Canadian LiteratureLouise Halfe – Healing through Orality and Spirituality in PoetryLouise Bernice Halfe was born in 1953 in Two Hills, Alberta. His Cree name is SkyDancer. She was raised as a member of the Saddle Lake Reserve and at age 7 was sent to Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta. . After leaving school at age 16, he attended St. Paul's Regional High School where he began writing a diary about his life experiences. (McNally Robinson) Halfe has a degree in Social Work from the University of Regina, as well as training in drug and addiction counseling (Moses and Goldie 396). In 1990, she made her first appearance as a poet in Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada. His other works include Bear Bones and Feather, which received the Canadian Peoples Poet Award, and Blue Marrow, which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. The Crooked Good is his latest novel just published. In January 2005, Halfe was named poet laureate of Saskatchewan. She currently lives in Saskatoon with her husband and has two grown children. (McNally Robinson)“I write because I love. I write for the survival of myself, my children, my family, my community, and for the Earth. I write to help keep our stories, our truths, our language alive.” (qtd. in Anthology 396.) This quote describes how Louise Halfe uses all four common elements of Native literature in her writings. I have chosen to discuss two of the elements he uses frequently, Spirituality and Orality, in relation to three of his poems: My Ledders, She Told Me, and The Heat of my Grandmothers. Orality is used extensively in Halfe's poetry. In My Ledders he writes as if spoken, using phonetic spelling. It is written in the form of a letter from a native woman to the Pope. The poem begins "dear pope, I don't, I don't, you got angry with my records, I couldn't let it go, I thought you could do something about it." (403) Halfe also uses repetition of words to express orality.