Katherena Vermette

Early Life and Education

Katherena Vermette was born on Treaty 1 territory, in the heart of the Métis Nation in Winnipeg, ​Manitoba​. She is the daughter of a Mennonite mother and Métis father and grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, a heavily Indigenous neighbourhood known for its high levels of crime and poverty, but also for its thriving culture and community.

Vermette’s first book of poetry, North End Love Songs, reflected her intense and conflicted experience of life in this neighbourhood. “I spent years trying to run away, get away, and be any place else before I realized there was no other place I wanted to be, or could be, really,” she said of her life in the North End, in a 2013 interview with The Walrus. “It’s like family, isn’t it? They annoy…us, but no one loves or knows us more.”

Vermette began writing poetry as a child, a passion that has continued throughout her life. To support herself, she has worked many jobs, such as teaching kindergarten. She has also led writing workshops, facilitated early literacy training, and run an Indigenous artist-training and employment program.

With growing success as a poet, Vermette enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s master of creative writing program. At age 35, she published her first book of poetry, North End Love Songs (2012, The Muses’ Company).

Poetry

Katherena Vermette has been published in many literary journals and anthologies, including Canada and Beyond and Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water. Fascinated with the birds and birdsong she heard every morning, her poem “Selkirk Avenue” describes young women on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, using the fragility and beauty of birds to express their extreme physical and emotional vulnerability while providing an image of the hardships of life on the streets:

robin
girl stands on
selkirk avenue
head down
her body cries
like a baby alone
paces
a round circle way
too young body squeezed
into too tight clothing
breathes out
with her whole chest
puffed out bright
and red
as if she’s
beautiful
as if she’s
proud

Vermette’s first collection of poetry, North End Love Songs (2012), is at once sad and inspiring, beautiful and picturesque. “Lost,” for instance, captures a desperate time for the poet and her family. When Vermette turned 14, her brother, Wayne, aged 18, visited a bar with friends. It was the last time he was seen alive. The Vermette family had little support or help in finding Wayne, due to what they perceived as apathy on the part of police, informed by stereotypes of young Indigenous men. “Her brother is missing / like a glove / or a sock / or a set of keys,” she writes. Vermette describes how the official response was a generic one, and then, in the last lines of “Indians,” turns that into bitter irony:

they said
he’ll turn up when
he gets bored
or broke […]
this land floods
with dead indians
this river swells
freezes
breaks open
cold arms of ice
welcomes indians

North End Love Songs also contains great beauty. “Family” is an ode to elm trees, and the power of family. American elms, not native to Canada, line the streets of north Winnipeg. But it is the Canadian elms by the river that have captured the heart and soul of the young girl in the poem. Vermette’s imagery and use of metaphor lifts the ordinary elm from the mundane to the memorable:

elms around us
like aunties
uncles
cousins
all different
but with the same skin […]
her favourites
are the ones by the river
they spread low
and stay close
to the earth
those ones she can
climb into
lean against
the strong dark bark
rest her small body
within their round arms
their sharp leaves
reach out over the river
she watches how
the waves fold
into each other
like family

North End Love Songs went on to win the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Poetry, propelling Vermette into the public eye. “This collection is an intensely personal story, but it is also nothing new,” she said in a 2013 interview with The Walrus. “It’s about a young girl or woman struggling with identity and place. That pretty much describes the whole ‘Canadian experience’ right there. More than that, it is a deeply Indigenous story, and I think Canada is hungry for stories about its first people.”

Books

Katherena Vermette’s first career as a kindergarten teacher in Winnipeg fostered her deep belief in education for Indigenous children (see also Education of Indigenous Peoples in Canada). This is seen in her collection The Seven Teaching Stories (2014–15), a series of seven books for young children that teaches about the seven sacred teachings of the Anishinaabe tradition, including love, respect, courage and honesty. In The Just Right Gift: A Story of Love, a boy searches for just the right gift for his grandmother: “he wants to find something as sweet as her kisses and as warm as her smiles.”

In 2016, Vermette published her first novel, The Break (House of Anansi Press). It opens as a young ​Métis mother witnesses a crime outside her window. The narrative expands from this event into an intricate web of perspectives, growing into an intergenerational family saga about life in Winnipeg’s North End (see also Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada). The Break was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and was a finalist on Canada Reads. In 2017, the book won the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize and the Burt Award.

Vermette followed The Break with two companion novels, The Strangers in 2021 and The Circle in 2023. In 2021, The Strangers was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and it won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize the same year. The Circle marks the end of the Strangers trilogy.

That same year, Vermette released Pemmican Wars, a graphic novel and the first of the series A Girl Called Echo. Illustrated by Scott B. Henderson and coloured by Donovan Yaciuk, the book is about the adventures of a 13-year-old Métis girl, Echo, who finds herself transported into the past during her history class at school. Going back and forth between the present and the past, Echo explores Métis history and culture as she journeys along historic fur trade routes, spends time at a Métis hunting camp and learns about the pemmican trade and bison hunt.

Film

The year 2016 saw the premiere of Katherena Vermette’s first documentary film, this river. Co-directed by Erika MacPherson and featuring activist Kyle Kematch, this river explores the horrifying experience of searching for a loved one who has gone missing. In the film, Vermette speaks about the experience of losing her older brother. this river won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Short Documentary in 2017.

Significance

Katherena Vermette is a powerful young female Indigenous voice and a rising star of Canadian literature. In her poetry, prose and film, she explores some of the most vital issues facing Canada today: the search for identity and the ongoing effects of historical and institutional prejudice.

Awards and Honours

• Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry (North End Love Songs), Canada Council for the Arts (2013)
• Best Short Documentary (this river), Canadian Screen Awards (2017)
• Burt Award (The Break), Canada Council for the Arts (2017)
• Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (The Strangers), Writers’ Trust of Canada (2021)

Published Works

• North End Love Songs (2012)
• The Seven Teaching Stories (2014–15)
• The Break (2016)
• Pemmican Wars: A Girl Called Echo, Volume 1 (2017)
• The Strangers (2021)
• The Circle (2023)