Dawaa: The Space Between

Author: Tareyn Johnson

Publisher: Duo (University of Ottawa Press) (2026)

Dawaa: The Space Between celebrates in poetry the tensions and beauty between the two ancestral languages of the author: Ojibwe and English.

As a First Nations woman, Tareyn Johnson grew up without knowing the language of her ancestors. Her grandparents attended residential school, and neither they, nor her mother carried the language. Left with a deep longing desire to embrace Anishnaabemowin (Ojibwe) language, she began her learning journey as an adult.

As her understanding grew, words began to form visually in her mind. As a result, twenty-six poems—two for each of the Thirteen Moons—grouped seasonally, beautifully juxtapose Ojibwe and English to express Johnson’s feeling of existing between two languages.

This collection of poems—not intended as a didactic or language teaching tool—examines the unique experience of walking between two worlds, speaking and learning two languages, and relating the two ways of knowing in a liminal space… the space between.

nanda-gikendan—seek to know it, seek to learn it.