Now make room in your mouth grassgrassgrass Layli Long Soldier
The First Nations of North America practiced poetry long before the arrival of white settlers. Their languages, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz (Mohawk), represent “the foundation of the American poetic lexicon.” But what is the role of Native poets today? And what exactly does the general term “first or native American poetry” mean?
For too long, the image of North American indigenous peoples has been shaped exclusively by the dominant white culture. Not only in our country, there are many who know the cultural traditions of indigenous North Americans only indirectly through the works of excellent white men: from the novels of Karl May (who, as is well known, has never been to America), the adventure novels of James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans) or from the “conciliatory fantasies” of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (The Song of Hiawatha). Through their work – as well as countless Western films and a whole sea of sixth-grade literature – we have been presented with stereotypical representations for decades that trap the indigenous people in a kind of color-printed alternative reality, in an imaginary then. Based on them, we have a deeply ingrained image of Native Americans as noble, undeveloped savages who, with eagle feathers in their hair and tomahawks in their hands, cross the grassy plains on a painted warhorse and occasionally raid a lonely ranch or stagecoach. But such images deny Native Americans the opportunity to be our contemporaries: to write modern-sounding poems, to compose dance music, to play professional hockey or basketball, to hold important political positions. In other words, they make them invisible in the presence"For a long time we practiced dying," he writes in the poem Anasazi young poet Tacey M. Atsitty (1982) from the Diné (Navajo) nation refers not only to the real massacres of her ancestors, but also to the slow symbolic death in the eyes of the ruling culture, which transformed the indigenous people from living contemporaries into labeled exhibits in a museum.
For decades, the idea that indigenous peoples could also have their own voices and say something about their traditions and worldview did not seem like a possibility that would be worth considering to the majority society. From the first encounters with European settlers, indigenous peoples were seen as primitive and illiterate. Unlike their overseas counterparts, natives did not record their songs and stories on paper, but passed them on exclusively orally, which led colonizers to the mistaken impression that they completely lacked a developed verbal culture. But nothing could be further from the truth. As the poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday (Kajova) emphasizes, the indigenous people of North America have been deeply fascinated by language and its creative possibilities since time immemorial. For them, the word was imbued with a special magical power – they understood it as a formative, extremely powerful creative force. The surviving songs, incantations, and prayers—that is, poetry in its broadest sense—are the best evidence of this belief. “The ability to speak in metaphors, to bring people together, to liberate them in their imaginations, to teach and exercise, was and still is highly valued and considered more useful than gold, oil, or anything else that the newcomers coveted,” adds Joy Harjo (Muskog/Creek). And today is no different. Whether contemporary poets write from the perspective of urban flaneurs or forest walkers, their work is driven by a belief in the magical power of words to change the world—to heal through words, to inspire change. “Words are living beings,” says Joy Harjo.
Despite this fact, the literary fruits and achievements of indigenous peoples remain largely unheard. And let us add that so too do their broader cultural contributions, their indelible mark on American identity. The Iroquois and Cree influenced the American democratic system, musicians with indigenous roots were at the birth of jazz and the blues, the languages of indigenous cultures may well have inspired Walt Whitman's "long-legged" poetry and at the same time lent the names to 27 of the 50 American states - and one could go on and on. The situation is all the more paradoxical because Native Americans (or rather, indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere) represent the group about which perhaps the most has been written of all human populations (Heid E. Erdrich). Nevertheless, we sense that in recent years there has been a gradual breaking of the ice. Indigenous figures are reaching the highest levels of politics and top sports competitions, and more and more films and television series are being produced by indigenous filmmakers about the current fates of their fellow tribesmen (Reservation Dogs, Dark Winds, Basketball or Nothing), indigenous communities are winning legal cases that have dams torn down to allow salmon to flow through rivers again, and plans for oil pipelines to cross sacred lands are being canceled. And it's no different with poetry.
American Dawn
The year 2000 seems to have been a watershed year for Native American poetry – more poetry titles have been published since that milestone than ever before, and the momentum shows no signs of slowing down. Some of them can be considered real bestsellers by the undemanding standards of poetry. For example, the award-winning titles Whereas by poet Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017), Nature Poem by Tommy Pic (Tin House Books, 2017), Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers Jake Skeets (Milkweed Editions, 2019) or Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz (Graywolf Press, 2020). An unprecedented number of representative anthologies have also seen the light of day. In recent years, these have been, chronologically speaking, the following: Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Native Voices: Indigenous Nations Poetry, Craft, and Conversations (Tupelo Press, 2019), New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018) and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry (Library of Congress/WW Norton, 2021). A symbolic confirmation of the growing importance of indigenous poetry is the publication of a major “Nortonian” anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (WW Norton, 2020). The comprehensive volume represents the most comprehensive compendium of First Nations poetry available to date. It includes the work of 161 poetic voices and covers the entire history of English-language Indigenous poetry, starting with the oldest surviving poem from 1678. In addition to cross-sectional titles that cover a wide range of poetic voices across nations and tribes, there are also (or are in preparation) numerous anthologies of a local/tribal nature and even comprehensive scholarly studies – see, for example, the publications Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization (The University of Arizona Press, 2022), by poet Craig Santos Perez of the Chamorro people of Guam. It should be noted, however, that these are far from the first publications of this kind – the pioneering spurs belong to older anthologies The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary American Literature (Red Earth Press, 1979) and Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back (Greenfield Review Press, 1983). However, the latest selections differ from these earlier efforts in that they contain exclusively the work of authors who are registered (and therefore verified) members of one of the state-recognized indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, in the past, there have been quite a few who have simply posed as indigenous writers under false names. The works of these impostors have subsequently appeared in compendia of indigenous poetry and helped to spread misguided ideas about the spiritual and cultural world of individual ethnic groups. It was, as Joy Harjo aptly puts it, “another form of capitalist appropriation, colonial insults.”
