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The main character in She Falls Again is attempting to survive as an Indigenous woman in Winnipeg – a sadly-complicated task. She talks to the Sky Woman, who challenges her to reclaim her matriarchal power.
She Falls Again is the latest example of cultural storytelling done by Winnipeg poet, writer and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild. The unique blend of poetry and prose was recently recognized as one of the winners of the 2025 Indigenous Voices Awards.
‘It’s a really special award to win as an Indigenous writer,” says Deerchild, “because you’re getting this award from other Indigenous writers and storytellers.”
The community celebration dynamic that the Indigenous Voices Awards provides is something that Deerchild sees as inspiring other writers from across Turtle Island to continue to participate in cultural storytelling. “It’s important that Indigenous peoples tell their own stories, tell our stories,” she says. “In telling these stories, we hope that people respond and react and want to engage in conversation and learning and sometimes unlearning about our complicated history in Canada.”
She Falls Again is the result of Deerchild’s history in Winnipeg where she’s lived for the past three decades. While it has been the place she credits for helping find her voice, she also highlights the constant challenge of living as an Indigenous woman in the city that she calls the “ground zero for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and two-spirits".
“There’s a lot of people that I’m speaking up for and speaking on behalf of and speaking as,” she says. “So it’s important to me to always focus on the balance.”
That balance comes from the matriarchal power that is such an integral part of She Falls Again. Deerchild notes all of the grassroots movements that Indigenous women have led in order to find justice, from the efforts of Cambria Harris, whose mother Morgan was murdered by a serial killer in Winnipeg and whose remains were discarded in a landfill, to the Drag the Red organization that searches the Red River for bodies. “That really was a strength that I saw very clearly and wanted to celebrate,” says Deerchild.
Deerchild celebrates this strength primarily through her poetry, which she regards as ceremony. She notes that, in a way, it is a replacement for the Cree language that she never spoke as it was taken away from her mother in a residential school. “[Poetry’s] where I go to heal,” she says, “to talk about things, to tell secrets, to uncover secrets, to speak in a language that was given to me, gifted to me, I believe, by Creator and through my ancestors.”
Deerchild received the Indigenous Voices Award on the English alongside Dene author Georges Erasmus and Kanien’kehá:ka author Wayne K. Spear for their work Hòt'a! Enough!. Atikamekw iskwew author Cyndy Wylde and Inuk writer Océane Kitura Bohémier-Tootoo received recognition in the French categories.