When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
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hear someone died
but I don’t want to be an identity or a belief or a feedbag. I wanna b
me. I want to open my arms like winning a foot race and keep my
stories to myself, I tell my audience.
Grief is sneaking cigs from the styrofoam cups on the tables next to the
creamers and plates of Mary’s pineapple upside-down cake, running off to
the playground behind the schoolroom trailers to (try and) smoke them
We were supposed to grow old together, hold down food, run for cover,
give birth.
Body the job
was to keep breathing.
JAKE SKEETS (1991–), Diné, is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge, from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective, and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. He is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and the 2018 National Poetry Series for his debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers.
Drunktown
Indian Eden. Open tooth. Bone Bruise. This town split in two.
Clocks ring out as train horns, each hour hand drags into a screech—
iron, steel, iron. The minute hand runs its fingers
through the outcrops.
Drunktown. Drunk is the punch. Town a gasp.
In between the letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds,
a tractor tire backing over a man’s skull.
—
Men around here only touch when they fuck in a backseat
go for the foul with thirty seconds left
hug their son after high school graduation
open a keg
stab my uncle forty-seven times behind a liquor store
—
A bar called Eddie’s sits at the end of the world. By the tracks,
drunk men get some sleep. My father’s uncle tries to get some
under a long-bed truck. The truck instead backs up to go home.
I arrange my father’s boarding school soap bones on white space
and call it a poem. With my father, I come up on death
staggering into the house with beer on the breath.
—
Mule deer splintered in barbed tendon. Gray highway
veins narrow—push, pull under teal and red hills.
A man is drunk staggering into northbound lanes,
dollar bills for his index and ring fingers. Sands glitter
with broken bottles—greens, deep blues, clears, and golds.
This place is White Cone, Greasewood, Sanders,
White Water, Breadsprings, Crystal, Chinle, Nazlini,
Indian Wells, and all muddy roads lead from Gallup.
The sky places an arm on the hills around here.
On the shoulder, dark gray almost blue bleeds
into greens
blue greens
turquoise into hazy blue
pure blue
no gray or gold
or oil black seeped through.
—
If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror. The bottle caps we use for eyes.
—
an owl has a skeleton of three letters
o twists into l
the burrowing owl burrows
under dead cactus
stuffed into mouth jarred open
feathers fall on horseweed
and skull bone blown open
SOUTHEAST
RENEWAL
Jennifer Elise Foerster
SOUTHEASTERN PEOPLE have long been writers. Sequoyah, whose tribute by Cherokee poet Joshua Ross is included in this region, had developed the Cherokee syllabary by 1821, the first writing system in Native North America. Muscogee and Seminole groups had developed and adopted an alphabet by 1853, coining new Mvskoke (Muscogee) words, writing constitutions, and translating English texts into Mvskoke.
This long history of writing is made apparent by the prolific works of early authors like Alexander Posey (Mvskoke, 1873–1908) and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee, 1827–67), who was one of the earliest known Native American novelists. But we can also look to periodicals published and edited by Native people beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The first Native press, the Cherokee Phoenix, was founded by Elias Boudinot in 1838. The Cherokee Female Seminary published its first periodical, Cherokee Rose Buds, in 1853. Throughout these early writings, many of which are represented here, I am most struck by what the poems conceal. Writings published in school periodicals had to be presented as optimistic evidence—propaganda—of the boarding school’s “success,” heavily monitored as these publications were by the white school administrators. While promoting “Indian education” in ways that, on the surface, seem to demoralize cultural identity and tradition, these are also poems of cultural survival and adaptation. While the poem may pronounce assimilation, read deeper and you will find resistance, wit, irony, and grief. In the 1850s, few would have recognized the unpseakable sorrow of the Trail of Tears in John Gunter Lipe’s sentimental, ballad-metered “To Miss Vic,” which reads on the surface as a rather common lament over a heedless lover. As Samuel Sixkiller addresses his graduating class at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, he is at the same time addressing the administrators, those who have assembled “To help nature’s children . . . [to] make pure Americans from ocean to bay.” I imagine only Sixkiller’s classmates understood his irony. His assertion of “the noble Red Man” as “the true, the only American” was lost to those only listening for their own reflection, a self-affirming national narrative. The reliance of this narrative on the maintenance of a façade (i.e., Manifest Destiny as an “altruism”) is one reason for Native poets being so long excluded from “American Literature.”
These early poems reveal, to me, the reality of the in-betweenness that has so long characterized the indigenous Southeastern experience. The literature by Native people during this catastrophic century was written against and through trauma to find a new means of surviving. The poets were living in two worlds at the crux of profound cultural, geographic, linguistic, and social change. The poetry itself reveals a negotiation of these two worlds, integrating contradictory beliefs in both cultural resistance and assimilation—a fierce recapitulation of tradition and, at the same time, a wielding of “new American” ideals of individualism and economic progress.
