American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  reined prairie. Copper bracelets were taken from

  graves overturned by looters for generations before

  the site was protected. The bracelets formed

  serpents. Elders said they represent the river, her

  life-form, serpentlike.

  ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE,

  “Streaming”

  Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an activist poet, her work in multiple genres a vehicle for an activist poetics. In her award-winning collections Dog Road Woman (1997), Off-Season City Pipe (2005), and Streaming (2014); in her powerful memoir Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival (2004); in her carefully nurtured anthologies Effigies (2009, 2014) and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (2011), this writer and intellectual of Cherokee, Huron, and Creek ancestry bears activist witness and assists the activist witnessing of Indigenous and mixed-blood, disempowered and colonized, human and other-than-human voices that have been ignored, marginalized, silenced, erased. These works do more than sound the call; they manifest action. To focus on one remarkable example, in the decade since its publication, Hedge Coke’s sequence of interrelated poems, Blood Run: Free Verse Play (2006), has effected nothing less in our world than multidimensional change: literary, affective, and social, as we might anticipate from the creation of a matrix of voices through which an endangered earthworks site is enabled to “speak,” but also change that is overtly political and deeply material. In other words, contrary to dominant expectations for a slender volume of poems, this erudite, mathematically encoded poetic sequence has provided moral impetus and spiritual catalyst for physical transformation.

  The complex of Indigenous earthworks known since the eighteenth century as Blood Run is located on both sides of the Big Sioux River on what is now the Iowa–South Dakota border. Repeatedly violated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the time of Hedge Coke’s activist witnessing at the turn of the twenty-first, the extant mounds remained vulnerable to ongoing assault and threats of complete erasure. Although she otherwise downplays her work’s role in preservation, at the end of Blood Run, embedded within paragraphs of acknowledgments to others, Hedge Coke notes that the long narrative poem that begins the sequence “is a version of the author’s oral testimony that urged the State of South Dakota Game Fish & Parks Department to vote unanimously to secure the site after twenty-three years of deliberation.”1 Following publication, as Hedge Coke’s poetic testimony became activated within diverse communities—as it was read and performed by descendants of Builder Nations, by Native peoples across the continent, by settler descendants and new arrivals, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and communities around the globe—parts of the Blood Run site were purchased and protected, reclassified as state park, reimagined as welcoming immersive environment for visitors Native and non-Native alike, renamed from insinuation of life-blood spilt in violence into (re-)recognition of iron-rich soil that was always, and continues to be, generative Good Earth.2

  I was fortunate to first hear selections from Blood Run in 2005, when Hedge Coke read from the manuscript as an invited speaker for the inaugural Newark Earthworks Day staged at Ohio State University’s regional campus at Newark, in close proximity to the massive complex of two-thousand-year-old earthworks, embankments, and effigy mounds for which central and southern Ohio are especially known. The juxtapositions of intimacy and scale in Hedge Coke’s work immediately drew me in, as did the method of multiple voices animating an earthworks site from multiple perspectives across time. Once the book was published, I repeatedly taught Blood Run in my Ohio State courses on Native American and global Indigenous literatures. Class discussions focused on the range of the book’s vibrant cast of earthly, cosmic, and abstracted voices; on the period-crossing diction and sophisticated wordplay of its poetic lines; on the braided development of its multiple themes, indictments of looters and anthropologists, calls for repatriation, predictions of renewal. But I had to admit to my students that I sensed more was going on below these surfaces than I could articulate. It took two years of rereading the poems, silently but especially aloud, in and out of published order, in and as embodied performance; two years of intuiting how the sequence produces meaning through its layered structures as well as through its singular and collective voices, its specific language and explicit content; two years of research into archaeological, historical, arts, and Indigenous methods of scholarship on mounds and mound principles, before I gained a fuller sense of the complexity of the book’s Indigenous aesthetics and activist poetics: what I came to understand as its thematic geometry and systems of multiple alignments.

  What follows is a lightly revised and condensed version of the essay I then wrote in 2009, “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run,” published in American Literature in 2010. I continued to sense that more was going on in and, especially, through the poetic testimony of Blood Run. At the time, I could neither fully describe nor fully imagine the capacity of Hedge Coke’s activist Indigenous poetics to manifest all manner of change.

  Across thousands of years, within broader practices of sacred science and civic art, Indigenous North Americans layered rock and packed soil into durable, multiply functional, highly graphic constructions of large-scale earthworks. These remarkable structures, which express Indigenous understandings of natural, human, and cosmic relationships through a concretized geometry of raised figures, include the estimated four hundred mounds that once composed the Oneota site known until recently as Blood Run. What remain of these largely devastated earthworks have been mostly unknown to contemporary citizens of the continent, even to trained archaeologists and historians. They entered literary consciousness, however, with the 2006 publication of Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run. In this sequence of two narrative and sixty-four persona poems, Hedge Coke evokes the expressive presence of these obscure earthworks, the complexity of their still-unresolved histories, the multiplicity of their still-relevant contexts. She renders visible both the seemingly imperceptible pasts and the willfully unimagined futures of Blood Run. Working against colonial ideologies in which mysterious mounds offer treasured silence, and against dominant aesthetics in which lyrical Natives offer ecological sensitivity but no recognizable science, Hedge Coke simulates earthworks technologies in the rhythms and structures of her poems.