The current flourishing is undoubtedly closely related to changing social conditions, the liberalization of American society as a whole. However, modern technologies also play a role, especially the influence of ubiquitous social networks, which enable faster cultural exchange and the dissemination of new ideas (the activities of the non-profit organization Indigenous Nations Poets active on Facebook and Instagram are exemplary). In addition, many indigenous authors speak a language that is close to the way in which today's youth communicate, which allows them to overcome possible cultural and generational barriers. At the same time, they enrich modern language with current topics: environmental, gender, social, political. However, rare events, such as the awarding of major literary awards (PEN, Pulitzer, American Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and others), or Joy Harjo's three-year tenure as American Poet Laureate, which also had a positive impact on the wider visibility of the poetic work of her contemporaries, also greatly help in raising awareness of Native American poetry. She herself initiated the publication of the aforementioned anthology with this intention (as her signature project) Living Nations, Living Words and the launch of the eponymous virtual map of indigenous poetry, which will be discussed later. Nevertheless, let us not be under any illusions that most of the authors discussed here are generally known. The above-quoted Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) tells a telling story about how an unnamed literary critic asked her followers on a social network if they knew any contemporary indigenous poetry writers. If even a prominent literary critic has no idea what is going on in this sphere, we can hardly expect the lay public to be any different, Erdrich notes. The problem has long been that the vast majority of titles are published under the supervision of academic publishers or only locally (and therefore without the possibility of wider distribution). Erdrich also rightly notes that if indigenous poetry does not confirm certain expectations associated with it (such as an explicit expression of a spiritual relationship to the natural world), it remains outside the reader's and publisher's sights. As in other respects, we hear and see only what we want to hear and see, what fulfills our stubborn ideas.
Poetry of hundreds of nations
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Native American, just as there is no universal Native American language. However, there are Diné, Koyukon, Onondaga, Oneida, Winnebago, Yup'ik, or Arapaho peoples and the individual languages in which their members think, speak, and write - in which they live. The term “Native American” was introduced in the academic sphere to replace the racially charged term American Indian. However, this term does not appear in any of the official documents that the US government has concluded with the indigenous people in the past (Harjo). Many authors therefore have a legitimate difficulty identifying with it: they are well aware that it obscures the cultural and linguistic diversity of individual indigenous ethnic groups built up over millennia. And this diversity, let's face it, is truly considerable. More than 573 officially recognized nations currently coexist in the continental United States, of which only 231 are in Alaska. Not to mention the large indigenous population in the US possessions in the Pacific: the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, American Samoa. We can immediately and forever throw away the limiting idea that connects Native Americans primarily with the tribes and cultures of the Great Plains (Cherokee, Ponyo, etc.). The imaginary map of Native poetry covers the entire expanse of the United States, all types of landscapes and climates, on the continent and beyond. The sheer number of remarkable poetic talents in the Hawaiian Islands alone would warrant a special case study. So when we speak of Native American (or First Nations, etc.) poetry, it can (and does) mean the poetry of hundreds of different peoples, as well as American poetry (Erdrich).
But that's just the beginning of the complications with definition and delimitation. Among the authors of indigenous poetry, we find voices of different ages, pure-blood or mixed origins, different levels of education, sexual orientation, gender (there are also transgender or gender-nonbinary poets, "double souls"), coming from the countryside, reservations or densely populated urban conglomerations. This in itself establishes a large tonal range in indigenous poetic work. The linguistic side of their work is also unusually diverse. The vast majority of these writers write in English - English is for them meeting place, a language community where they can have a peaceful dialogue with each other, but they adapt it to the specific syntax and rhythm (melodicity) of their tribal languages. Or as the young poet Sherwin Bitsui (1975) from the Diné (Navajo) nation says: they use it with a setting Indian minds. Their poems are so unmistakable in their diction, sound, and tone. When we read in Bitsui's darkly surreal verses that people "speak," oars become fingers that "scrape windows into the dawn," mountains "burn" and confuse "morning with mourning," a glacier "spider" the story of the Southern Cross, and blood fills the cracks in empty cartridges, we can sense something of the indigenous belief that the world - within us and around us - is a living, dynamic, and interconnected continuum, a never-ending dance of flowing and merging. This mercurial quality of Bitsui's language is already expressed in the titles of some of his collections - for example Shapeshift (2013) or Dissolve (2018).
However, the practice of poetry represents above all a unique opportunity to keep alive the original indigenous languages and stories, the greatest wealth that every culture possesses – to give them the opportunity to sound outside the narrowly defined space of the home community, to bring them to the ears of a wider circle of listeners and potential speakers. In practically every indigenous poet we can find at least one poem in which words appear in their original indigenous language – regardless of whether they have spoken it since childhood or had to learn it laboriously from their elders in adulthood. However, we also find those who programmatically write their verses bilingually. Such are, for example, the poems of Margaret Noodin (1965) written in English and also in the Anishinaabemowin language – see, for example, the collection What the Chickadee Knows (Wayne State University Press, 2020), in which, according to his own words, he tries to show how differently the world can be soundhow different it can be described in the indigenous language paradigm. And let us add that many poems exist exclusively in the tribal language of the author – like a series of verses by the desert poet Ofelia Zepeda (1952) in O'odham (about which she also wrote a reference textbook A Tohono O'odham Grammar). In addition to the fact that such poems allow us to make a direct (if purely visual) comparison between a language originating from a specific landscape/country and its songs, and an imported language, in many ways alienated from its earthly origins, we can see in their existence a partial victory of indigenous peoples over systematic efforts to eradicate, to silence their languages. Each such poem is a place from which indigenous languages can reach out into the surrounding world; a place in which they persist like a seed in the soil.
