Reneltta Arluk, Author
Reneltta Arluk is of Inuvialuit, Dene and Cree descent from the Northwest Territories. Her first written work, TUMIT, is a one-woman play exploring personal relationships and the breaking of cycles. TUMIT, meaning tracks in Inuvialuktun, takes her storytelling one step further.
Thoughts And Other Human Tendencies is Reneltta’s first book. A collage of poetry exploring relations and culture from the perspective of an Indigenous woman finding her passions and capturing the snippets of joy and pain that come from the experience.
Reneltta Arluk is currently Director of Indigenous Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She is also a mom to her son, Carver.
THOUGHTS AND OTHER HUMAN TENDENCIES
Published Under BookLand Press, Thoughts and Other Human Tendencies is a poetry collection where stories of Indigenous experiences are distilled into feelings and thoughts.
Reneltta Arluk weaves the traditional and the contemporary together through the eyes of a young Indigenous woman. She draws from the Indigenous tradition of praising the land and the spirit, the realities of Indigenous culture, and the concept of feminine individuality. Her poems, both sacred and secular, are written with the passions of anger, grief, and love, at once tender and furious.
She celebrates the everyday acts, rituals, and stories that draw people together across the years and across the distances of cultural dispersion. Here are tales of love, betrayal, courage, defeat, acceptance, loss, grief, passion, delight, courting, coming of age, birth and death, youth and old age, hunting and surviving. The poems are united by the history of her ancestors and the ongoing struggle to define what it means to be a community member, an Indigenous person, and a woman in the twenty first century.
“In Thoughts And Other Human Tendencies, Reneltta Arluk sings to us in dialects of confession and celebration. In her poems and in her brilliance, she dances strong for all of us.”
“Unlike many works of poetry, Thoughts and Other Human Tendencies has a clear progression through the growing pains of youth to more adult, even risqué subject matter. The poems comprise the intensely personal and in many ways autobiographical work about growing up and dealing with the joy and pain the process entails. ”
“Reneltta Arluk once acted a script I had written. She gave breath, blood, and body to a character I had imagined. Here, in these poems, she does the same for herself, for her own history. Here is the script for the drama only she could enact.”
“There is both wisdom and magic in these words with some bare bones truth telling that makes me feel less alone.”
Thoughts and Other Human Tendencies is available in Cree, mâmitoneyihtamowina ekwa kotakak ayisiniwak ot'swepinikewiniwâwa. Translated by Susan Sinclair.
Thoughts and Other Human Tendencies also available in French, Pensées et Autres Propensions de L'Espèce Humaine with Les Éditions de La Grenouillère Inc. Translated by Carole Beaulieu.
For purchase
Playwrights Guild of Canada, In English and in French
At the ARC Poetry Northern Edition Launch in Ottawa, ON
Reneltta shares one of her favourite poems, Blue Collar/Red Trash