by Joy Harjo
North America is mistakenly called nascent. The Shawnee nation is mistakenly called moribund. America established a mathematical beginning point in 1785 in what was then called the Northwest Territory. Before that, it was known in many languages as the eastern range of the Shawnee, Miami, and Huron homelands. I do not have the Shawnee words to describe this place; the notation that is available to me is 40°38′32.61′ N 80°31′9.76′ W.
Measuring the Distance to Oklahoma
Shell shaking in the state of the coin toss and sorrowful walk.
Weaving through the powwow grounds
grass stomped low and buzzing with flies
your son walks two quick steps ahead of me
to point out a tiny bow and arrow at a vendor’s booth.
Rats scuttle in the grain silo.
The gentle clamor of the casino washes through the parking lot.
A table is piled with half a dozen corn cakes,
each one embossed with the maker’s thumbprint.
Your grandfather recounts
catching water moccasins as a boy
and spitting wads of tobacco down their throats
just to watch them squirm.
You sink onto a dusty quilt
gently pull the empty Coke can from your boy’s sleeping fist
shake your head impatiently when your daughter whines for you to
untie an intricately beaded belt from her regalia.
Child’s arrow, capped with a pencil eraser twirling in your fingers.
Ottawa County moon as seen from a distance:
pale vodka swirling in an open mouth.
Driving home on the frontage road,
green and riveted as a turtle’s back.
Highway sketched into place by the broken black lines
of oil rigs at midnight.
B: WILLIAM BEARHART (1979–), Anishinaabe–St. Croix, earned an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In addition to writing and editing, bearhart works as a poker dealer at a small casino in Wisconsin. His poetry has been published in The Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and PANK Magazine.
When I Was in Las Vegas and Saw
a Warhol Painting of Geronimo
I thought We could be related, Andy and I. We’re both
blue walls and yellow cows in a gallery of pristine white. We’re both
screen prints, off-set and layered. Under exposed. We’re both
silver clouds filled with helium and polluted rain. We’re both
white and blonde and scared of hospitals. Only I’m not really any of those things.
And then I thought We could be related, Geronimo and I. We’re both
code names for assassinations. We’re both first
names you yell when you jump from a plane. We’re both
gamblers and dead and neon acrylic brush strokes on a screen printed image. Only I’m more
like a neon beer sign sputtering in a tavern window: burned out, broke,
a heart with arrhythmic beats.
PLAINS AND MOUNTAINS
PLACED WITH OUR POWER
Heid E. Erdrich
THIS REGION is represented by powerful poems that sing, narrate, and argue, that are lyrical, and often witty, all the while bearing witness to generations of Indigenous people living in enormous, often harsh, and beloved lands. Here some of the last and most brutal repression of our people took place, battles by the U.S. military against men, women, and children, including the shame of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. Poets of the Plains and Mountains do not forget such injustice but lend their voices to a resistance active across three centuries.
This section asserts an historicism while offering re-visioning, resistance, and survivance based in culture, tribal stories or tribalography, and tribal languages. To begin, two poets born in the 1870s, Zitkála-Šá (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) and Elsie Fuller, call out politicians by name and fault Congress with scathing sarcasm. Political content is one characteristic of Native poets of the Plains and Mountains. Other poems make historical reference to conflict with (un)settlers and perform resistance to colonization. Many of the poems in this section concern themselves with events and figures familiar to the general public such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, the Ghost Dance, Custer’s defeat, and the Dakota “Uprising.” Lois Red Elk’s “Our Blood Remembers,” an elegy to Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake/Sitting Bull, suggests that our ancestral blood contains the tribal past. The vital perspectives in these poems differ from the vague, romantic notions people might have about warriors and conflicts: these poets are directly related to well-known chiefs, to unknown survivors of massacres (Indian wars) that displaced their Plains relatives, often in forced marches and migrations, to the harsh climates near the more mountainous regions.
Several poems reveal deep and personal consideration of lesser-known conflicts as well: the Sand Creek massacre (Lance Henson), the oil-driven greed of the Osage Murders (Elise Paschen), and the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota warriors (Layli Long Soldier) whose execution, the largest in U.S. history, was commanded by Abraham Lincoln the same week he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Such poems recognize, as Lois Red Elk says, our “guardian relatives” and “ancestor of our blood.” These are not historical accounts, not reenactments, but personal poems from survivors whose understanding of the U.S. Cavalry, Custer, and disappearances of Native women are not imagined, but inherited, embodied memories.