Remember your own birth
If this poetry is accompanied by a considerable diversity of languages used, the same applies to its formal side. Think of any poetic technique or formal procedure and you can be sure that sooner or later you will come across it in a poem. Especially the poetic work of the younger generations (clearly represented in the collection New Poets of Native Nations) offers a whole range of borrowed (post)modern poetic forms and techniques, pointing to a lively dialogue with contemporary poetic trends and also a desire not to be stuck in the past, to actively explore the possibilities and boundaries of what is still permissible in poetry. There is therefore no shortage of poems in prose, in the form of letters or lists, dictionary/explanatory entries, those that imaginatively work with the translucency of paper, or pieces set in the form of a certain figure – from a hammer to poems resembling slender blades of prairie grass. Such poems simultaneously erase the difference between artistic genres, they are as much a literary act as a visual one. The imagination of individual poems is enhanced by an all-pervading sense of innovative language play, linguistic mischief. A language that has served the destructive forces of marginalization for decades is joyfully shattered into harmless fragments by indigenous creators and reassembled into a (old)new language that would be able to reinterpret historical and personal indigenous experience; their own sense of ceremony, ritual, justice, generosity. A language that is well aware that it is a language. A language that can cut, but also calm troubled waters. The result of these self-aware efforts is a kind of literary kintsugi – instead of gold, however, indigenous poets use the soft and translucent glue of poetry to glue broken and torn meanings together. Anyone who wants to can see a certain similarity to how in the United States, through fluid forms of colloquial slang, they took possession of the language of their oppressors in the black subculture – only there is less of that fire in the poetry of indigenous peoples.
In some ways, these poems seem to reflect the experience of living in a fragmented, incomplete world – being in an enforced cultural diaspora. Many a native poem literally grinds between the teeth like grains of sand, resisting saddled, comfortable reading. Their authors create deliberate disproportions, disharmony, disorientation and bottomless pits in them. Read aloud, they resemble the broken beats of modern electronic music or the syncopated jamming of the many-voiced thrush, the greatest DJ among American birds. This is the case in a whole series of poems by the talented poet Layli Long Soldier (1973) from the Oglala Lakota nation, poems full of sharp edges, cliffs, silences and omissions, isolated words in an empty Arctic space, seemingly randomly scattered across the page like oracle dice. Similarly radical are the poems of Craig Santos Perez (1980), in which this Guamanian poet-academic makes extensive use of various types of brackets, slashes, dashes, text symbols, and unexpected breaks in the text that break its flow. The graphic poem is extreme in this respect. (I Tinituhon), which is entirely made up of isolated syllables and numbers arranged in an asymmetrical grid. Such a poem can be entered from anywhere, from any direction, and at first glance has no prescribed beginning or end.
Alongside these innovative creators, however, there are also authors who stick to tried-and-true poetic practices without the need to experiment too much – after all, even in the works of Craig Santos Perez and Layli Long Soldier, who otherwise do not go out of their way to meet readers twice, we find poems that are tame, non-conflicting, and smooth in nature. A model example of the “traditional” trend is the poetic work of Linda Hogan (1947), a seasoned and versatile writer from the Chippewa nation, whose soulful poems and essays express the deep spiritual and material connection of indigenous peoples with animals, with whom they have had an intimate and daily dialogue for millennia (see, for example, the book of essays The Radiant Lives of Animals). Her poems may not dazzle with linguistic and formal innovation at first glance (and they have no reason to), but they more than make up for it with a broad tenderness that recalls the best of Mary Oliver's (1935-2019) poetry.
What is strangely absent from the poetry of the indigenous people, with honorable exceptions, are extremely minimalist genre forms similar to those of the Japanese or Chinese. It is as if there is an unspoken conviction among the indigenous singers that there is no reason to spare words – just as American soldiers did not spare insults and patrons, betrayal after betrayal after betrayal after betrayal. At the same time, however, we can – and certainly rightly – see in this a certain continuity with much older verbal traditions and formations. The poems of indigenous authors are often rhythmized by the hypnotic repetition of the same word or phrase in the manner of a song refrain, which reveals the deep roots of this poetry in folk storytelling and in ritual incantations and songs (as well as possible later influences from Christian hymns and black spirituals). After all, many poets describe themselves as storytellers, or at least actively engage in the art of storytelling (such as veteran poet Simon J. Ortiz). A prime example of this characteristic technique is provided by the oft-cited poem by N. Scott Momadaye. The Delight Song Of Tsoai-Talee, which celebrates the human connection with the cosmos. “I am the farthest star / I am the chill of dawn / I am the thunder of rain / I am the glitter on the snow crust…” Momaday lists various forms of her cosmic identity. No less eloquent example are the already cult litanic poems of Joy Harjo I Give You Back, Remember and She Had Some Horses (all from the collection of the same name from 1983). Here is a small sample from the poem Remember: “Remember your own birth, how your mother strained her strength / to imprint you with form and breath. You are a testimony / of her life and the life of her mother and the mother before her. / Remember your father. He is your life too. / Remember the earth whose skin you are…”. Reading these poems, we seem to hear the rhythmic beats of a leather ritual drum. We feel the earth tremble under the feet of the stamping dancers, how excitement jumps from their heated bodies to us, how we too begin to sway to the electrifying rhythm, and suddenly it becomes perfectly clear to us that these poems are to be embodied in dance, song, bodythat boiling blood flows through these poems. Joy Harjo, by the way, accentuates this essential musicality of her poetry during live performances, when she sings the poems in a peculiar way. And to complete the circle, a number of her poems, like the mantra quoted here to drive away fear I Give You Backk, with her fellow musicians, she also set it to music. As she herself says with conviction: “Music and poetry entered the world like dance”, it is therefore impossible to separate one from the other; music and poetry are the same rhythmically pulsating blood.
