Gregory Scofield

Gregory Scofield (born July 20, 1966 in Maple Ridge, British Columbia) is a Canadian Métis poet, beadwork artist, dramatist and non-fiction writer. He is a graduate of the Gabriel Dumont Institute Native Human Justice Program. He has published two instruction books on doing Métis flower-beadwork for the Gabriel Dumont Institute.

Background and career

Scofield is a Red River Métis of Cree and European ancestry. He speaks the Cree language, and incorporates it into his poetry. He is currently an assistant professor of English literature at Laurentian University, despite being a high school dropout and not having the relevant educational background. He was the subject of a documentary film, Singing Home the Bones: A Poet Becomes Himself, in 2007.

Identities Scofield sees himself as a "community worker" and his various identities are reflected through his writing.

Scofield says he learned to take pride in the Métis aspect of his identity after participating in an annual Métis cultural gathering and festival called "Back to Batoche Days".

In 2016, Scofield won the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize for his lifetime body of work.

Critical response

In a review of Scofield's book Witness, I Am, Nicholas Bradley wrote, "Scofield is an observer, especially of tragedies, and his poems explore, with speech that verges on song, the meaning of knowing one’s place in the world. Muskrat Woman, the first section of Witness, I Am, is a long poem about a flood—in Scofield’s words, 'a retelling, a reimagining of a much longer âtayôhkêwina—Cree Sacred Story'." Bradley also wrote, "The poems concern the living and the dead—those who have survived forms of colonial brutality, and those who must be remembered. Scofield’s distressing acts of testimony, mourning, and dissent suggest convincingly the importance of the literary arts to public discourse about matters of grave consequence."

The jurors for the 2016 Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize were Canadian poets Jeffery Donaldson, Karen Solie and Katherena Vermette. They commented, "His forms embrace the musical, the documentary, and the experimental in a vision of risk and generosity. From raw, urban truths to the solace of Cree cadence, from the heart beat of the drum to the wax poetics of a young Louis Riel, Scofield's range of subject, work, and style dazzles. He has courage to let us in, and the patience to help us understand." Louis: The Heretic Poems (2011) Witness, I Am (2016)