by Joy Harjo
Nanih Waiya Cave
Pearl River, Mississippi
A very long time ago the first creation of men was in Nanih Waiya; and there they were made and there they came forth. [ . . . ] And the Choctaws [ . . . ] came out of Nanih Waiya. And they then sunned themselves on the earthen rampart and when they got dry, they did not go anywhere but settled down on this very land and it is the Choctaws’ home.
—Isaac Pistonatubbee
A couple miles down this iron-locked road
is a low cave in a large mound. Dad throws rocks
inside the gape. We hear shallow water.
He crawls through the opening, flashlight in hand.
I am scared of underground places, can’t follow.
There is room for four grown men to stand, he echoes.
I stay where I can see what’s around me:
Kudzu-draped trees, old growth, in the shadows.
I can almost see what’s inside them, their stories,
but they’re tight-lipped and I take my lesson.
Picnic tables, grills, beer cans surround the mound.
Even though it’s miles away from any town,
no sign, not on a map, just a numbered
county road, I can see people still come here.
Dad crawls out, throws a burnt log onto the ground.
I want to go inside; shuffle, head down, knees up
into the entrance but can’t go any further.
Instead I grab a handful of wet cave-wall dirt,
mossy green, replace it with my hair. I clutch
this dirt-gift, nails in palms, head pulsing heat from pain.
This place he’s taken me, this Shadow World,
requires both of us. We had to come
to our Source, go in, come back out renewed.
But I’m not done with this past yet, can’t end it
and reemerge; my head is burning in shadow.
* From the website: The Donner Party by Daniel Lewis. http://railboy.tripod.com/donner/
OUTRODUCTION
LeAnne Howe
WE BEGIN in the East and go North. As Joy Harjo has said, “to be gracious, we should begin with Northeast–Midwest, and then wind up with the Southeast.” This collection of poems, born of these lands, is not an end nor a beginning.
The undertaking for our anthology of poems by ancestor-poets has been thousands of years in the making, especially considering the song chants. We’ve pulled together more than 240 poems from authors of Native Nations around the Western Hemisphere into a body of work that we could recognize. Native chants have no beginning and no ending as they reverberate around the universes and sing.
Here now, I am back at dirt’s door, my own homeland. I hear someone softly playing a sacred song as I write. A song cords its way up through the arms of the giant elm tree growing outside my grandparents’ house. I’m cradled back into the place where memories of music and poetry began for me, Ada, Oklahoma, in the 1950s. Here again I hear my grandfather’s solitary fiddle whining against my great-aunts’ voices in a three-part harmony. My great-uncle plays rhythm guitar. I feel as if they play and sing all Sunday afternoon into dusk, but I can’t quite be sure my memory serves. I see myself waving good-bye as they drive away in an old farm truck back to Stonewall, Oklahoma. I don’t want their images to fade, so I keep waving long after they are gone.
Because I am so young, time slows down and is splintered by great fissures of sorrow. I’m back where I must be in order to write about my first encounters with poetry.
Like music, poetry also came to me through my grandparents. They both wrote poems. My Cherokee grandmother composed poetry on the backs of envelopes of letters she’d received, or in the margins of her books. I still have them. She told me when she was young, they couldn’t afford paper. Iva’s early life was one of poverty, and great sadness. At seventeen, she married a white man. My mother was born a year later in 1917 in a one-room cabin at Stonewall. The Mvskoke Creek midwife was named Izola, so my grandmother named her newborn daughter after the Mvskoke Creek woman.
My grandmother lost her husband and their farm in the 1918 pandemic. She and her two-year-old daughter, Izola, moved from Stonewall to Ada, where she worked as a housekeeper for fifty cents a week, plus board. Her poetic voice comes from all these losses. She usually wrote poems about dying flowers, faded rose gardens in late summer, and wilting bluebells. She never wrote about love, or her children, or all the death and dying she’d witnessed as a young woman.
Grandmother didn’t write poetry about “the angel of death that would come in the spirit of a bird for her friends, and husband,” but she would tell those stories to me. I know more of her life and her poetry because she was also a storyteller. She and my mother would sit at the dining table in Ada after Sunday lunch and write rhyming verses. Most of my mother’s poetry is lost or destroyed. But we have my grandmother’s.
Grandfather Lonnie Valentine also wrote poetry in the margins of books, and in small notebooks. He included detailed recipes for curing horse colic and curing kidney disease in horses. I have them. He was my grandmother’s second husband and he played the fiddle, sang songs, cured horse colic, and wrote poetry. He never talked of writing poetry and the only reason I know he did is because I found them among his things after he died, along with his deputy sheriff’s badge and a pistol. Maybe he thought it wasn’t manly to write poetry and patrol the west side streets of Ada known as “the bucket of blood.” At that time there were many shootings in the two-story gambling houses in west Ada. Yet my grandfather’s poems were about love. In 1914, he was writing about an “orange-haired girl from Kentucky.” He was seventeen years old; she was fifteen. He kept their letters. Lonnie Valentine also wrote about his love for a roan horse. In his youth, before crop failures and poverty took his family’s farm, he and his brothers raised quarter horses.