We are here, we are alive.
Despite the formal diversity indicated, we find a number of significant similarities and intersections in the poetry of the first Americans, which testify to an internal poetic (and programmatic) unity. A number of deeper beliefs – such as that about the magical potential of words – are shared across individual tribes and language groups. However, friendly and kinship ties between individual actors also play a significant role; indigenous poets know each other well, read each other, support each other, quote each other, inspire each other, invite each other to public readings, mention each other in interviews and texts – in short, they act as one unwavering family. Let us now take a closer look at it.
Like other long-standing poetic traditions, the poetry of the first North American peoples has its heroic figures, its elders, to whom one can go for advice, from whom one can learn much. For many, they are such by the old masters poet, essayist and novelist N. Scott Momaday (1934) or Simon J. Ortiz (1941), a poet-storyteller from the Akom people. However, significant teachers and inspirers can also be found in authors two generations younger. Names such as Laura Tohe (Diné/Navaho), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), Louise Erdrich (Chipewa), Sherman Alexie (Spokane) or Luci Tapahonso (Navaho) may sound familiar to Czech readers. Some of them have even been translated into Czech. Such luck befell, for example, the desert poet and university professor Ofelia Zepeda (1952) from the Tohono O'odham people (formerly known as the Papago Indians), whose collection was published in our country without a wider critical response The Power of the Ocean: Poems from the Desert (Dybbuk, 2019). By the way, in a masterful translation.
Among established and experienced writers, poet and musician Joy Harjo (1951) of the Muskog (Creek) Nation holds a unique position. Harjo entered the literary world as one of the key figures of the second wave of the so-called Native American Renaissance, a literary and (broadly speaking) artistic movement of the second half of the 20th century, whose symbolic beginning is considered to be the publication of N. Scott Momadaye's groundbreaking novel House of Dawn (1968, Czech 2001). The initial impulse to write poetry was given to the young Harjo by her mother, who wrote song lyrics at the kitchen table on an Underwood typewriter, “the most wonderful thing in the house.” Since then, Harjo has published countless successful and award-winning poetry collections (the most recent An American Sunrise is from 2019), several plays, a wonderful book for children The Good Luck Cat (with illustrator and artist Paul Lee) and two extraordinary memoirs (Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior), in which she describes her thorny path to poetry and music, the central values of her life. In addition, she has recorded one group and seven solo jazz albums (Harjo is an excellent saxophone and indigenous pentatonic flute player) and has recently recorded a teaching series on “poetic thinking” for the e-learning platform MasterClass. Harjo is a tireless promoter and advocate of indigenous cultures and poetry, also active on social media. Together with poet Gloria Bird (Spokane), she compiled a collection Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America (WW Norton, 1998) focused on the work of indigenous women authors and also the already mentioned extensive anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, which offers a multigenerational cross-section of Native American poetry from across the United States. In 2019, she was named United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress (as the first poet of Native descent), a sort of official representative of American poetry whose task is to spread awareness of poetry across American society. As part of her first term (of three total) in office, she initiated the creation of an interactive online map of Native American poetry Living Nations, Living Words (see the accompanying anthology of the same name, already commented). This exceptional project aims to redefine the geography of the North American continent through the poetry of indigenous peoples, to be a living testament to the work of 47 selected poets (each of whom has their own profile on the map with basic biographical data and an annotated recording of a representative poem) and also to express their relationship to a specific place – their roots in American soil (the selected poems are united by the theme of “place and displacement”). “The literature of the indigenous peoples of North America defines America. It is not exotic. Its interests are specific, although often universal,” notes Harjo.
The canon of already proven authors has expanded in recent years to include extremely talented representatives of the youngest generations – such as the aforementioned Layli Long Soldier, the young poet and podcast host Tommy Pico (1983, Kumeyaay), the Hawaiian poet and researcher Brandy Nālani McDougal (Kānaka Maoli), or Ishmael Angaluuk Hope (Tlingit, Iñupiaq), the poet and screenwriter of a unique computer game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa, 2014), which is one of the few plays based on Inuit mythology. And I am mentioning only a handful of them here. Although many of the youngest authors have only published a single poetry collection, it can already be predicted that in the future they will play a similarly important and initiatory role for the upcoming generations as Harjo, Momaday, Erdrich, Hogan and others play for the current ones.