  Hedge Coke engineers the geometry underlying the free-verse structures of Blood Run to complement, contrast, and otherwise complicate the erudite language of individual poems and the dramatic arc of the sequence as a whole. This subtle mathematical patterning helps make legible both the unread signs of individual earthworks at Blood Run and the forgotten sign systems of a sophisticated earthworks complex. Readers are guided toward perception of messages still coded within Indigenous earthworks extant and destroyed, toward recognition of a still readable form of Indigenous writing—not simply on the land but literally through the medium of the land itself—toward imagination of possible renewal.

  In the opening narrative poem, the speaker describes Blood Run as a “trading place” and “settlement” where “structures, from gathered earth hauled in baskets, / strategically placed, forming designs—animal, geometric—rose / reverent” (BR 5). In the series of persona poems that follows, these earthen “structures” speak for themselves, countering the silence of colonial erasure with the poetic science of Indigenous technologies. Most remarkable in this respect is Hedge Coke’s literary resurrection of a destroyed snake effigy once central to Blood Run. The strategic placement and serpentine structures of her “Snake Mound” and “Stone Snake Effigy” persona poems—with their sinuous allusions to both the biblical Serpent in the Garden and the extant Serpent Mound earthwork in Ohio—reclaim sacred reverence from the imposed discourses of Manifest Destiny and a pagan (pre)history. Thus the thematic and structural complex Hedge Coke builds for and between her Snake Mound and Stone Snake Effigy personas, intricately designed to juxtapose “animal” and “geometric
” forms, exemplifies her larger project: to build a contemporary poetics between an activist witnessing of destruction and the explication of an older form of Indigenous writing, an expressive Indigenous technology based in Indigenous science. Designated “savage” ruins by dominant US culture, razed by its agents to further their sense of “providence” and “progress,” the seemingly lost figure of the sacred snake at Blood Run reasserts its celestially aligned body of mounded earth as an active Indigenous presence in the layered landscape of Hedge Coke’s poems, an impetus to an activist present seeking Indigenous futures.

  Sighting Indigenous Sitings

  The raised forms of Indigenous earthworks marked territorial boundaries and significant roadways; they created focal points within urban settlements and within centers for economic trade, technological and artistic exchange, intellectual and spiritual practice. Platform, conical, pyramid, ridgetop, geometric, and effigy “mounds” thus represent achievements in science and aesthetics on a monumental scale. They integrate the precise observation of natural phenomena with geometry and other abstract forms of knowledge, as well as with practical skills in mathematics, architectural design, engineering, and construction. Many earthworks were sculpted to mirror perceived patterns in the sky, both in the bodies of individual works and in the arrangements of multiple works into complex sites and cities; moreover, particular works were often aligned with specific celestial events, such as an equinox or solstice sunrise or sunset point on the horizon.

  The best-known examples of extant Indigenous earthworks include the well-preserved and, in some cases, reconstructed ceremonial, burial, and boundary-marking works in Cahokia, Illinois, located along the Mississippi River outside of what is now St. Louis, Missouri, which was itself once Cahokia’s mounded suburb. The earthworks at Cahokia date from about a thousand years before the present, and they include the massive Monks Mound, a platform rising in multiple terraces to a height of nearly one hundred feet and sited to correspond to the sunrise points of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices. Other well-known examples include the large-scale geometric earthworks (outlines of circles, squares, and octagons) and the large-scale effigy earthworks (including Eagle Mound, Alligator Mound, and Serpent Mound) situated along the waterways of what is now central and southern Ohio. The oldest of these works date from more than two thousand years ago and, depending on their specific locations, they are sited to correspond to prominent solar, lunar, or other celestial events. Contemporary researchers have determined, for instance, that the Octagon Earthworks located at what is now Newark, Ohio, is both a mathematically perfect octagon enclosing fifty acres of land and a lunar calendar that marks the 18.6-year cycle of the moon’s northernmost and southernmost rise and set points.3 Researchers have also determined that the complex at Newark is connected to a related complex located sixty miles to the southwest, near the town of Chillicothe. The two sites, each of which includes the mounded outline of a large octagon connected to the mounded outline of a large circle, appear to have been connected by a straight and bounded roadway. At certain times of the year, this roadway became aligned beneath the visible stars of the Milky Way, creating a “star path” between the lunar observation site at Newark and the mixed solar-and-lunar internment site at Chillicothe.4

  In response to these and other types of archaeologically based evidence, including the presence of natural materials and trade items originating great distances from central and southern Ohio (copper, obsidian, mica, silver, meteoric iron, marine shells, bear and shark teeth), researchers speculate that, beginning roughly two thousand years ago, the region was a center for Indigenous North American social, spiritual and, importantly, technological and artistic activity and exchange. Archaeologists have located over six hundred earthwork complexes within the contemporary borders of Ohio, and there are literally thousands of individual earthworks sited across the North American continent, some dating to more than five thousand years ago.

