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

by Joy Harjo

  POETRY OF ALASKA

  Diane L’xeis´ Benson

  ALASKA—A RUGGED LAND of gold; the great land; the last frontier—these are the descriptions of newcomers, but for Alaska Native people it is life, and the home of ancestors. In contrast, the seven Iñupiaq, five Tlingit, one Yup´ik, two Athabascan, and one Aleut (Tangirnaq) writers reflect an eternal connection to place that runs through their veins cycling through the generations.

  Beginning with the singing words shared by Lincoln Blassi appealing to the “Whale of distant ocean,” the intimate knowledge of land and sea offerings of the treeless and windswept St. Lawrence Island is evident. In this most remote northwestern environment and Siberian Yup´ik culture, time is polychronic, cyclical, as it is with all Alaska’s indigenous peoples and is clear in this reverence of the whale harvest season. Respect of the landscape and what it holds is an important thread for continuance—the people are not separate from the landscape but a part of it. They belong to it. It is this that is shared from one indigenous group to the next in this vast and diverse land called Alaska.

  There are loosely seven different regions of Alaska that by their size and geographic differences could be countries within their own right: Southeast, Northeast, Aleutians, Northwest, North, South Central, and the Interior. Unlike many other tribes in the United States, Alaskan tribes still exist on the very land of their ancestors. The Alaskan poets represented here have all had the benefit of either living in their community of origin, or returning to it.

  Alaskan tribes speak twenty distinct languages and numerous dialects. Each distinct language is representative of a distinct culture intrinsically woven into time and space of place. Language represents not only the values and social systems but the relationship to land and to its subsequent spiritual realities. Interestingly, we see this even in English—in the poems of the poets across the generations from “Spirit Moves,” by Fred Bigjim, to “Anatomy of a Wave” by Abigail Chabitnoy. The voices of the old ones, the dark secrets held by the landscape, are present in the poetry. And all the while life, indigenous life, insists on finding a way.

  The regions of Alaska that are the origins of these poets are the terrain of their poetic souls.

  Contained by glacial fields, Southeast Alaska’s spruce-covered mountains dive into the sea, facing islands and rugged coasts, where rain can be relentless. It is a place of abundance—rich with berries, mammals, deer, sea greens, and fish. Tlingit story, friendship, and life all revolve through the sharing of this wealth no matter the location, as in “How to make good baked salmon from the river” by Nora Marks Dauenhauer. Although having to adapt, ancestral relatives are still present and remembered and all are nourished.

  Family is always central, and for the Interior Athabascans life along the many rivers and birch-wooded forests through harsh winters and hot, dry summers is reliant on their unity and reciprocity. Although Dian Million was removed from Alaska at the age of twelve, she illustrates this timeless principle in “The Housing Poem.” Mary TallMountain, also of the same region and similar circumstance, alliterates the sharing of grease from caribou, and gently brings home to the reader the deeply held bonds that go beyond time and distance in her two poems, “Good Grease” and “There is No Word for Goodbye.”

  The voice of Alaska Native poets began to challenge the status quo and twist the canon around the end of World War Two, when Alaska Native people became the minority demographic: many were forced off to boarding schools, and traditions and languages were banned. Conflicting worldviews and painful ironies emerge as acculturation meets cultural studies in “At the Door of the Native Studies Director,” by Robert Davis Hoffman. Andrew Hope III, in one of his less minimalist poems, “Spirit of Brotherhood,” creates a cross-rhythmic theme of religion and cultural adaptation as he situates the cultural placement of the oldest Native American organization, the Alaska Native Brotherhood.

  Dominant in much of the Alaskan poetry is the reality of loss, cultural disruption, and the effort to reconcile cultural existence in a continually colonizing and commodifying world. What is notable is that voice is given to these themes primarily by more recent poets. This is evident in a number of poems by Iñupiaq writers Joan Kane, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Carrie Ayaġaduk Ojanen, and Ishmael Hope—all of whom were born long after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Internal and external struggles are laid bare in the poetry and are seemingly interwoven into historical trauma and circumpolar politics by this generation now coping with the undeniable urgency of global threats to subsistence and humanity, climate change, and war. Inupiat are on the front line of the north, and these poets, perhaps influenced by the activists before them, speak to current issues and their own fragility juxtaposed with Alaskan Native life that often appears to be teetering on the edge. Even in the darkness, there remains a glowing undercurrent of perseverance.

  POETRY OF THE PACIFIC

  Brandy Nālani McDougall

  THROUGH INCORPORATED and unincorporated territories, free associated states, and ocean monuments, the United States currently controls one-third of the Pacific Ocean, which itself comprises one-third of the earth’s surface. Continuing manifest destiny beyond the continental borders, the United States formally annexed Hawaiʻi and Guåhan (Guam) in 1898 and Amerika Sāmoa in 1900 to bolster militarization and trade in the Asia-Pacific region. Though dominant historical narratives are vague and imply that American colonialism has been benevolent and beneficial for us, they conveniently omit the violence behind the establishment and ongoing maintenance of American empire in (and because of the location of) our islands in the Pacific. These colonial stories also enable tourism, another leading economic industry in our region, to profit from exploitative images of us as happy, simple natives living in a paradise that is open and ready to serve.

