She is a longtime advocate of mixing poetry, prose, music, and graphic art. As she explained in 1977, “I believe the day will come when we will simply behold a work of art and not be concerned whether it is a poem, a sculpture, a painting or even a machine, like a space rocket. Everything becomes poetry on the highest level of consciousness. And humanity may reach that level—if we don't blow ourselves up first!” Central concerns in her writing include ecology, preservation of Native American and Appalachian cultures, feminism, nuclear energy, cultural diversity, and family.
Awiakta is the author of a poetry collection and a novella. Her third book, Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom, combines poetry and prose. Like a Cherokee basket, it weaves together history, autobiography, native legends and traditions, poetry, and themes of environmentalism, science, botany, gender issues, politics, and spirituality. Celebrating the interconnectedness of life, Awiakta advocates that readers relate the wisdoms of the Corn-Mother Selu (pronounced “say-loo”) to similar wisdoms in their own cultures and return to a relationship with earth and with each other that provides more “balance and harmony” in our lives. Her book offers us “seed thoughts” for the twenty-first century.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novella: Rising Fawn and the Fire Mystery (1983). Poetry and prose: Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1993), Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet (1978). Autobiographical essay: “Sound,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 41-51.
SECONDARY
Thomas Rain Crowe, “Marilou Awiakta,” Interviewing Appalachia (1994), 215–35. Joyce Dyer, “Marilou Awiakta,” in Bloodroot, 40. Grace Toney Edwards, “Marilou Awiakta: Poet for the People,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 19–34. Ruth Yu Hsiao, “Awiakta,” The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing In the United States (1995), 90. Parks Lanier, Jr. review of Selu, Appalachian Journal 21:3 (spring 1994), 326–27. Jerold J. Savory, review of Selu, Southern Humanities Review (spring 1995), 198-200. Alexander Vaschenko, review of Selu, North Dakota Quarterly (summer 1995), 229–32. John W. Warren & Adrian McClaren, Tennessee Belles-Lettres (1977), 109–13.
WOMEN DIE LIKE TREES
from Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet (1978, 1995)
Women die like trees, limb by limb
as strain of bearing shade and fruit
drains sap from branch and stem
and weight of ice with wrench of wind
split the heart, loosen grip of roots
until the tree falls with a sigh—
unheard except by those nearby—
to lie…mossing…mouldering…
to a certain softness under foot,
the matrix of new life and leaves.
No flag is furled, no cadence beats,
no bugle sounds for deaths like these,
as limb by limb, women die like trees.
WHEN EARTH BECOMES AN “IT”
from Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1993)
When the people call Earth “Mother,”
they take with love
and with love give back
so that all may live.
When the people call Earth “it,”
they use her
consume her strength.
Then the people die.
Already the sun is hot
out of season.
Our Mother's breast
is going dry.
She is taking all green
into her heart
and will not turn back
until we call her
by her name.
ANOREXIA BULIMIA SPEAKS FROM THE GRAVE
from Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1993)
Young women, listen to me—
I'm talkin’ to you.
Don't come down here before your time.
It's dark and cold.
Nothin’ doin’ down here
but the Grandmothers sayin'
“Anorexia Bulimia!
Tell the young women this for us:
They bound our feet
and our toes busted out—
to travel on, test new waters.
They bound our breasts…
our nipples busted out,
infra-red eyes to take in
what the other two miss.
When they bound our middle
rib ’n hip busted the stays
took the waist with ’em—
free as they were born.
But now, young women—now…
They've got your soul in a bind,
wounded, wound up
in electronic wire and hard paper twine
that cut images into your brain,
unnatural images sayin’
‘Starve yourself to suit us.
Starve your body.
Starve your power.
Starve your dream—
thinner and thinner—
until YOU vanish.’
They want you to do that
’cause if you was to take on weight
you might start throwin’ it around.
No way can They handle
a full-grown woman
with a full-grown dream. No way.”
Listen young women,
the Grandmothers and Anorexia Bulimia
are talkin’ to you—
Feed your body.
Feed your soul.
Feed your dream.
BUST OUT!!!
—For Judy (1966-1992)
FROM SELU: SEEKING THE CORN-MOTHER’S WISDOM (1993)
A Time to Reweave*
*Note: “A Time to Reweave” and “A Time to Study Law” are excerpts from “Womanspirit in the High-Tech World,” an address given at the First National Women's Symposium, 1989, sponsored by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Northeastern State University.
