When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through

by Joy Harjo

  The poems from this region begin with a timeless dream song of the Anishinaabeg translated into English in the early 1900s and close with a poem by b: william bearhart, born in 1979, that references an Andy Warhol painting of Geronimo he saw in a gallery in Las Vegas.

  We continue on the circle to “Plains and Mountains,” which include the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and parts of Utah and Colorado. These lands contain the heart of the Northern Hemisphere (excluding Canada, of course), vast plains rimmed by lakes and mountains. These lands bore many road and railroad paths crossing indigenous territories as European immigrants moved west. The poems of Elsie Fuller, born in 1870, and Zitkála-Ša (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), born in 1876, open this section. It closes with a poem by Duckwater Shoshone, Southern Ute, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nation citizen Tanaya Winder, born in 1985, that is informed by the tragic loss of a beloved by suicide—which is epidemic among our tribal nations.

  “Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Pacific Islands” includes, of course, Alaska and Hawai‘i, along with western Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. It comprises the largest geographical area and has been the most challenging to represent. These lands veer from the Arctic Circle, to islands in the Pacific—Guåhan and Amerika Sāmoa—that are more than two thousand miles from any large land base, to the northwestern mainland jutting out into the Pacific. Portions of these lands were explored by Captain James Cook, or were colonized by Christian missionaries and by the larger fur-trapping companies like the Hudson’s Bay Company. The poems in this section begin with the first wā (epoch) in the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian Creation chant, translated by Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1897. She was dethroned by U.S. businessmen who wanted the lands for commerce. There are also excerpts from a speech by Chief Seattle made in 1854, translated by the beloved Vi Hilbert, and “Prayer Song Asking for a Whale,” told in St. Lawrence Island Yup´ik by Lincoln Blassi, who was born in 1892. The last poems are by spoken-word poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Native Hawaiian/Kanaka Maoli born in 1991; Michael Wasson, born in 1990, of the Nimíipuu, Nez Perce, whose “A Poem for the Háawtnin & Héwlekipx [The Holy Ghost of You, The Space & Thin Air]” is a kind of prayer before prayer; and Ishmael Hope, 1981, Tlingit and Iñupiaq, whose “Canoe Launching Into The Gaslit Sea” emerges directly from the oral traditions to entreat the people to come together.

  “Southwest and West” includes the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, along with southwestern Colorado. The lands include the bones and arches of muscle in all its mineral color, high pines and desert, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish were some of the first European colonizers. These poems open with “The Indian Requiem” by Arsenius Chaleco, Yuma, born in 1889. Many poems of this time fell into the “vanishing Indian” trope. His poem makes a turn to include the vanishing white man. This section closes with a poem by Diné poet Jake Skeets, born in 1991, called “Drunktown,” which ventures into the painful territory of a border town that slinks violently alongside Native lands. The inhabitants live off Native art and image while treating Native citizens with utmost contempt.

  We come around to the final section, “Southeast,” which includes Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. This area suffered from the exploration of the Spaniard Hernando de Soto and his party in 1539–1543, and from other Spanish explorers, then from the encroachments and wars waged among the English, the French, and the Americans. Because these lands were rich in resources and strategically located for trade and national expansion, the land grabs were ferocious. Andrew Jackson and his predecessors removed most of the indigenous populations to Indian Territory: land west of the Mississippi, primarily present-day Oklahoma, that was deemed by the U.S. government as land “reserved” for relocation. Despite the long history of written literature among many of the Southeastern nations, we noticed we had the fewest poems from this region. One of the first poems presented for the Southeast is “Sequoyah” by Joshua Ross, Cherokee Nation of Alabama, born in 1833. The poem honors the man who invented the Cherokee syllabary. The section closes with a poem by Lara Mann, Choctaw, born in 1983, who returns us to the Nanih Waiya cave of our rebirth: “We had to come/ to our Source, go in, come back out renewed.”