  If you ask for our stories, however, you will likely hear our poetry, the genre we tend to prefer, which stands as testament to the superficiality and brevity of the United States in the Pacific; to the resilience, ingenuity, and strength of our communities; and to our fierce love for our islands and ocean, our cultures, and our ancestors. It would not be an overstatement to share that there is a poet, an orator with a love and healthy reverence for the power of language, in every Pacific family. Therefore, this section showcases only a few of the poets from Hawai‘i, Amerika Sāmoa, and Guåhan and should definitely not be considered exhaustive. There are many others whose powerful, wise, inspiring, and talented voices fill other books and anthologies, lift our peoples through movements and rallies, heal our hearts, and nourish our imaginations.

  Given the diversity of our cultures, languages, histories, and political issues in the Pacific, I will treat each Pacific archipelago separately and begin with Hawaiʻi, as the Pacific selections start with the first wā (epoch) in the Kumulipo, a genealogical chant tracing more than eight hundred human generations—as well as plant and animal ancestors—that emerge after the universe comes into being. The first wā details cosmogenesis as spontaneous and generative, ending with the birth of night. Though the Kumulipo was first recorded in writing under the direction of King David Kalākaua, who reigned from 1874 to 1891, Queen Liliʻuokalani began the translation in 1895 while imprisoned in ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu and completed it in 1897 in Washington, D.C., as she lobbied against Hawaiʻi’s annexation to the United States. The Kumulipo has since become one of the most important poems of our people.

  Literary scholar and poet kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui uses the metaphor of the haku (braided) lei to describe how Hawaiian poems use overlapping meanings, interweave traditions, and yet adhere to craft and structure. Though applied to Hawaiian poetry, the metaphor holds true for all of the contemporary Pacific selections that follow. We begin with John Dominis Holt’s “Ka ʻIli Pau,” a poem reflecting on how we are continuations of our ancestors, and Leialoha Perkins’ “Plantation Non-Song,” a strong indictment of Hawaiʻi’s sugar plantations for fostering “ghettos of mind, slums of the heart.”
Holt first published in 1965 and Perkins in 1979, following the near extinction of the Hawaiian language and other forms of colonial silencing since annexation in 1898. The next generation of poets began writing in the 1980s and ’90s—Imaikalani Kalahele, Michael McPherson, Mahealani Perez-Wendt, Dana Naone Hall, Joe Balaz, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, and Haunani-Kay Trask. Their poems are emblematic of their political activism and ancestrally rooted commitment to social and environmental justice. Kalahele’s “Make Rope,” McPherson’s “Clouds, Trees, & Ocean: North Kauaʻi,” Balaz’s “Charlene,” Westlake’s “Hawaiians Eat Fish,” and Trask’s “Night is a Sharkskin Drum” and “Koʻolauloa” emphasize continuance and ongoing connections to ʻāina (land) and suggest we are able to move between ancestral time and our own. In these poems, the poet’s duty is to “become the memory of our people” (Kalahele). Perez-Wendt’s “Uluhaimalama,” Hall’s “Hawaiʻi ’89,” and Trask’s “Agony of Place” lay bare and fight the ravages of American colonialism “grinding vision/ from the eye, thought/ from the hand/ until a tight silence/ descends” (Trask), while also taking spiritual sustenance in ancestral connection and the land’s enduring beauty, “feast[ing] well/ On the stones” (Perez-Wendt) and “blooming [like kokiʻo] on the long branch” (Hall). Notably, much of the poetry of this period is lyrical and elegaic, yet insistent on how healing is rooted in our return to culture and ʻāina.

  Poets who began writing in the 2000s and 2010s, including Christy Passion, Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, Noʻu Revilla, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, and myself, share intimate portraits of ʻohana (family) and continue the work of truth-telling and memory-keeping alongside political activism and community engagement. As it was for the poets before us, ancestral connection, which includes human, plant, and animal ancestors, is a significant thematic thread, one that informs a predilection for decoloniality. My sonnet series “Ka ʻŌlelo” allays the trauma of the English-only law through a love song for my grandfather and ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language); and “He Mele Aloha no ka Niu” honors the generosity of the niu, or coconut. Passion’s “Hear the Dogs Crying” and Colleps’s “Kiss the Opelu” lovingly invoke sonicality in rendering their grandmothers’ stories. Similarly, the moving “Smoke Screen” by Revilla imagines her father’s days working at the sugar mill where he “marr[ied] metal in his heavy/ gloves . . . He was always burning into something.” The last of the Pacific selections, Osorio’s “Kumulipo,” is a spoken-word poem referencing Liliʻuokalani’s Kumulipo and voicing her own genealogy to stave off colonial forgetting. Perhaps diverging from their predecessors, these poets openly reflect on issues of cultural and political identity, including language, gender, and sexual identity, and use the lyric and other forms to show the trauma of colonial loss and violence experienced by the ʻohana, while also affirming a strong commitment to justice and sovereignty.