The wide generational gap brings a fruitful tension between the traditional and the modern into the poetry of indigenous peoples. This can be well demonstrated in the relationship of a number of young writers to writing poetry about nature. References to the mystical world of bears, wolves, wolverines, ravens or reindeer (and generally to the invisible spiritual forces permeating their natural world) are to a greater or lesser extent a constant presence in the work of indigenous poets, but are reflected by young blood with considerable critical distance. Young poets are well aware that identifying indigenous ethnic groups with the natural world – however well-founded it may be – has long been a tool of control, keeping indigenous peoples under the spell of invisible stereotypes. It is precisely these – and in general the expectations that people have of indigenous canids – that are subjected to biting criticism in a long poem-strip Nature Poem (2017), Tommy Pico’s second book of poetry, for which he won the 2018 American Book Award. In it, we follow Pico’s alter-ego, the young queer poet Teebs, who lives in the big city and cannot (in the words of the official annotation) “bring himself to write a poem about nature.” Right at the beginning of the book, he says: “I can’t write a poem about nature / because it feeds the narrative / of the noble savage.” And later he expands on this opening proclamation: “I can’t write a poem about nature because this conversation is taking place in the Hall of South Americans at the American Museum of Natural History.” Pico even goes so far in his defiance of cultural stereotypes that in the same poem, through Teebs’s mouth, he provocatively declares: “Frankly, I hate nature – I hate its entrails.” But a moment later – somehow in a whisper, obliquely, out of earshot – he admits: “It is not true in the least that I hate nature. Places have thoughts – hills have ridges that adore / when we caress them with our eyes.” Pico’s poetic composition perfectly expresses the tension that many of his (and Teebs’) contemporaries, especially those from big cities, undoubtedly share and deal with on a daily basis: We cannot turn our backs on our roots – on our own culture and the land that gave us birth, but at the same time we want to live lives like everyone else; we are not dusty exhibits in a museum, insects forever immobile in the resin of the past; we are here, we are alive.
How colorfully the novel depicts There there (2018, Czech: Vyšehrad 2021) by Cheyenne novelist Tommy Orange (1982), an Indian living in a big city, listening to hip hop and breakbeat, watching comic books, and at the same time participating in a tribal powwow as a dancer is nothing extraordinary these days. Native people do not live in isolation from the outside world, nor in an imaginary reservation of the mind. Their poetry can express a deep connection to the land and refer to the language and environment of social networks, drawing from the bottomless reservoir (and sometimes, let's admit it, also the swamp) of pop culture iconography. Pico himself uses incisive street slang and Internet abbreviations (bc instead of because, wd instead of would, and the like) in his poems, as well as ancient and sacred concepts from his own tribal language. Similarly, it mixes quotes from Beyoncé lyrics and references to the self-centered Instagram culture with peaceful moments when the title character gathers sage with his father in the hills outside the city. As if to tell us: believe it or not, a symbiosis of both worlds is possible, both are part of the same inscrutable cosmos.
If we go into the consequences, in the end, even the nature that appears in this poetry is not completely without stain - it too has undergone an unmistakable and far-reaching transformation under the influence of external economic and political forces, it too is somehow distorted, marked, through and through. other. (Let us leave aside the fact that untouched wild nature without human influence has always been only a pious wish of those who vainly desire purity, and one that has repeatedly led to the expulsion of indigenous people from the territories of newly established national parks and natural monuments, even though they have influenced and co-created the ecosystems there for millennia.) In this spirit, one of the opening scenes of the poem is symptomatic Daybreak by popular young poet Jake Skeets (Diné/Navajo). In the poem that symbolically introduces the collection Living Nations, Living Words (the poem is about sunrise – and east is the direction of emergence, of inspiration), “an airplane or a crane or perhaps a crow casts a shadow on the common columbine and wildflowers”, but nearby, “a basketball backboard made of sheet metal and metal pipes” lies on “a pile of rusty cans” and discarded junk.
Just as the lives of those forced to exchange old ways of existence for new ones in a completely new world inevitably changed, just as the landscape in which indigenous peoples live inevitably changed, so too indigenous poetry adapts to, responds to, and incorporates changing circumstances in all sorts of ways—and only because of this can it continue to survive and evolve. Poet and editor Heid E. Erdrich summarizes this development—and its diverse trajectories—as follows: “We write and do not write about treaties, battles, and drums. We write and do not write about eagles, spiritual powers, and canyons. Indigenous poetry can be all of these, but it is also about grass and apologies, bones and joy, marching bands and genocide, leather, social work, and much more.”
A dark reminder on white pages
When considering possible motives behind the persistent tendency to overlook indigenous populations, one possible motive is the one behind the ostentatious transparency of black people – the reminder by mainstream American societies of the unflattering aspects of their own culture, the problematic foundations on which they stand; their cultural Shadow. Every indigenous poem is potentially dangerous because its words are, as he writes ambiguously in Nature Poem Tommy Pico, “a dark reminder on a white page.” And the more of them there are, the more real this threat to the light-painted American dream—the idealized stories America tells itself—is. Every Native American poem is a barrier against forgetting—much like a sound recording of a place or a photograph.
When we read the poetry of the first Americans, we cannot escape the past, we cannot escape the tragedy that hangs over the American indigenous peoples like a storm cloud. The vast majority of indigenous poems are told against the backdrop of the indescribable experience of cultural genocide, which has reduced a once-numerous group of natives to an ostracized minority on the very fringes of social interest and without much political relevance (natives today make up barely half a percent of the total American population). The intensity of this experience is understandably different (by far the harshest repression took place in the territories of the Great Plains tribes, not all peoples were permanently displaced from their ancestral lands), but nevertheless the trauma of violent colonization, this whole (in the words of poet Laura Da' of the Shawnee nation) "mighty grinding machine" is at work behind every spoken word. For Native Americans, who have lived for millennia in a cyclical, nonlinear concept of time, history is not something static, something forever finished. History is alive for the natives, unfolding even now, right now; history is happeningWhether it represents a scar or a healing balm, it is ever present with us as a silent companion, walking with us regardless of our conscious will; we are all woven from its colorful threads.
