In Dawaa: The Space Between, Anishinaabe poet and artist Tareyn Johnson explores that space through a dialogue between languages and images. Writing in English and Anishinaabemowin, she reflects on memory, identity and the experience of relearning a language that was disrupted across generations.
The result is a work shaped by both absence and resilience—where poetry becomes a way to hold what cannot be fully said in either language alone.
Language as a relationship and worldview
For Johnson, a professor and director of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Ottawa, poetry became a way to process emotions and share how she sees the world. In Dawaa, language, memory and visual art reflect the experience of an Anishinaabekwe reconnecting with a culture and language that are grounded in relationships between people, land and generations.
Language plays an important role in shaping this perspective. Johnson writes in both English and Anishinaabemowin, but the two do not function as direct equivalents. Words in Anishinaabemowin often carry meanings and relationships that cannot be neatly translated into English. Rather than smoothing over these differences, Johnson builds them into the structure of the book itself, allowing the tension to remain. Each page presents two columns: English on one side and Anishinaabemowin on the other. The columns sit beside each other in conversation, allowing meanings to shift between the two languages, with Johnson intentionally leaving some of the gaps unresolved.
“I wanted to create an experience where someone feels uncomfortable reading it. I want to catch people a little off guard.”
By drawing the reader’s eyes back and forth between the columns, the poems invite the reader into a space where meaning is fluid and perspective can shift.
Art, composition and perspective
Alongside the poetry, Dawaa incorporates visual elements that accompany the reader’s experience. Photographs, layered images and inverted landscapes appear throughout the book, creating a dialogue between text and image. For Johnson, who describes herself as a highly visual thinker, the visual elements are not simply illustrations: they are another way of expressing memory and place. Many of the images combine personal photographs with landscapes connected to her family and community. By layering and sometimes inverting these images, Johnson invites the reader to pause and reconsider what they are seeing.
That sense of visual disruption mirrors the tension of reading the poetry itself. Just as the language moves between English and Anishinaabemowin, the images ask the viewer to look again, just as the poems ask the reader to listen differently. Through this combination of poetry and visual art, Dawaa becomes less about providing clear answers and more about opening a space for reflection, a space where readers can engage with different ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Creating space for the next generation
At its heart, Dawaa is about survival, resilience and the spaces people create for the next generation. Johnson imagines her daughter one day holding the book, passing down the threads of family, language and memory that stretch across time and space.
She says that language revitalization often places a heavy burden on individuals who are trying to relearn what was once taken from their communities. “Revitalization is an unfair burden to people. Ideally, our future generations wouldn’t have to fight that battle, they would just grow up with the language.”
“Revitalization is an unfair burden to people. Ideally, our future generations wouldn’t have to fight that battle, they would just grow up with the language.”
Tareyn Johnson
— Professor and director of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Ottawa
She hopes the book will resonate with others trying to reconnect with their own ancestral languages or cultural identities. Many people, she notes, struggle with feeling that they do not fully belong to one identity or another, often measuring themselves against rigid expectations of what they should be. Instead, Johnson’s work suggests that identity can be held in relationships—across languages, histories and ways of knowing.
This poetry offers a way to hold these tensions and to acknowledge frustration and healing while continuing on a journey of rediscovery.
For Johnson, the book is one way of carrying memory and perspective forward so that what has been reclaimed through effort might simply be lived by those who come next.
Dawaa: The Space Between is available for purchase at the uOttawa Press website.