  This makes a circle, and we once again face East, which is the direction of beginning. And it will begin again, with the next generations of poets, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those poets speaking here within these pages. We note that the tribal nations of the states bordering Canada and Mexico often extend beyond those political borders, just as the borders of the states themselves as they are known do not contain or adequately define tribal areas. Because of the limitations of the size of this anthology we could not include our Canadian and Mexican relatives. Many tribal nations had winter and summer homes across what are now state lines or country borders. Many are now located far from their original homelands.

  Each of these tribal nations has its own rich literary traditions. There are many more poets of tribal nations than are represented in this anthology, but we are limited by space, resources, and language. When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through is only a slivered opening into a vast literary field.

  Within this anthology are many inconsistencies in the spelling and naming in tribal languages and in English native-related terms. The lack of uniformity is generally due to geographical location in tribal areas, shifting dialects, education, generation, and personal preference.

  We apologize to specific oral texts with their roots in deep culture for their placement in English in a collection that will find its way into many hands, many places. We ask permission for your presence here, to teach, to show that you are a part of a massive cultural literature that still exists, in the tongues, minds, hearts, and memory of the people, of these lands. We ask your forgiveness if we have inadvertently caused any harm in this transmission.

  We give thanks to those who kept culture going, kept the arts and poetry going. Until 1978, cultural tribal-nation expression was outlawed. It wasn’t until the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978 that we were free to practice our indigenous cultures in the United States. This act included but did not limit access to sacred sites, freedom to worship through ceremonial and traditional rites, and use and possession of sacred objects. We did not have organized religion, per se; rather the whole earth is a sacred site. A poem can be considered a sacred site, in which so much of our culture is stored, made into form to be acknowledged, given a place, even a place to hide. Many of our oldest and most traditional poems and songs contain maps of the stars, road maps, or precepts of spiritual knowledge.

  We acknowledge the source of poetry, those who agreed to create the poetry in which to hold meaning with words, and those poets who kept and keep it going, despite history.

  Mvto, Yakoke, thank you to all who brought this collection together, from far back in time, to the present.

  NORTHEAST AND MIDWEST

  WRITING A POETRY OF CONTINUANCE

  Kimberly M. Blaeser

  THE BILINGUAL and multidimensional dream song of the Anishinaabeg that opens these selections from Native poets of the Northeast and Midwest effectively introduces the preoccupations of many of the poems in this section. The dream song arises from an intimacy with the watery landscape of the Anishinaabeg, invests itself in a reality beyond the page alone, embodies tribally specific perspectives, and voices a long-standing spirituality, all of which—grounding in place, non-static rendering, cultural knowledge, and spiritual allusiveness—informs the work of many of the thirty writers represented here, including both early and contemporary poets. Place in Indigenous literature, of course, ultimately includes various historical and contemporary conflicts involving land, water, and other regional resources like minerals and timber, and it includes the complex realiti
es of Native urban lifestyles. These thematic concerns appear in the work of the more than fifteen tribal nations represented from the region, even as individual poetic works distinguish themselves in form, voice, philosophical stance, or unique details culled from the wide-ranging knowledge and experience of the individual writers.

  The earliest poets in these pages lived and wrote as long ago as the nineteenth century. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s oeuvre of approximately fifty poems was written beginning in about 1815 and Emily Pauline Johnson penned her work primarily in the 1880s. These two Native women found themselves “translating” their culture experience and knowledge as well as their language into the English poetic forms and vernacular of the time. That translation of “an other” cultural experience continues through the writings of the early boarding school students, in the formal translations of tribal writing and the bilingual presentations of poems, as well as through the ongoing contemporary attempts to interpret the devastating history, contemporary legacy, and manifestations of cultural genocide through an Indigenous or tribally specific lens. The poems, too, wield attempts to reclaim a cultural aesthetic and the right to artistic self-determination.