The 1990s will be the decisive decade, when humanity will either call Earth “Mother” again or perish. To survive, we must reconnect the Web of Life. People of reverent spirit everywhere are saying it: scientists, theologians, educators, artists, poets, sociologists, the man and woman next door, the kindergarten child who, when asked his greatest wish, said “I don't want to die.” It is a time to reweave, a time when women are coming into our own. As Native people often say, “The Grandmothers are coming back.”
Whatever our ethnic, cultural or religious roots may be, women since the beginning of time have been “weavers,” weavers who work from a spiritual base. We know how to take diverse strands of life and spin them into a pattern. How to listen to the whole web at once and mend small tears that occur. If the web should be damaged beyond repair, women, like our sister the spider, know how to ingest the remaining strands and spin a new web.
We are doing that. Consider women across the country who represent major strands of the web: women working in health, history, government, law, literature, family, holistic healing, spirituality, economics, education, art, conservation, and so on. Diverse in many ways, we are unified in our determination to ensure the continuance of life. There are men who support us in our work, as we so often support them in theirs. This cooperative trend among women and between genders is a hope for the future.
But in the worlds society at large, people who call Earth “it” are still dominant and still rending the web at a deadly rate. Contending with them, with their disdain virus and the damage it causes, can be very wearying. That's why I've given you a corn seed for remembrance—a gift from Selu, the strong, who fed the people in body and in spirit. Although eternally giving, she brooked no disrespect, not even inappropriate curiosity (much less sexual harassment). When disrespect occurred, she quit cooking and gave the law instead. This is a principle worth pondering for women today.
FROM SELU (1993)
A Time to Study Law*
As women work for the good of our people and move into positions where we help make governing policies, it is useful and strengthening to study the Cre
ator's laws and precedents for their application. Most people now call these laws “natural.” Native people have traditionally called them “sacred.” In either case, the laws are immutable and inexorable. And they are good guides for keeping focused and centered in our efforts.
My parents used a real spider's web, one that I could see and touch, to teach me the laws. Two that are especially appropriate for women to study are these:
The Creator made the Web of Life and into each strand put the law to govern it. Everything in the universe is part of the web. Stars, trees, oceans, creatures, humans, stones: we are all related. One family. What happens to one will happen to all, for the Creator's laws function this way. They teach us to cooperate and live in harmony, in balance. Ignorance of the laws is no excuse, because through Mother Earth the Creator reveals them continually. If we are reverent toward her and take only what we need, she will sustain us. If we are irreverent and take too much, we separate ourselves from her power and we will die.
A similar law governs all warm-blooded species, including the human. The gender that bears life must not be separated from the power to sustain it. From the eagle to the mouse, from the bear to the whale, the female has the power to nurture and protect her young. A complementary law governs the siring gender, who ranges farther and is more changeable and transitory. Together, the laws make a balance, which provides for continuance in the midst of change—and for the survival of the species.
For centuries American Indians studied the Creator's web and wove the sacred laws into their own cultures, each tribe according to its customs. The welfare of children was paramount.
Imagine that the Grandmothers of these cultures—the female ancestors—have returned to sit in council and consider the dilemmas of American society. Undoubtedly, they would put these questions first on their agenda:
“Who will take care of the children? Who will feed, clothe, shelter, educate, protect—nurture them to maturity?” They would insist that the issue of children's care be resolved before the issue of birth is even considered. To do otherwise is unconscionable. “Children are the seeds of the people. Seed corn must not be ground,” is the ancient tribal wisdom for survival.
Suppose we then take the Grandmothers to our cities and show them microcosms of the “grinding of children” that is a national disgrace: physical and sexual abuse, economic exploitation through drugs and the sex industry, the steady descent of women and children into poverty, the violence toward women of all ages. “Although we've had the vote for sixty-five years,” we explain, “until recently women have been barred from policy-making bodies that govern life in America. Even now, on a national level, our power is weak: one in nine on the Supreme Court, 4 percent in the Congress and about the same in the state legislatures. We do not have equal representation in making any laws, not even those that affect our children and our own bodies. We are being undermined, disenfranchised, disempowered.…”
Calm and steady, the Grandmothers have listened intently. “We've heard this story before. Remember what happened then to the people….”
Native women, especially, do remember.
I'd thought it would never come to this—again. Seemingly, the women's movement was mending the Creators law that was broken in the Grandmothers’ time. I'd thought my daughters—and surely my granddaughters—would serve with men on the councils of the land, resuming their ancestors’ place as “Mothers of the Nation.” I'd thought they and my son and their children would live in a society restored to the balance that ensures survival….
“Seed corn must not be ground.”
What can women do to prevent our disempowerment and the “grinding” of our children?