The presence of specific historical events and destinies forms a distinct trace in the thematic fabric of indigenous poetry. The forms of this living dialogue with the past (it is not a mere recollection as a look back at the past, as we understand it) can be different: it can be fragmentary mentions, fleeting allusions (here to a place, here to a name), but also long and elaborate poems that view a past event in broader social and linguistic contexts, attempting to deconstruct it verbally and semantically. A masterful example of the latter is offered in the collection Whereas already quoted several times by Layli Long Soldier. In a multi-page poem called the numeral 38 deals with the lesser-known execution of 38 Dakota warriors who were hanged en masse on December 26, 1862, on the orders of Abraham Lincoln himself. As the poetess matter-of-factly reminds us, he coincidentally signed the so-called Emancipation Proclamation that same week, which granted freedom to all blacks in the rebellious slave states. In this context, the author mentions Spielberg's biographical film Lincoln (2012), in which the scene of the signing of the charter is not missing, while “the hanging of the 38 Dakotas was not included”. It draws attention to the ever-present disparity in the representation of indigenous peoples (they continue to be ostentatiously overlooked, non-existent in mainstream American culture) as well as to the persistent hypocrisy and empty promises behind the official proclamations of the American government. A large part of the collection Whereas It was, after all, a direct response to the official congressional apology to the indigenous peoples, SJ Res. 14 (2009-2010), which, while successfully passed Congress, was not approved by former President Obama and, worse, contains a clause that protects the United States from the legal consequences of anything admitted in the apology. Like so many other apparent favors, it is nothing more than an empty gesture, another chapter in an endless history of betrayal and falsehood.
The story of the twilight of the indigenous people, however, is not only about the massacres of defenseless women and children or the executions of captured warriors, however sad and tragic. The natives also and above all lost the land under their feet, the basis of their identity and languages, the source of all their life force. By mass killings of animals on which the natives were dependent for their existence (beavers, bison, wolves) and by means of the cynical distribution of alcohol, the reeducation of children in Indian boarding schools or mass transfers to distant reservations, which went down in history under the name of the Trails of Tears, the colonizers managed to cut off the vital connection of the natives with the rhythm of the migratory and vegetative natural patterns according to which they oriented their lives, but also with the places of birth and origins. This process was symbolically completed by the renaming and desecration of countless specific sacred sites – as in the case of the granite monument Mount Rushmore (or Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe or Six Ancestors in Lakota), an important point in the sacred geography of the Lakota, into whose facade the gigantic faces of four American presidents were carved. Although in recent years there have been isolated transfers of once confiscated land back under tribal administration and a return to at least some of the most visible original place names (an example is the highest American mountain Mt. McKinley, which since 2015 has been officially called Denali again – or High in the local Athabaskan language), this deep scar on indigenous identity cannot be healed. Native Americans (although themselves descendants of other fusions, other conflicts, other climates) have cultivated a relationship with the American land for millennia. As Heid E. Erdrich explicitly says: “Native ways of being arose in relation to the land.” Even the bark of a juniper tree can be the Milky Way to the natives, a map of home. They are so firmly embedded in the American soil that they cannot be clearly distinguished from it; they are unthinkable without it. They are daily from it (into it/for it) gives birth – even those living in cities, because even cities ultimately “belong to the land” (Orange). The land precedes us: “Before we were humans, we were the land,” Erdrich declares in the poem The Theft Outright.
All our strength comes from the earth
Native American poetry can be read from a certain perspective as belonging to poetry. If we pick up any of the contemporary collections of Native poetry, we cannot help but notice that the included authors are usually arranged according to a geographical key, or rather according to the affiliation of individual poets to a certain region, place, or world direction. This does not necessarily have to be the place where the given author actually resides. While the poet-rancher Henry Real Bird (born 1948) from the Crow tribe spent his entire life near the places where he was born and raised, the young poet Jennifer Elise Foerster (Muscogee/Creek) lives in San Francisco, but her roots reach back to the area of present-day Alabama and Georgia. Such a division naturally brings a reassuring appearance of clarity and order to the surging sea of dozens of unanchored names. Let us recall that the poetry of the first Americans is a geographically vast literary corpus, encompassing the flavors and colors of subtropical regions, deserts, seashores, prairies, boreal forests, and Arctic tundra, not to mention the cultural diversity of individual peoples and tribes (their language, rituals, stories, but also material culture - architecture, tools, clothing, jewelry). The emphasis on local anchoring, however, also expresses a deeper sense of belonging to a particular earthly place - identification with him. When Heid E. Erdrich, editor of the collection New Poets of Native Nations, in a comprehensive and informative preface, claims that the selected poems come "from a place and are tied to a place", reflecting precisely this derivation of Indian identity from locally earthly. However, it does not end with the fact that these poems tell the story of a specific place (specific rivers, rocks, mountains, lakes, plains), as it might seem from a too cursory view. Erdrich herself adds that poems as such – regardless of their content – are understood by many creators as a place; a place where memories, dreams, hopes, past, present and future meet. Each poem creates space for imagination, (e)motion, change; each poem is space, a place to live, which we can enter for any length of time and then emerge from it again into the wider world, refreshed and strengthened.