  In these many ways, the backdrop of colonization permeates much of the writing here. Poems like the early William Walker Jr.’s “Oh, Give Me Back My Bended Bow” render the tensions between tribal identities and mainstream expectations—here manifested as the physical accoutrements, literal places, and everyday preoccupations of a life (“bended bow,” “o’er hills,” and “the otter’s track” versus “ancient pages,” “antiquated halls,” and “Grecian poet’s song”). But later work by the likes of Gerald Vizenor, Roberta Hill, Linda LeGarde Grover, or Laura Da’ likewise embody effects of manifest destiny, assimilation policies, and stereotypic misrepresentation. Vizenor, for example, writes of “half truths/ peeling like blisters of history”; Hill describes a reality where “We stand on the edge of wounds, hugging canned meat”; LeGarde Grover depicts the brutal reeducation policies of tribal boarding schools—“We will not spare the rod./ We will cut your hair. We will shame you.”—and Da’ addresses the literal erasure of Native knowledge, identity, and sovereignty through such things as the rampant renaming and remapping of tribal homelands.

  An equally prevalent approach to writing Native America displayed in these pages is the simple and eloquent assertion of tribal realities: Poets write life as “exotic curiosities” (Gail Tremblay), as “neon acrylic brush strokes on a screen printed image” (b: william bearhart). They enact Native stories of origin and Native stories of ghost “suppers for the dead” (Gordon Henry Jr.). Landscapes and their inhabitants fill the poems like “teeth marks on birch bark” (Kimberly M. Blaeser). Performative poetics embody the sonic realities of oral cultures in works like Peter Blue Cloud’s dual-voiced poem “Rattle,” or the bilingual poems of Ray Young Bear. Selections engage in word play and trickster humor, include allusive visual texts, and stretch the boundaries of expected “Indian” identities or Native poetries. Whether the poem claims “I am a citizen of two nations: Shawnee and American” (Laura Da’) or “We are the Lou Reed Skins, the Funky Skins, the Cowboy Skins” (Alex Jacobs), each of these lines places us in the immediacy of being Indigenous. Here are poems that know the Thunderers, that know the “rez car” (Jim Northrup), stories invoking the sweetgrass smell of baskets (Salli M. Kawennotakie Benedict), tribal songs that recall the mythic dive of water animals, and poems that “swim within this stream /of catastrophic history” (Denise Sweet) “Knowing, how our own song/ completes the chorus” (James Thomas Stevens).

  The homeland or geography of the poets, and thus of the poems themselves, varies greatly, encompassing as it does the Northeast coast, the Great Lakes and a multitude of other freshwater lake regions, rich riverways (including the headwaters of the Mississippi), the hills and mountains of the Appalachian region, the northern woodlands, and the prairies. This is both canoe country and the locale for immense cargo ships. This is voyageur territory once rich with copper, timber, iron ore, fish, fur-bearing animals, and other resources—a homeland prized enough to be fought over more than once. Elements of subsistence economies continue across the regions as do the efforts to protect these traditional activities: gathering of manoomin (wild rice) in fall; the ritual planting of the “three sisters” (corn, beans, and squash); sugarbush/maple syrup camps in spring; trapping, hunting, fishing, leeching, spearing, and the gathering of clams and other seafood; and the harvest of nuts, berries, and medicinal plants—all these activities remain a part of the seasonal cycle that informs the identity of the tribes, builds connections across the generations, and supplements wage-earning jobs. Therefore, they remain a part of the fabric of the poems. The language of place present in these works also involves the tribal villages and reservations; involves Métis culture and the merging of Native culture with other immigrant groups like German, Swedish, and Norwegian inhabitants; and involves both small-town economies and the large urban areas where more than half of tribal members now live. Through the centuries, these territories have been the site of major Indigenous political organizations and resistance movements. Here the Haudenosaunee Confederacy developed a much lauded and studied cooperative government, one that today still issues its own passport. Here in the shadow of Fort Snelling, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was born on the Minneapolis streets in the 1960s and gave rise to a new wave of Native activism across the nation. As Steve Pacheco’s poem “History” acknowledges, the intent or implied gesture of these works is “for history to surround us.”