Being in-between is so much a part of the literatures of Southeastern people, but this is also what has led to its dismissal from “Native American” literature, to which standards have been, until recently, decided by everyone but Native writers. To “preserve” their idea of authentic Indianness, many cultural critics and canon-makers left out such writers as Alexander Posey and Mary Cornelia Hartshorne. Especially because these writers, many of whom were women—Stella LeFlore Carter, Ruth Margaret Muskrat Bronson—were writing political poems. Another reason for exclusion: Poetry is powerful. Poetry by Native writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often engaged the same language that was stripping them of human rights: English lyric metricism and romantic themes. While we could understand this purposeful engagement as a means of asserting agency, the dominant literary culture would still rebuff, insisting on its “savage vs. civilized” mythos: any writer of this kind of verse, it was assumed, had lost their “Nativeness.” I shouldn’t have to point out the problem here. Why would we not have written in available and contemporary forms—dirges to translate our loss, for example, or parodies of our contemporaries, as J. C. Duncan parodied Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” in his poem “The Red Man’s Burden”—to speak back to the language of oppression? Positioned as we were at the crossroads, why would we not also have engaged the dominant language to stand up for our humanity, our rights? One must use all the resources one can. James Harris Guy’s 1878 letter to Alfred B. Meacham is, to me, one of the best examples of p
oetry being wielded as a tool for political justice.
As Robert Dale Parker so deftly argues in Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, the poems that remain in favor with non-Native audiences as the most “authentically Indian” are transcribed (mis)translations (by non-Natives) of traditional or ceremonial songs. Such conception of “Native” poetry supports, also, the public’s preferred idealization of the illiterate Native American.
Our heritage as original peoples of the Southeast has always been one of cross-cultural adaptation and diplomacy. We emerged from the Southeast Chiefdoms’ collapse as numerous decentralized societies living along the rivers’ confluence points, establishing alliances to maintain a balance of power in the region and, later, to form united fronts against European encroachment. We were ethnically and linguistically heterogenous among the (at least) five distinct language families indigenous to the southeast: Algonquian, Caddoan, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and Siouan. This heterogeneity of the peoples, languages, and traditions of the Southeastern tribal nations still largely defines us today.
The Southeastern region of what is currently the United States is the ancestral homelands of not only the most widely known Southeastern nations—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Muscogee (Mvskoke or Creek)—but also countless other cultural groups—Natchez, Yuchi, Appalachee, Timucua, Koasati, Caddo, Catawba—that emerged from the Moundbuilding Centers of the Lower Mississippian Basin and its river’s vast network of tributaries.
With this diversity, what we have in common is a very long story of inhabiting and living in balance with the southeastern woodlands, waterways, animals, and people. The groups indigenous to the American South are the inheritors of the Mississippian cultures, which in linear, historical time are known to have existed from 1500 B.C. until the 1600s. Our varied Southeastern emergence stories, however, go farther back, preceding the oldest known structures of civilization in what we now call the United States. Louisiana's Poverty Point, the oldest major Earthworks Center in the Western Hemisphere, is at least five thousand years old, with an effigy mound in the shape of a hawk more than 640 feet wide in wingspan. These imprints of origin, from Nanih Waiya, the Choctaw Mother Mound, to the Ocmulgee and Etowah mounds, all thousands of years old, are shared by all people indigenous to the Southeast in memory, body, and story.
What is also shared is a history of surviving through erasure and invisibility: the vibrant and diverse peoples, stories, and societies of this country’s Southeastern lands are largely invisible to the “American story” of itself. The empire of Coosa, for example, which has been considered the largest chiefdom, comprised of thirty-five thousand people and spanning four hundred miles upon its encounter by Hernando de Soto in his July 16, 1540, expedition, is visible today only in a few ambiguous landforms.
For a person with indigenous roots in the Southeast who is looking for evidence of your homeland, you have to follow invisible maps. The landscape has changed, the surfaces of our histories have been written over: the longleaf pine ecosystem of Creek country’s southern territory reduced from ninety million acres to three million acres in under two centuries; the river valleys of the eighteenth-century Muscogean towns now predominantly underwater as a result of twentieth-century damming practices. When we look at the maps of the Southeast, we do not see ourselves, we do not see our memories of place. But that does not mean we do not hold these memories and embody them, not only in cultural practices or ways of life, but in our poetics.
