Prairie Schooner, Ecotone, and others. Kirkwood teaches at Hamline University, The Loft Literary Center, Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Institute of American Indian Arts, and others. They are a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.
Residency Project: “Heartsong Cartography” is a travel memoir retracing the Anishinaabe migration path along the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean in a converted solar-powered ambulance named Ambrose. “Heartsong” aims to push the boundaries of what travel writing can do: there’s abundant travel literature about writers exploring distant, exotic lands, but there isn’t as much about writers exploring the lands they, themselves, are Indigenous to. Central to this memoir-in-progress are Kirkwood’s Ojibwe ancestors who left an indelible impression on the land and culture of the Great Lakes region, one the Anishinaabe people will continue making.
Centuries ago, Anishinaabe people lived near the Atlantic ocean, somewhere along the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Compelled to begin migration westward after several prophetic revelations to where “the food grew on the water,” Kirkwood’s ancestors were guided by bravery and love, portaging a mighty distance all along the shores of the Great Lakes, resting, negotiating, and organizing in places now known as Mackinac Island, Manitoulin Island, Niagara Falls, Detroit, Montreal, and Chicago. From reservation dispensaries to hidden backrooms of masterfully crafted quill baskets to portentous Fourth of July parades, “Heartsong Cartography” meditates on how the Anishinaabe migration path created a vast network of varying Anishinaabe communities, diverse and yet all connected by the water.
“Heartsong Cartography” challenges the idea of travel as a straight line, embracing the idea that landscape and history moves through us more so than we move through it. Kirkwood finds healing in these travels as they reckon with both personal and community histories of gender, race, and environmental-based violence. Once finished with this manuscript, which they hope to accomplish at the Tin House residency, they hope to inspire readers to see how their personal healing is inextricably tied to the healing of land, water, and sky, the ancestors embedded there.