  The complex “placement” of both poets and poems in the Northeast and Midwest regions is also tied to migrations—not only the migratory patterns of birds and animals, but the original migration stories of tribes like the Anishinaabe, who followed the “migis” shell from the St. Lawrence River to their current homelands in the Great Lakes. Or like the Oneida, who originated in what is now upstate New York and now inhabit both Northeastern and Midwestern regions of the United States as well as locations in Ontario, Canada. Indeed, the original homelands of several of the individual tribal nations once spread across what is now the U.S.–Canadian border. With families, languages, and clans arbitrarily separated by a political boundary, Native people sometimes “commute” for ceremonies. The references of the poems, too, may extend to the First Nations’ 1990 Oka standoff in Quebec as readily as to U.S. references like the war in Vietnam. Equally as important in the experience of the poets are their migrations to and from cities for employment and education, or their migrations to and from reservations and homelands for important gatherings. Kimberly Wensaut, for example, traces the literal and symbolic migrations “in our seasonal souls” and ironically embodies the tensions of dual existence as a “Prodigal Daughter.” Poems like Marcie Rendon’s playful “What’s an Indian Woman to Do?” both worry the edges of mixed identity and strongly claim Indigenous belonging.

  Also addressed in the poems or understood as their backdrop are major historical events: past intertribal warfare, forced removals to reservations, tragedies like the internment of Dakota women, children, and old men together with the mass hanging of Dakota warriors, or tragedies like the Chippewa Trail of Tears. Just as the land itself is marked with burial grounds, effigy mounds, abandoned missions, old boarding schools, Indian Health Service (IHS) hospitals, contemporary powwow grounds, tribal colleges, casinos, and impressive new tribal buildings housing everything from tribal courts to cultural centers, so, too, does the fabric of the poems include allusive gestures to these many layers of history, to the embedded knowledge of place, and to the material culture of the individual tribes. They refer as well to all manner of contemporary realities from language recovery to 49 songs, Indian kitsch to tribal protests, and intellectual sovereignty to sacred lands.

  Ultimately, these poems reject the placating fantasy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular “Song of Hiawatha” (supposedly set on the shores of the Great Lakes), reject the bromide of the nob
le and disappeared savage. The Indigenous poetics in these pages tune themselves differently—to a survivance truth both painful and celebratory. The poems look steadily at a dark history. They critique laws and rhetoric that enforce settler colonialism or the racism of “manifest manners”—a term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor referring to the continued legacy of manifest destiny as it is exhibited in the everyday actions of individuals or institutions. But sometimes these poems approach this “woke” state through humor, symbolism, or the seemingly random accumulation of the everyday. They invoke buried Iroquoian and Algonquian languages and non-Western teachings. They hold up a mirror to loss and unexpectedly translate the small reflection it makes as hopeful. In the words of poet Karenne Wood, “This is to say we continued.”

  The Water Birds Will Alight

  Sung by Gegwejiwebinan

  THIS SONG was recorded by ethnologist Frances Densmore, who worked with Mide (Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society) singers from White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Lake nations between 1907 and 1909. Densmore did not speak Ojibwe fluently and relied on local interpreters, primarily Mary Warren English.

  Gegwejiwebinan gave an English translation of his name, “Trial Thrower.” Translator and scholar Margaret Noodin notes that Anishinaabeg names often carry stories. The spelling of his name used by Frances Densmore is GEG WE’DJWE’BĬNÛN’.

  Kegĕt´

  Indábunisin´dangûg

  Bĭnes´iwug´

  Ekwa´yaweyân´

  [From the Densmore publication]

  Surely

  Upon the whole length of my form

  The water birds will alight

  [As translated by Mary Warren English]

  Geget indabooniisaandaagoog Binesiwag akwaa-ayaayaan