Niya Mary

Niya Mary is a lyrical poetry collection rooted in Métis and Cree womanhood, family memory, and the sacred work of becoming an ancestor. Named for the author's capan Mary Cardinal, the book moves through Northern Alberta landscapes, Edmonton streets, kitchens, hospitals, ceremonies, and childhood rooms, tracing how love, grief, language, motherhood, and inheritance shape Indigenous women across generations. Through poems of tenderness and rupture, Samantha Gibbon explores intergenerational survivorship, colonial violence, mental illness, early motherhood, sisterhood, and the enduring strength of matrilineal lines. Her voice is intimate, embodied, and ceremonial, carrying grandmothers, daughters, land, and spirit in the same breath. Accompanied by the author's visual art, Niya Mary becomes both offering and testimony: a gathering of pain, resilience, memory, and devotion, and a reminder that identity is carried forward through love across bloodlines, homelands, and generations still unfolding together.