Murison, Blanche E. Holt. “Lipsett Indian Museum.” The Native Voice 15.7 (July 1961): 15.
Blanche E. Holt Murison (1880-1968) was a periodical poet who contributed work to journals beginning in the early 1900s. She published a poem, “In Memorium,” in the McGill University Magazine in 1913, and “The Mothering Heart” was anthologized in Canadian Poets of the Great War in 1918. She contributed the following poem to the 1961 Special Pauline Johnson Centenary Edition of The Native Voice, in honour of Edward and Mary Lipsett, who amassed “an impressive collection of Indian arts and crafts, [which was] known the world over as the Edward and Mary Lipsett Indian Museum.” She was born in England and immigrated to Canada in 1904, marrying Captain William Holt Murison of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. They lived in Saskatoon for a while, then moved to Vancouver. It is hard to find out more about her at the moment, as we do not know her maiden name.
Lipsett Indian Museum
The patterned patience of the centuries,
The warp and woof of bark and rush and reed—
The art of carven wood and woven bead,
Here dramatise ancestral effigies.
Totems of immemorial heraldries
Attest the ritual of the tribal creed—
Tootooch and Quil-tum-tum of mythic breed,
Tell tales of peace and war and pedigrees.
Splendid perfection—’broidered caribou,
Mastodon ivory—a warrior’s spear—
The fighting prow of an old war canoe—
A chieftain’s brave regalia—and here
Touched tenderly with transcendental grace,
The portrait of a Mother of her Race.