BY ARIEL GORDON
CAROL ROSE DANIELS is probably best known for being the first Indigenous woman to anchor a national news broadcast in Canada when she joined CBC’s Newsworld in 1989. Having spent three decades reporting for CBC, APTN, and CTV while raising three children (whom she calls “her most important teachers”), the award-winning Cree and Chipewyan journalist, who has roots in the northern Saskatchewan community of Sandy Bay, has also established herself as a visual artist, musician, and author. She won the First Nations Communities READ Award and the Aboriginal Literature Award for her debut novel, Bearskin Diary (Nightwood Editions, 2015). But if you ask the multi-talented artist, she’ll tell you that poetry is her first love.
With the release this month of Hiraeth (Inanna Publications), Daniels mines some harrowing and personal source material – the Sixties Scoop – to showcase her passion for the form. Her hope, she says, is that the collection’s poems support Indigenous women in their attempts to find strength.