I still can recall the long drive out into the country to my great-uncle’s house. Today I realize it was only five miles outside of Stonewall, but it seemed much farther in those days. Once there I would lie on a quilt in the yard forgetting about the heat and mosquitoes and listen to the Indians sing and play guitars while my grandfather played the fiddle.
Lonnie Valentine was born in 1897, the same year that Queen Lili‘uokalani finished translating the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian Creation chant. Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation opens the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Pacific Islands section in our anthology:
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
I respond with a Choctaw chant to Queen Lili‘uokalani’s chant.
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
Because you are holding on to me I am not dead yet.
In working on our volume of two centuries of Native Nations poetry, I’ve come to believe that Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation of the Creation chant of the Kumulipo was heard all the way across the big blue waters, and all across the lands, even in the lands of the people of Indian Territory where my grandmother and grandfather were born. Maybe all peoples everywhere still respond to Queen Lili‘uokalani’s beautiful call.
We are not finished yet.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALL CREATIONS begin with an intent, a spark of light. The spark for the anthology gathered us around it, all of the p
oetry editors, all of the assistance in the many forms. We have done the best we can and acknowledge that no project is definitive. There could be numberless anthologies issued on the same theme, and each would be distinctly different. We offer up with gratitude this gathering, for behind each poem and poet are multitudes of poets and family ancestors. Please forgive us for any omissions or failures. And even celebrate this circle of indigenous poets and poetry, that they go forth to continue to inspire those who are coming up. There are many, so many more than when the older of us began listening to and writing poetry.
We are grateful for those in our tribal nations and communities who have taken care of our oral arts, despite the destruction that has come down from disrespect and disregard of the original inhabitants of these lands. They suffered as they held tight, and here we are, fed. It is because of them that we recall our tribal ways of doing and making, given by the tribal communities in which we were raised, whether they be in our homelands or in urban communities.
So many efforts and support structures have brought this collection into being. We would like to acknowledge the Department of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, especially Allen Dunn, department chair; Margaret Lazarus Dean, director of creative writing; and English Department staff including Judith Welch, Donna Bodenheimer, and Kayla Allen. We depended especially on Jeremy Reed, Joy Harjo’s assistant at UTK. He was there ensuring the details during each part of the process. Allison Davis also stepped in to assist with early editing. We are grateful to the students at UTK who helped lay the groundwork. We would also like to acknowledge Stanton B. Garner Jr. for his advice.
We are grateful for the support of the Eidson Foundation at the University of Georgia for their assistance, and for James Matthew Kliewer, from the University of Georgia, for all his editing work.
Without the continued belief and support of Jill Bialosky, our inspired editor at W. W. Norton, and the supportive staff, especially Drew Weitman, we would not be placing this book into your hands, to share. We also depended on the warrior skills of agent Kathleen Anderson, and our intrepid permissions editor, Frederick Courtwright. For translation assistance we thank Margaret Noodin and Sherwin Bitsui. We would like to thank the Tulsa Artist Fellowship for their support during the final assembly of these poems. And special thanks to Allison Hedge Coke, Carolyn Dunn, Phyllis "Coochie" Cayan, and Larry Evers for helping us to locate some of these poets.
We have had much assistance as this project developed. We would like to acknowledge Emmi Whitehorse for the use of her stunning painting as cover art, and Jill Momaday for helping us contact her father, N. Scott Momaday. We also must acknowledge Scott for his trailblazing inspiration and offerings as a poet, writer, and artist. We would not be who we are as Native writers without his efforts and creations in this world. And there’s Robert Dale Parker. We relied greatly on his groundbreaking scholarship that resulted in his collection of early Native poetry, Changing Is Not Vanishing. We would like to thank Lisa Brooks for her scholarship and the discussion of Eleazar, and her reminder that New England Native poets are a force to be acknowledged. We remember all the editors of those earlier anthologies of Native literature, the anthology ancestors.
There are many who are not named here. May your efforts find reward in this creation.
We are in service to the peoples, lands, and inhabitants of our tribal nations and are grateful for this opportunity to share the poetry that has inspired so many, and keeps us going through times that challenge us to remember those original teachings that are most often spoken and sung through poetry.
Mvto/Yakoke.
// The Editors: Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise Foerster
I would like to add gratitude to my husband, Owen Chopoksa Sapulpa, whose listening and knowledge inspires me. And for my people, the Muscogee Creek Nation, the Mvskoke, especially those who take care of the songs, poetry, and stories that feed our spirits. And mvto, mvto, mvto, mvto to my sisters LeAnne Howe and Jennifer Elise Foerster for this part of the journey. And finally, with gratitude for all the editors, advisors, and helpers without whose assistance this collection would not exist. Mvto, thank you for the source of life that emerges in poetry and song to sustain us.
