I see a special journey that mirrors Antoine’s personal lived experiences. He finds his truth. This journey opens this picture from his earliest engagement with long-time-ago Dene Relatives. He blends this special connection so authentically, along with his story and inserted images which adds poetic color to his picture...a very special view from the top of this Mountain.
—Gerald Antoine, Dene National Chief
A powerful collection of stories, and life lessons honestly told that all assist in telling a story of renewal of hope. While it is the story of a Dene’s personal journey of self discovery, it’s a very human story that all can identify with. Survival and decolonization of Indian Residential School. PTSD, Dene culture and World View, Art, formal Education, Native American Church and \ internal evolution. Well worth the read.
— Georges Erasmus, Indigenous leader and spokesperson
With characteristic grace and generosity, Antoine Mountain gifts readers with a text that is part memoir, part art history lesson, and characterized throughout by an unyielding sense of wonder. A celebrated Dene artist, writer, and intellectual, Antoine shares memories from his life growing up on the land in Sahtu, Great Bear Lake Region (a childhood cut short by residential school), as well as his travels to Florence, Mongolia, and to the American Southwest to learn from his Navajo cousins. What emerges is an exquisite canvas of stories, prayers, paintings, and teachings, with words here to help us heal and endure. This is a treat, an opportunity to sit, in gratitude and companionship, with one of the North’s foremost artists and intellectuals, to follow the brushstroke of his life’s journey and ‘honour the mystery’ that is everywhere around.
—Maggie Quirt, Professor of Human Rights & Equity Studies, York University
This book/work is almost too vast to capture in a comment. But it is also notably specific. It is woven of an artist’s mind: full of poetry, meditation, prayer. And stories! It moves beautifully and with pace and naturally by way of stories. It is also in context(s): The context of the North and the Dene homeland; The context of kinship and cultural relations with the Dinéh people from the South, In the context of big ideas in art and culture and literature; In the context of confident, assured resistance to colonialism as it shows up in residential schools, in war, in academia. This book is a teaching. Many teachings. Like sitting with an Elder. We are fortunate when we sit with an Elder. We are fortunate when we sit with Antoine Mountain’s writing. Like the way an Elder speaks, this book reveals something whole to us in both its words and form. Sitting with it can be disorienting if we might be too dependent on linear Western European conventions. But it is gravitational and engrossing and a gift to the open hearted, open minded learner. — Loren McGinnis Host, The Trailbreaker CBC North Radio One