For Southeastern people, the land has always been infused with meaning. We built extensive earthworks, effigy mounds, and vast ceremonial complexes that signified our human place within the cosmos. Today, many of our stories, design motifs, architectures, and traditions of oratory reflect these ancient patterns. And while, especially in the story of Southeastern people, it is the land itself that is persistently lost, it is through land—through place—that we consistently renew. I read these poems and hear the ever-determined voice of renewal; the insistence of stories, as in “A Creek Woman Beside Lake Ontario,” in which Stacy Pratt writes of “stories he keeps repeating/ from inside my own body”; the survival of nature beyond the sagas of land ownership and loss, as in Moses Jumper Jr.’s “Simplicity” or Mary Cornelia Hartshorne’s “Fallen Leaves”; and the power of humor, in Louis Little Coon Oliver’s “Medicare” or LeAnne Howe’s “Noble Savage Sees a Therapist.” Humor sustains us; it also tells the truth.
Southeastern people have always been and continue to be our own agents for adaptation and change: In the face of American expansion, we formalized syllabaries and new systems of constitutional government while working with foreign landscapes to help us rebuild as nations. Likewise, Southeastern poets and orators have engaged this practice of inventive adaptation for nearly two centuries of writing, and longer when considering oral traditions. The adoption of the hymn meter is an example of one such adaptation. West African melodies and Christian Scottish hymns were introduced into many Southeastern tribal communities in the eighteenth century and merged into a hybridized style of gospel singing. Hymns were some of the first written compositions using the Mvskoke syllabary, and it is likely that many of the hymns that make up the Mvskoke and Choctaw hymnals are also original compositions that document the experience of removal. For Mvskoke, Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Chickasaw people, call-and-response is an integral part of ceremony and celebration, as is the all-night singing, dancing, and shell-shaking that comprises most of the Green Corn traditions. Joy Harjo tells us, “In the rhythms of stomp dance are the root rhythms of blues and jazz, and of the land.” Joy Harjo was the first poet I read who taught me that a poem can listen, as if to its own echo, spiraling back to its origins. Even after removal from the Southeast, where we once traveled in search of the sun, we still dance in spirals toward the coming dawn. We still dance counterclockwise and honor the fire in the center of our ceremonial circles. It is the fire that has kept our towns and people alive, traveling with us from our original homelands to help us re-establish anew when we arrived. We will always be arriving and renewing our futures.
Evening Song 93
From the nineteenth-century Choctaw Hymns,
“Times and Seasons.”
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
PETER PERKINS PITCHLYNN (1806–1881), Choctaw, helped shape the national tribal government in the nineteenth century. His father was John Pitchlynn, a white trader, and his mother was Sophia Folsom, from an influential Choctaw family. He was educated at the Choctaw Academy in Kentucky and the University of Nashville and went on to become one of the greatest chiefs of the Choctaw.
Song of the Choctaw Girl
I’m looking on the mountain,
I’m gazing o’er the plain;
I love the friends around me,
But wish for home again!
I hear their tones of kindness,
They soothe my every pain;
I know they love me truly—
I wish for that home again!
My mother’s grave is yonder,
And there it must remain;
My father’s care is tender,
I wish for home again!
My sisters and my brothers—
Alas! it may be vain,
This longing for beloved ones—
I wish for home again.
O, take me to my Nation,
And let me there remain;
This other world is strange, strange—
I wish for home again.
Give me the western forest—
the mountain, stream and plain,
The shaded lawns of childhood—
Give me my home again!
The free breeze of the prairie,
The wild bird’s joyous strain,
The tr
ee my father planted—
O, take me home again!
The sunshine and the flowers,
My mother’s grave again,
Give me my race and kindred—
O, take me home again!
JOSHUA ROSS (1833–1913), Cherokee, was the son of Andrew Ross and Susan Lowry. His uncle was John Ross, chief of the Cherokees. Ross graduated from the Cherokee Male Seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in 1855 and from Emory and Henry College in Virginia in 1860.
Sequoyah
O’er Sequoyah’s lonely grave
The forest oaks their branches wave;
No guide is known to point the place
Where sleeps the Cadmus of his race,
Neglected son of genius rest—
No marble pressed on thy breast;
But when the Nation fades away
Before the mighty Saxon sway;
When high upon the list of fame
In letters bright shall stand thy name;
The learned have your powers admired
And some have thought you were inspired;
Like to that might seer of old,
Before whose eye the future rolled;
Who saw great nations rise and fall
And read the writing on the wall;
Now all are loud in praising thee,
But when you lived seemed not to see,
Aught in the gift forest child
Above the common Indian wild;
So thou didst to the deep wood fly
In solitude alone to die;
No well loved hand or sister dear
To wipe away the last sad tear.
LILY LEE (unknown), Cherokee, was a student at the Cherokee Female Seminary in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, around 1855. Since she published under a pen name, her actual identity is unknown.