// Joy Harjo-Sapulpa
First, I would like to thank Hashtali, whose eye is the sun. I rarely begin with the sacred, but because so many of our poetry ancestors are in this collection, it feels right to acknowledge all the powers that have been with us on the journey. I would also like to acknowledge my southeastern ancestors on both sides of my tribal families, the Billys (Choctaw) and the Bennetts (adopted Cherokee family); and my sons, Joseph Craig and Randall Craig, my husband Jim Wilson, and my granddaughters Chelsey Craig and Alyssa Warren. This book would not have come into the world without the leadership of Joy Harjo. Thank you, Joy, for pulling us together. Thank you, Jennifer Elise Foerster, for holding us together. It has been my enormous pleasure to bring the book into the world.
// LeAnne Howe
With gratitude for all who receive, return to, and return us to poetry, a breath of creation; for the poets, artists, and writers of the Institute of American Indian Arts; for the essential inspiration of my family and ancestors; for all of my teachers, especially Joy Harjo and LeAnne Howe—thank you for your enduring strength and wisdom and for inviting me to work with you on this immense endeavor; and for the guidance, time, and efforts of the regional contributing editors. I am humbled to participate in this truly collective vision.
// Jennifer Elise Foerster
CREDITS
Sherman Alexie, “The Summer of Black Widows” and “The Powwow at the End of the World” from The Powwow at the End of the World. Copyright © 1996 by Sherman Alexie. Reprinted with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.
Paula Gunn Allen, “Laguna Ladies Luncheon” from Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962–1995. Copyright © 1997 by Paula Gunn Allen. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of West End Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, westendpress.org.
Crisosto Apache, “Ndé’isdzán [‘two of me’]” from GENESIS (Lost Alphabet, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Crisosto Apache. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Tacey M. Atsitty, “Rain Scald” from Rain Scald. Copyright © 2018 by Tacey Atsitty. Reprinted with the permission of The University of New Mexico Press. “Sonnet for My Wrist” from Crazyhorse, no. 83 (Spring 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Tacey Atsitty. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Joe Balaz, “Charlene” from Pidgin Eye (Ala Press, 2019). Originally published in. Hawai’i Review 85 (2017). Copyright © 2017, 2019 by Joe Balaz. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
b: william bearhart, “When I Was in Las Vegas and Saw a Warhol Painting of Geronimo” from Cream City Review 38, issue 1 (Spring/Summer 2014): 36. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Esther G. Belin, “Assignment 44” from Of Cartography. Copyright © 2017 by Esther Belin. “First Woman” from From the Belly of My Beauty. Copyright © 1999 by Esther Belin. Both reprinted by permission of The University of Arizona Press.
Salli M. Kawennotakie Benedict, “Sweetgrass Is Around Her” from Sweetgrass Grows All Around Her, edited by Beth Brant (Toronto: Native Women in the Arts, 1997). Reprinted by permission of Jasmine Benedict.
Diane L’xeis´ Benson, “Ax Tl’aa” from Umyuugwagka : my mind, my consciousness : an anthology of poetry from the Arctic regions, edited by Anthony Selbourne and Diane E. Benson (Isle of Wight, England: Making Waves, 1999). “Potlatch Ducks” from Callaloo: Native American Literatures 17, no. 1 (Winter 1994). “Grief’s Anguish” [previously unpublished]. All reprinted with the permission of the author.
Fred Bigjim, “Spirit Moves” from Sinrock (Portland, Oregon: Press-22, 1983). Copyright © 1983 by Fred Bigjim. Reprinted with permission.
Gloria Bird, “In Chimayo” and “Images of Salmon and You” from Full Moon on the Reservation (Greenfield Center, New York: Gr
eenfield Review Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Gloria Bird. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Sherwin Bitsui, “tó” from Flood Song. Copyright © 2009 by Sherwin Bitsui. “The Caravan” and “This mountain stands near us: mountaining” from “Dissolve” from Dissolve. Copyright © 2018 by Sherwin Bitsui. All reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
Kimberly M. Blaeser, “Dreams of Water Bodies” and “Captivity” from Copper Yearning. Copyright © 2011, 2017, 2019 by Kim Blaeser. Reprinted with the permission of the author and The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Holy Cow! Press, holycowpress.org. “Apprenticed to Justice” from Apprenticed to Justice. Copyright © 2007 by Kim Blaeser. Reprinted with the permission of Salt Publishing Ltd. through PLSClear.
Peter Blue Cloud, “The Old Man’s Lazy” from Clans of Many Nations: Selected Poems, 1969–1994. Copyright © 1995 by Peter Blue Cloud/Aroniawenrate. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of White Pine Press, whitepine.org. “Rattle” from Nothing But the Truth, edited by John Purdy and Rupert (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2001). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Peter Blue Cloud.