  The work of American empire and militarism has also meant Indigenous displacement and a growing Pacific Islander diaspora—to the point that some off-island populations outnumber their on-island kin. In their poetry collections Dan Taulapapa McMullin (from Amerika Sāmoa), Craig Santos Perez (who is CHamoru from Guåhan), and Lehua M. Taitano (who is also CHamoru from Guåhan) all write from the diaspora, sharing their individual stories of having to leave their home islands. Here, McMullin’s “Doors of the Sea” lyrically follows an overseas journey that separates brothers and plays with gendered language, a signature of McMullin’s faʻafafine (non-binary) perspective. Perez’s “ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek]” mourns the loss of birdsong after U.S. military ships brought brown tree snakes to the island and details colonial efforts to save the Micronesian kingfisher. Finally, Taitano’s “Letters from an Island” offers us a glimpse into a family’s correspondence between Guåhan and the continental United States. Both Perez and Taitano are avant-garde poets who incorporate CHamoru language and culture, visuality, history, and politics into their poetics. Collectively, these writers, like others in the Pacific, are creating new literatures in order to honor our ancestors, remember our histories, revitalize our cultures, decolonize our islands and ocean, and imagine sovereign futures.

  Kumulipo Wā ʻekahi

  The Kumulipo is a Hawaiian creation chant. Below is the version recorded in writing under the direction of King David Kalākaua. The accompanying translation into English was completed by Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1897. King Kalākaua reigned over the Hawaiian Kingdom from 1874 until his death in 1891. His sister, Queen Liliʻuokalani, succeeded him on the throne. They were the last two monarchs of the Hawaiian Kingdom before the U.S. military–backed overthrow in 1895.

  O ke au i kahuli wela ka honua

  O ke au i kahuli lole ka lani

  O ke au i kukaiaka ka la.

  E hoomalamalama i ka malama

  O ke au o Makali’i ka po

  O ka walewale hookumu honua ia

  O ke kumu o ka lipo, i lipo ai

  O ke kumu o ka Po, i po ai

  O ka lipolipo, o ka lipolipo

  O ka lipo o ka la, o ka lipo o ka po

  Po wale hoi

  Hanau ka po

  [Translation into English]

  At the time that turned the heat of the earth,

  At the time when the heavens turned and changed,

  At the time when the light of the sun was subdued

  To cause light to break forth,

  At the time of the night of Makalii (winter)

  Then began the slime which established the earth,

  The source of deepest darkness.

  Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness,

  Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night,

  It is night,

  So was night born

  CHIEF SEATTLE (1786–1866), Suquamish and Duwamish. The city of Seattle, Washington, is named after Chief Seattle, who ruled over both the Suquamish and the Duwamish though the two tribes were separated by the Puget Sound. In addition to his leadership skills and his ability to understand the intentions of the white settlers, he was also a noted orator in the Northern Lushootseed language. During the treaty proposals of 1854, Chief Seattle delivered a speech that is still remembered today. At the time of his death, protests over treaty rights and resettlement were still ongoing.

  Excerpts from a Speech by Chief Seattle, 1854

  The speech was originally transcribed by Dr. Henry Smith into a trade language known as Chinook Jargon before he attempted his own translation into English. The speech was transcribed into Northern Lushootseed by Vi Hilbert, July 27, 1985, then subsequently into English.

  Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you forget.

  The red man could never comprehend nor remember it. Our religion is the tradition of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the great spirit and the visions of our leaders, and it is written in the hearts of our people.

  Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb; they wander far away beyond the stars and are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They always love its winding rivers, its sacred mountains, and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely hearted living and often return to visit, guide and comfort them.

  We will ponder your proposition, and when we decide we will tell you. But should we accept it, I here and now make this the first condition that we will not be denied the privilege, without molestation, of visiting at will the graves where we have buried our ancestors, and our friends and our children. Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe.

  Even the rocks which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the lives of my peopl
e.

  And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe; and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the fields, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.

  At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless.

  Dead—did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.

  [Translated by Vi Hilbert]

  LINCOLN BLASSI (1892–1980), St. Lawrence Island Yup´ik, was born in Gambell, Alaska, where he worked as a whaling harpooner. The story of his childhood appeared in the July and August 1978 issues of Alaska Magazine. As the number of the region’s whales decreased, Blassi sold his ceremonial whaling gear, which the ethnographer Otto Geist acquired for the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

  Prayer Song Asking for a Whale