A clash of imaginations informs these poems. The world’s image of the Plains and Mountains, the “Wild West,” remains populated by cowboys, outlaws, and Indian chiefs on war horses. Poems in this section do present Native figures on horseback (Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and James Welch) but these riders long for peace and place. “The West,” the land rush, the last Indian wars, all took place in the Plains and Mountains, but the West these poets depict is not a place to be tamed, settled, or claim-staked. Instead these lands claim us. They are our origin places and the sites of our power, as the poets Richard Littlebear, Sy Hoahwah, and John Trudell remind us. In pulp fiction and old movies, the reason “Indians” were “on the war path” goes unexplained. These poems are explanation offered: Our warriors were and are preoccupied with ongoing defense of our sacred spaces and places of power—the prairies, rivers, canyons, and mountains that birthed us remain our relatives.
These poems point out crucial differences between Native and (un)settler understanding of history. For Natives, these poems say, history is active and ongoing, rather than residing in distant memory. In her poem on the annual commemorative horseback ride by Dakota people, Long Soldier writes: “The memorial for the Dakota 38 is not an object inscribed with words, but an act.” The memorial is not a static memory, but an active resistance. Action as a cultural distinction concerns Hoahwah as well. His notion of memorial is an act continued at a linguistic level:
The other sister Tsi-yee, named after a war deed
(her father charged a cavalry officer
knocked him off his horse then lanced him to the prairie)
Hoahwah’s relative, Tsi-yee, carries in her name a memorial to “a war deed,” an act against a U.S. soldier. In Comanche, Hoahwah illustrates, one’s name can participate in an ongoing and active resistance. For many women poets in this region, resistance can take the shape of creatures or women imbued with supernatural powers: In Louise Erdrich’s “Jacklight,” for example, an uncanny doe fights back at male hunters. Tiffany Midge’s “Teeth in The Wrong Places” writes a monstrous feminine strength that’s bawdy, funny, and fierce. Such protections are warranted today when statistics for sexual assault in the United States show that Native women make up the highest number of victims. What happens to the land, happens to us, is a lesson learned across centuries of desecration.
What’s become an American standard, the wilderness pastoral or eco-poetic lyric, might work as metaphor for a non-Native poet, but these poems are from place and related to pla
ce. These poems become acts of power and profound connection. N. Scott Momaday notes a season that “centers on this place” in the “deep ancestral air,” stating he stands “in good relation to the earth”; and Victor Charlo describes “mountains so close we are relative.”
Power from the land goes beyond romanticizing Native relationships with nature, in part by revealing the power of words in silent places. The iconic figure, a man named Earthboy, in James Welch’s poem, “farmed the sky with words.” Welch’s line reveals a complex relationship to place as it transposes earth and sky; we understand the “Earthboy 40” of the poem’s title to be a storied place, a place where words form their power. In response to Robert Frost’s depiction of the American landscape as an “unstoried” place, in my poem “The Theft Outright” I write back in time to our first stories of how we came from the earth itself: “We were the land before we were a people.”
Our relationship to language within land arises from the silence, the vastness of our homelands, as expressed by Suzan Shown Harjo:
The Song that sang itself
had no language
it was a heartbeat that thundered
through the canyons of time
It is the place itself that gives power, and that power carries across time and distance. It is not an uncommon notion in the nations represented here that all of our power comes from the earth, which we need, but which does not need us. When John Trudell recalls being under police control and told to squat, he points out the mistake his captors made: “They placed me with my power”—the earth. Such power allows the speaker to move across time, even while restrained:
I was their captive
But my heart was racing
Through the generations
The ability to hold and express a distinct sense of time is how these poets remain, in Momaday’s words, “in good relation” to those who came before and those still to come.
Ultimately what bridges the generations of the diverse poets of Plains and Mountains is the resurgence of Indigenous languages that began in the late twentieth century and continues to grow. Ute language is at the heart of Tanaya Winder’s moving and elegiac poem “learning to say i love you.” Richard Littlebear’s “We Are the Spirits of these Bones,” told alternately in Cheyenne and English, alludes to repatriation and ancestral spirits troubled by and unfamiliar with their new place of rest. In the face of generations of government attempts to teach only English to Native children, the existence of poems in Indigenous languages represents a hard-won resurgence.
The grassy plains and powerful mountains that many consider the middle of the country are, these poets assert, their own places with their own histories and boundaries. They speak their own poems daily. Plains and mountains formed the lives within them. Rocks and waters came first, then plants, creatures, and then we humans. Indigenous ways of being arose in relation to land. So too our poetry comes from place and from acts of resistance—from Little Big Horn to Standing Rock—our historic and ongoing battles to protect our homelands.