Whenever Indigenous poets speak of place, they do not mean a relationship to place in the prevailing Western sense – they do not understand place as a space to be conquered and owned, a monetizable acreage. For them, the relationship is exactly the opposite: places belong to us, he claims. Each place has its own distinct consciousness, its own distinct intelligence, overlap. Every place speaks its own poems daily and awakens poems in those it breathes life into (Erdrich). To live from a place—to draw from its moods and fruits, to find a depth of security in its earthy embrace—is to listen to its songs, its thoughts, its inspirations, its appeals. Indigenous peoples, of course, and not only those of North America, listen attentively to these utterances—and that is also why they maintain such a strong connection to the land and the wider community of life. Listening strengthens bonds, biologist David G. Haskell would say. So when a Native American speaks of a relationship to the land—of his own adhesions with the earth, or rather, if he pronounces, if he sings this relationship, if he pronounces The earthiness of one's bones and blood is not just fancy word gymnastics. Each individual tribal nation always also represents a specific landscape, a piece of land and the songs contained within it, sounding – all the language resonating “within the earth”. All our strength comes from the earth, the natives repeat over and over and over. And that poetic kind of thing. Poet and former professional basketball player Natalie Diaz expresses this deep connection to the earthly in a long poem The First Water Is the Body as follows: “The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States⏤ / it is also a part of my body. // I carry the river within me. The river is who I am: 'Ah, Macaw. // That's not a metaphor. // When we Mohawks say, Inyech 'Aha Makavch ithuum, we pronounce our name. / We tell the story of our existence. The river flows through the center of my body.” And something similar is also told to us by the exceptional Inuit poet ng nanouk okpik (Iñupiaq) in the introduction to the poem Her/My Arctic, when describing her “Inuit self”: “I was/am forged by sea salt / pounded by snow into the iron ore of a red herring.”
However, the forms of this relationship can also be less conspicuous and proclamatory. Ultimately, a deep relationship to a place is best revealed by the ability to know and read that place in detail – to know every flower there, every stone, to know that the rain will not come, because the air has not yet brought “a sweet breath of moist clay” and the earth has not “frozen in expectation” (Ofelia Zepeda, poem It's Going to Rain). To know him, as N. Scott Momaday writes, intimately and truly, “from a thousand angles” (The Way to Rainy Mountain). Such a thorough knowledge (sometimes called in English field knowledge) shows an extraordinary sensitivity among indigenous poets for the faithful evocation of the smells, colors, sounds, shades, plants and creatures typical of a particular landscape. This specific quality – smelable, palatable, tangible – seems to reflect the bodily awareness of a specific earthly place and its living forms, built over thousands of years, resulting from daily close contact with the earthly elements. When Leslie Marmon Silko writes in a beautiful poem Where Mountain Lion Lay Down With Deer about the “crushed wild mountain scent”, we are immediately transported among the reddish sandstone rocks, where mountain cougars creep silently, where the canyon wren sings. Similarly, when reading the desert verses of Ofelia Zepeda, specific sensory impressions from the American-Mexican borderland linger in us for a long time: the aroma of the dry bark of mezquita bushes, the fine dust settled on the leaves of ocotillo, the ribs of saguaro cacti. This spatial quality of the individual poems reflects the astonishing diversity of the landscapes from which the indigenous poets come, to which they relate in their imagination. Each landscape produces different songs, different imagery, different ways of being-a-place and therefore also being-in-language. Poets from Alaska excel in a distinctly different imagery, poets from desert or mountain regions in another, and descendants of the peoples of the Great Lakes in another. In the poetry of each of them, different elements, different animals dominate, the taste and sound of light in them are different; in one the rustle of grass and the clatter of horse hooves are repeatedly heard, in the other the roar of the ocean waves. No one has their feet so firmly on the ground as a poet – and even more so a native poet.
The landscapes of these poems are not only full of specific scents and colors, details that we can roll in our mouths, rub between our fingers. Each place also has its own geography of memory – geological memories, deep in time, but also in the form of accumulated memories and experiences of those who inhabited these places in the ancient and recent past. Each one is thoroughly permeated with history, bloodied, processed – with mythical and lived-in stories, personal and collective memories, and images that people bring to the landscape. As the debut collection of poet Laura Da' shows Tributaries (2015), in which the tribal history of the Shona people is mixed with the author's own family memories, we walk simultaneously as we traverse the landscape. the body of history – history and the body of the landscape are one. The feeling of physical consubstantiality with the land and the awareness of its historicity naturally leads to a reaction to the negative changes that American landscapes have undergone in a relatively short period of time. A number of poems clearly express sadness over a world of past abundance; the transformation of once undeveloped land into parking lots and supermarkets, the extinction of local wildlife. The poem is eloquent in this regard Leaving Tulsa by Jennifer Elise Foerster. “Once upon a time there were coyotes, cardinals in the junipers…” begins the elegiac composition that also lent its title to the collection of the same name, which was shortlisted for the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award. Elsewhere, the poet summarizes in a single sentence the elusive scope of the massacres that led to the complete decimation of the American bison population—and, figuratively, the once-large population of indigenous people: “On the grassy plain behind the house / a single bison remained.” Also widely cited in this context is Perez’s poem ginen the micronesian kingfisher [I sihek]which he cites the decimation of Guam's Micronesian kingfishers by the introduced brown boiga: “(our) nightmare: no / birdsong⏤ / from the jungle gone / (and white) bright blue green azure red gold / feathers⏤everywhere: buoys / brown birds / silence⏤”. In none of the examples given, however, does the reader remain with only the impression of bitterness from loss. After all, even the disappearing populations of kingfishers and bison are being helped to recover by programs for their rescue and subsequent reintroduction, as Perez (albeit with a considerable amount of ancient irony, since these rescue operations are carried out by Western scientists who often treat indigenous local knowledge with disdain) discusses in the second half of his poem. As long as at least one remains alive, there is hope that the world will be filled with the lost colors again. Even if they may never be the same, the same radiant.
