[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvG8A_iobNA&feature=youtu.be]
Red River
You wrote to me, you were looking for
Someone who could translate
Two words into the language of
The ancestors of the late
Mother of your partner, who wanted a tattoo
Of the words her mother chanted when
Breathing was hard to do.
She spoke these words in English
But you wanted to know their names
In the dialect of the Saulteaux Métis;
A tongue whose name I’d claimed.
I took a name, I took a name in vain
Run Red River, flood the conquered plain
Did I take a name, did I take a name from veins?
Run Red River, breathing blood speak up again
Let it in, let it in, let it in, let it flow
Narrowing, narrowing, narrowing: Throat of the world
Can I breathe in the bad and breathe out the good
I see those men stalking through the twisting wood
And the white stone dam of guilt that glows
Like the white knights armour; let the Red River flow
To the fork of the Red and Assiniboine rivers,
From Orkney and the Hebrides,
Men came to trap and trade fur for
The Hudson Bay Company.
They spoke Scots English, Gaelic and Orcadian.
The women who they took for wives
Were Cree of the First Nations.
The ‘Red River Dialect’ became the English name
For the lilting Manitoba Métis speech
Heard around the Saulteaux plain.
Like the Michif language, Cree don’t say he or she,
But I know that white man’s hunger ate
The speech of the Métis.
{chorus}