ELSIE FULLER (1870-unknown), Omaha, was a poet who attended the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, from 1885 to 1888. The institute took students from sixty-five northern and western tribes. As at other American Indian boarding schools, students were taught in English and punished for speaking in their native languages, given religious instruction, and enrolled in programs that emphasized trade, agriculture, and teacher training. The school created one of the earliest “outing” programs, which sent students to work for families in New England when the school was closed in the summer months. More than 1,300 students attended Hampton Institute between 1878 and 1923. This poem was published in Talks and Thoughts of the Hampton Indian Students. It refers to U.S. Senator Henry Laurens Dawes of Massachusetts, the author of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.
A New Citizen
Now I am a citizen!
They’ve given us new laws,
Just as were made
By Senator Dawes.
We need not live on rations,
Why? There is no cause,
For “Indians are citizens,”
Said Senator Dawes.
Just give us a chance,
We never will pause.
Till we are good citizens
Like Senator Dawes.
Now we are citizens,
We all give him applause—
So three cheers, my friends,
For Senator Dawes!
ZITKÁLA-ŠÁ (GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN) (1876–1938), Dakota, was a writer, editor, musician, teacher, political activist, and cofounder and president of the National Council of American Indians in 1926. Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, she was sent to a Quaker missionary school in Wabash, Indiana, and later studied at Earlham College and the Boston Conservatory of Music. Along with her English translation of Native American oral stories, her autobiographical essays, and her political writing, she co-wrote one of the first operas to deal extensively with Indigenous themes and subjects.
The Red Man’s America
My country! ’tis to thee,
Sweet land of Liberty,
My pleas I bring.
Land where OUR fathers died,
Whose offspring are denied
The Franchise given wide,
Hark, while I sing.
My native country, thee,
Thy Red man is not free,
Knows not thy love.
Political bred ills,
Peyote in temple hills,
His heart with sorrow fills,
Knows not thy love.
Let Lane’s Bill swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees,
Sweet freedom’s song.
Let Gandy’s Bill awake
All people, till they quake,
Let Congress, silence break,
The sound prolong.
Great Mystery, to thee,
Life of humanity,
To thee, we cling.
Grant our home land be bright,
Grant us just human right,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our king.
D’ARCY MCNICKLE (1904–1977), Métis and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, was an author, activist, academic, and community organizer. He was born and raised in St. Ignatius, Montana. Following the Riel Rebellion (or North-West Rebellion) in what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1885, his Cree Métis mother had fled with her family to Montana, where they were formally adopted into the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. McNickle attended the University of Montana from 1921 to 1925 and sold his allotment to raise money to study at Oxford and the University of Grenoble. He worked as an administrator at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, served as director of American Indian Development at the University of Colorado, and was the primary author of the “Declaration of Indian Purpose” for the American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961. He helped to establish the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Chicago’s Newberry Library in 1972. His best-known literary work is the novel The Surrounded.
Man Hesitates but Life Urges
There is this shifting, endless film
And I have followed it down the valleys
And over the hills,–
Pointing with wavering finger
When it disappeared in purple forest-patches
With its ruffle and wave to the slightest-breathing wind-God.
There is this film
Seen suddenly, far off,
When the sun, walking to his setting,
Turns back for a last look,
And out there on the far, far prairie
A lonely drowsing cabin catches and holds a glint,
For one how endless moment,
In a staring window the fire and song of the martyrs!
There is this film
That has passed to my fingers
And I have trembled,
Afraid to touch.<
br />
And in the eyes of one
Who had wanted to give what I had asked
But hesitated—tried—and then
Came with a weary, aged, “Not quite,”
I could but see that single realmless point of time,
All that is sad, and tired, and old—
And endless, shifting film.
And I went again
Down the valleys and over the hills,
Pointing with wavering finger;
Ever reaching to touch, trembling,
Ever fearful to touch.
ELIZABETH COOK-LYNN (1930–), Crow Creek Sioux, is from Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and was raised in a Sisseton Santee Dakota family. She is an editor, essayist, and novelist and co-founded Wíčazo Ša Review. She has written several books of prose and poetry. She received the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
At Dawn, Sitting at My Father’s House
I.
I sit quietly
in the dawn; a small house in the Missouri breaks.
A coyote pads toward the timber, sleepless as I,
guilty and watchful. The birds are commenting on his
passing. Young Indian riders are here to take the old
man’s gelding to be used as a pick-up horse at the
community rodeo. I feel fine. The sun rises.
II.
I see him