  Earthworks have been sketched, mapped, surveyed, sometimes excavated, and too often looted by non-Indigenous settlers and their descendants since at least the eighteenth century. However, it is a twentieth-century technology—aerial photography—that has enabled contemporary viewers to see individual earthworks and earthwork complexes from a great height, the only perspective from which these works can be viewed as complete wholes. Aerial photography has made it possible to consider how these large-scale constructions of packed earth function as and within sign systems in what are increasingly revealed to be regularized patterns. Drawing on knowledge gained from conventional surveying, mapping, and excavation, as well as from aerial photography, the legibility of earthworks and their systematic patterning has been further enhanced by the development of computer-generated models for particular sites.5 In addition, in 2008 researchers in Ohio began to survey earthworks through the aircraft-based use of the optical remote sensing technology known as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which deploys laser pulses to measure ground elevation. Combined with Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) data, LiDAR creates highly detailed, three-dimensional, color-coded imaging of topographic data. These vivid pictures make it possible to see evidence of earthworks no longer visible to the naked eye, as well as to conceptualize more precisely the specific siting, geometric patterning, and celestial alignments of individual earthworks and earthwork complexes.

  The archaeologist William Romain and his colleagues have demonstrated how LiDAR imaging strengthens hypotheses about Ohio earthworks that are based on ground-level observations and measurements, such as that these works are consistently located near water and that they typically align with solar and/or lunar events. LiDAR has validated additional speculations as well, confirming that Ohio earthworks are consistently oriented to the lay of the land, often running parallel to natural ridges or embankments, and that geometric earthworks (outlines of circles, squares, and octagons) are typically “nested,” that is, calibrated to fit within each other, even when located some distance apart. Perhaps most intriguingly, LiDAR has confirmed speculation that the sizes of the major Ohio earthworks are based on a consistent unit of measurement, that unit’s multiples, and that unit’s key geometric complements. Romain suggests that any one of these aspects constitutes a striking achievement. That Indigenous mound-building cultures spanning roughly fifteen hundred years of earthwork activity in Ohio were able to incorporate all of these aspects into the construction of specific sites at the same time is truly astounding.6

  In short, the more legible the earthworks become through aerial-based technologies—that is, the better contemporary viewers are able to see these works both as individual constructions and as multigenerational components within larger sign systems and patterns—the better we are able to understand earthworks as Indigenous technologies related to Indigenous science, and the better we are able to conceptualize earthworks as a form of Indigenous writing that employs “geometric regularity” and “geometrical harmony” in order to record natural, human, and cosmic relationships within durable structures.7

  Building Indigenous Worlds

  First occupancy of the Blood Run site dates to over eighty-five hundred years ago, but Blood Run was most heavily populated by what are currently termed Oneota peoples at the beginning of the eighteenth century—not in the so-called prehistoric distant past, but rather within the period of alphabetically written history—when the site may have been occupied by as many as ten thousand individuals. Like Cahokia in Illinois, Blood Run was an urban space, a large city, and it was a regional trade center. The available evidence suggests that as many as four hundred individual earthworks spread across some twenty-three hundred acres may have been constructed at the site. An 1883 survey documented 276 then-extant earthworks spread across an area of about twelve hundred acres, while subsequent mapping indicated only 176 earthworks as still visible. At the time of Hedge Coke’s writing, after more than a century of looting, violent physical removal, and agricultural cropping di
rectly on the site, less than eighty earthworks remained visible at Blood Run.8

  Hedge Coke’s sequence of poems gives voice to the traditions of Indigenous mound-building cultures and, most strikingly, to the earthworks themselves. In the main body of her sequence of sixty-six poems, Hedge Coke creates a series of sixty-four persona poems through which a range of elements associated with the Blood Run site and its long history are enabled to “speak.” These voices include the site’s Ceremonial, Burial, and effigy Snake Mounds, which speak both individually and collectively across the sequence, as well as the central River and the distant Horizon. They also include celestial bodies (Morning Star, Sun, Moon, Blue Star, North Star); both wild and domesticated flora and fauna (Dog, Starwood, Corn, Redwing Blackbird, Sunflower, Deer, Beaver, Buffalo, Fox); Memory and a spiritual guide called Clan Sister; Skeletons and Ghosts of the deceased; evidence of Indigenous writing systems (Cupped Boulder, Pipestone Tablets); and, perhaps least expectedly, multiple non-Indigenous human and mechanical intruders to the site: Jesuit, Squatters, Tractor, Looters, Early Anthro, and Early Interpreter. The poems are divided into formal sections that suggest a temporal movement from a utopian distant past in sections I, “Dawning,” and II, “Origin,” to a disrupted near past and volatile present in section III, “Intrusions,” to an anticipation of further danger in section IV, “Portend.” The unnumbered “Epilogue” then points toward the still unknown future(s) of Blood Run. Across these sections, the individual persona poems work together as a kind of activist play, a series of dramatic speeches and staged conversations spoken from multiple relevant perspectives. Through these monologues and dialogues, Hedge Coke endeavors to persuade readers/listeners (and readers/performers) that the Blood Run site carries intrinsic as well as historical value, that it deserves to be recognized as sacred and preserved for future generations.