Working with Tomson Highway's "Half Hanged Mary"
Tomson Highway wrote "Half Hanged Mary" as part of his play The Rez Sisters, and it is one of those pieces that looks simple on the surface but falls apart fast if you treat it like a standard death-poem exercise. The poem takes the form of a last statement from Mary, an Indigenous woman who was actually half-hanged during a 1915 lynching in Manitoba, survived, and later died. Highway flips the script on the European tradition of dying speeches, turning a moment of attempted execution into something that carries dark humor and brutal clarity. When I started working through this with students, the first thing that trips people up is the title itself. Half Hanged Mary isn't just a description of what happened to her. It's a refusal to let the colonial machinery finish its job. The title does more heavy lifting than most people give it credit for. Mary survives the hanging because the rope breaks or the scaffold fails, and that incomplete death becomes the whole point of the poem. Most readers expect a straightforward lament. They get satire instead. The voice is deliberately irreverent. She lists the people she has killed, and the list includes her own mother and father. But she does it with a casual tone that feels almost conversational. That's the trap. It's easy to read the matter-of-fact delivery as indifference. It isn't. The flatness is the point. Highway is showing how trauma strips away the ability to perform grief in the way outsiders expect. The poem demands you sit with discomfort rather than offering a clean emotional arc.
One thing I learned the hard way when grading these: students will latch onto the religious imagery and treat it as purely ironic, which is correct but incomplete. The religious references in the poem aren't just mocking Christianity. They are showing how colonial religion was forced onto Indigenous people and then used to justify violence against them. The irony cuts both ways. Mary weaponizes the language of the colonizer to tell her own story. That's a layer that gets missed unless you actually look at what she's saying rather than just noting that religious symbols are present. The structure is loose, almost stream-of-consciousness, which makes it frustrating to analyze because there isn't a neat progression. You have to map it yourself. I usually start by tracking the shifts in tone rather than looking for traditional stanzas or clear thematic moves. The poem moves from dark comedy into something quieter near the end, and that transition matters more than any single symbol you could pull out. Here is a practical approach that works: read the poem aloud once without taking notes. Then read it a second time marking only the moments where the tone shifts. Those shifts are where Highway is doing the real work. After that, go back and look at specific images. The horses in the poem are worth paying attention to. They appear almost casually but they represent freedom and escape in a context where Mary has none. That contrast between movement and being pinned in place runs through the whole piece.
A common mistake is treating the poem as only about racial violence. It is, but it is also about gender. Mary's body is a site where colonial and patriarchal power converge, and Highway doesn't shy away from that. The poem doesn't offer her dignity through suffering. It offers her dignity through speech, through the act of telling her story on her own terms even if those terms are cruel and unflinching. There is no single correct interpretation of the ending. Some readers see it as acceptance. Others see it as defiance. I've found that both readings hold at the same time. The poem is built to resist closure, and trying to pin it down to one message is exactly what Highway is warning against. The discomfort you feel when you finish reading is supposed to stay with you. If you're using this for a paper or class discussion, don't rely on summary. The poem rewards close reading. Quote specific lines, especially the ones that seem jarring or offensive on first read, and then explain why that jarring quality is functional rather than accidental. That approach will serve you better than any general statement about themes or symbolism.
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