Towards recovery
It is certainly not an exaggeration to speak of Native American poetry as the poetry of survivors—of those who remained alive. despite. However, it would be a mistake to limit its diversity to a connection with the past, to define it through the past – we would be making the same mistake as those for whom indigenous peoples mean only bows and arrows. While the trauma of cultural genocide in the work of indigenous writers can never be completely escaped, it is also necessary to emphasize that this is not poetry that would excessively revel in images of suffering or historical injustices. Such a thing would only lead to the feeding of negative emotions, to stagnation in personal and collective pain without hope of correction. As poet and university professor Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen) says: “Indians do not only inhabit the past and pay tribute to the past; we also work and create towards the future.” And one form of this healing, life-giving work is writing poetry. Simply by consciously bringing the past into the present – for example, in the form of a poem that brings a specific cruelty to life – we make amends, we heal the present; by returning to the past, we free our hearts from pain that would otherwise threaten to grow into stubbornness and hatred; we learn to live and think forward, beyond anger.
The Hispanic writer Sandra Cisneros (born 1954) wrote that in other times these poets would have been healers, visionaries, spiritual leaders. And in a sense they are still today. They managed to transform the pain they endured and the cruel injustices committed against their ancestors into something encouraging and healing. It would be so easy to fall into skepticism in the face of the gradual disappearance of one's own culture; to simply give up and become cynical. And although there are certainly countless indigenous people today who succumb to the pressure of hopelessness, in their poetry we find something else - a determination to persevere in the face of adversity; the ability to look at history with their heads held high, unwavering and calm; the courage to look through torn wounds forward, towards recovery. The poets who have accompanied us through this text, confirm again and again with their words the determination to live on and persevere, to resist extinction with the nonviolent means available. To fight, but not with the use of violence and deadly weapons, because that would only multiply violence, but with love and understanding – as Natalia Diaz does in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Postcolonial Love Poem, as the protesters did – peaceful warriors – at Standing Rock. They offer us such a great dose of hope, all the more needed in times of climate change and reckless military conquests by the powerful, which threaten the fragile world peace. Such a message can speak to anyone in the world – no matter where they live, what their belongs to. Regardless of culture.
Perhaps this unwavering determination to persevere is most beautifully expressed in the poem's final stanza: Blonde from poet Heather Cahoon (Sališ/Kutenai):
It is November and the dying grasses of the prairie are the same shade as my hair. If I wanted to, I could lie down in them and disappear, I could run away from the evil wind. But I don't want to, I know the land, I would merge with it and no one would have a clue that I ever existed. And so I stand tall. *** Poems cited (in order of appearance): Layli Long Soldier - “Now make room in the mouth…” (from the poetry collection Whereas, 2017) Tacey M. Atsitty - Anasazi (from the poetry collection Rain Scald, 2018) Sherwin Bitsui - River (from the poetry collection Shapeshift, 2003) Sherwin Bitsui - “This mountain stands near us: mountaineering…” (from the poetry collection Dissolve, 2018) Sherwin Bitsui - ANWR (from the poetry collection Shapeshift, 2003) Craig Santos Perez - (I Tinituhon) (from the poetry collection from unincorporated territory [lukao], 2017) N. Scott Momaday - The Delight Song Of Tsoai-Talee (from the poetry collection Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems, 2011) Joy Harjo - I Give You Back (from the poetry collection She Had Some Horses, 1983) Joy Harjo - Remember (ibid.) Joy Harjo - She Had Some Horses (ibid.) Tommy Pico - excerpt from a poetry collection/poem Nature Poem, 2017 Jake Skeets - Daybreak (from the anthology Living Nations, Living Words, 2021) Laura Da' - A Mighty Pulverizing Machine (from the book Tributaries, 2015) Layli Long Soldier - 38 (from the poetry collection Whereas, 2017) Heid E. Erdrich - The Theft Outright (from the poetry collection National Monuments, 2008) Natalia Diaz - The First Water Is the Body (from the poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020) ng nanouk okpik - Her/My Arctic (from the poetry collection Corpse Whale, 2012) Ofelia Zepeda - It Is Going To Rain (from the album Earth Movements, 1997) Leslie Marmon Silko - Where Mountain Lion Lay Down With Deer (from the novel Ceremonies, 1981) Jennifer Elise Foerster - Leaving Tulsa (from the poetry collection Leaving Tulsa, 2012) Craig Santos Perez - gin the Micronesian kingfisher [and white] (from the poetry collection from unincorporated territory [rubber'], 2014) Heather Cahoon - Blonde (from the poetry collection Elk Thirst, 2005) ***
Who else not to miss:
Cedar Cigo (Suquamish) ML Smoker (Assiniboine/Sioux) Karenne Wood (Monacan) Trevino L. Brings Plenty (Minneconjou Lakota) Sy Hoahwah (Yappithuka Comanche/Southern Arapahoe) Elise Paschen (Osage) Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe) Henry Gordon, Jr. (White Earth Anishinaabe) Janet McAdams (Muscogee) nila northSun (Shoshone/Chippewa) Esther Belin (Navajo) *** An abridged version of the text was published in Host magazine (6/2022).