For myself, I am a poet, a writer. I have no political clout, no big money to roll. But I do have faith in the Creator. And I do remember the Grandmothers’ stories, especially the Cherokee one. I must tell it to my children, for it has been erased from most books. Hearing it, they will better understand the Web of Life and their places in it. Science teaches them the web's pattern, but not that the laws holding it in place are sacred. The story will also help my children realize how crucial it is to keep any issue within its context when making a decision. An issue, too, is part of a web. And many of our society's negative attitudes toward women and children have deep roots in the past.
The story of the Cherokee Grandmothers shows how the people interpreted the Creator's law for the female—making the welfare of children central—and of what happened when that law was broken. This story was repeated in many Indian nations.
As I have described previously, when the European men first arrived, Cherokee women had been the center of the family and the center of the Nation for about two thousand years. When the Cherokee men asked, “Where are your women?” the Europeans said, “What are your women doing here?” To their minds, it was “pagan” and “uncivilized” to have women in places of power. Besides, the Europeans followed the laws of property, and the property they wanted was the land. To get it, it was evident they would have to upset the tribal balance. A primary way to do that was to undermine the power of women. No rocks at first. Just steady pressure for decades. They refused to deal with women in treaty negotiations. They called the Cherokee system a “petticoat government” and insisted on their own way. They introduced alcohol to the people. And within the wholesome teachings of Christianity, which the Cherokee found familiar and sound—God is Creator of all, love God and your neighbor as yourself—many missionaries also brought the concept that woman is unclean (because of menses) and the cause of the fall of man. This teaching alarmed the people, for it was well known that “a people cannot be conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” Meanwhile, on diplomatic and military levels, the men fought losing battles. Word came back along the great trade routes that the process was everywhere the same in Indian country.
But there was hopeful news from the Iroquois in the North. As a primary model for their constitution, Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues were studying the League of the Iroquois and its Great Law of Peace, which by the late 1700s had united five, then six nations for centuries. Based on equal representation and balance of power, the Great Law had been codified long before European contact by Hiawatha and the Peacemaker, with the support of Jikonsaseh, the most powerful of the clan matrons. The Iroquois system was (and is) spirit-based. The Council of Matrons was the ceremonial center of the system as well as the prime policy maker. Only sons of eligible clans could serve on the councils at the behest of the matrons of their clans, at the executive, legislative and judicial levels. Public and private life were inseparable and the matrons had the power to impeach any elected official who was not working for the good of the people.
But when Franklin and others incorporated the Iroquois model into the U.S. Constitution, they omitted women as a gender, as well as men of color and men without property. Within fifty years, indigenous people were forced onto reservations, declared “alien and dependent” by the U.S. Supreme Court, decimated.
In the time of crisis, bereft of political power and disenfranchised in their own land, the Grandmothers felt their hearts sink low. But they did not allow them to be “on the ground.” Instead, they took them underground, where they joined with wise men, Grandfathers, who accepted women's power as a complement to their own. By restoring the balance of the Creator's law for survival as well as by keeping faith with other sacred laws, American Indians have slowly and patiently rewoven their lives and are emerging with renewed strength.
In most other surviving cultures, deep below the turmoil of historical events, there have been counterparts of the Indian Grandmothers and Grandfathers who, according to their customs, have found ways to ensure that the gender that bears life is not separated from the power to sustain it.
Many institutions in America are trying to bring gender balance into their structures—churches, synagogues, universities, corporations. The U.S. Congress is not among them. Two hundred years have passed sinc
e the U.S. Constitution was adopted, fifty-one years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced for debate. Congress remains adamant in refusing to mend the Creator's law, as well as reluctant to make complementary, enforceable laws for the siring gender's responsibilities for children.
In some other sectors of society, also, the attitude toward women coming into the public sphere is, “What are you doing here?”
We know why we're here. We're doing our part to get the job done. Keeping our government and our society in balance requires the minds and energies of two genders. The more America is in harmony with the Creator's laws, the better off our people will be.
You and I are sisters but different. Yet we have common ground in an old saying, “There are many paths up the mountain.” If we take the mountain to be Womanspirit rooted in the sacred, there is honor to your path and honor to mine. We are one in our calling to bring Womanspirit into balance with Manspirit in our world. We must continue in our paths and resume our rightful places on the councils that govern our land and its people. Otherwise, our Mother Earth will die. And all that lives will die with her. Peace to your path and peace to mine. On our way up the mountain, we'll call to each other: “Keep going. We'll make it. We'll make it. Sure we will.…”
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