Coyote's Sons, Spider's Daughters
Western American Indian Poetry 1968–1983
NOT ALL AMERICAN INDIAN
poetry necessarily reflects in
form or content the Indian culture of its maker. Poets, free to celebrate
their heritage proudly these days, are also exercising their
freedom to choose whether to explore in their art that
part of their human experience which is Indian. But even if they
no longer feel bound to write of cradleboards and Alcatraz, or
to make heavy use of invocation and repetition, certain techniques
and themes have special resonance for contemporary western American
Indian poets.
Most American Indians, even though they are acculturated, have
grown up close to living oral tradition, in places where secular
stories and local gossip–and, in many instances, formal
recitals of origin stories, trickster tales, war narratives,
and the like–still remain an important part of family and
community life. Contemporary western American Indian poetry continues
that narrative tradition. Simon Ortiz, for instance, a full-blood
whose family is deeply involved in the religious life of Acoma
Pueblo, incorporates oral formulae and a strong sense of tale-teller
and audience into some of his poetry, calling loving attention
to the pleasures and importance of repetition and of "telling
it right." He and others like Leslie Silko (Laguna), nila northSun
(Shoshone-Chippewa), Ted Palmanteer (Colville), Carroll Arnett
(Cherokee), and Marnie Walsh (Sioux) also make poetry out of
community anecdote and gossip, often writing in a colloquial
"Reservation English" rich in idiomatic vocabulary and speech
rhythms. As in this short poem by Walsh, they display an unselfconscious
ease with and respect for the speaking voice that too seldom
graces dialect poetry:
we all went to town one day
ain't seen you since
1
went to the store
bought you new shoes
red high heels
Humor of a wryly mocking flavor
is another characteristic of traditional literature that endures
in contemporary American Indian poetry. Much of the laughter
wells up inevitably from the ironies of Anglo-Indian relations,
even, or perhaps especially, when encounters are marked by fearsomely
earnest good intentions, as in the reply of Carroll Arnett to
the "fair lady anthro" who asks whether the patch in the
blanket has ritual significance:
Yes mam
2
it surely does it
symbolizes that once
upon a time there
was a hole
in the blanket
Like the ritual clowns at many
western tribal ceremonies, poets make fun not only of other people's
sacred objects and mistaken ideals, but of their own as well.
3
Like the clowns, these poets make
humor the charm against rigidity and pretentiousness. Take, for
example, James Welch's (Blackfeet-Gros Ventre) playfully self-mocking
vision of himself as a lustful savior of his people–or of
one of them, anyway–in "Arizona Highways":
Eulynda. There's a name
4
I could live with. I could
thrash away the nuns, tell them
I adopt this girl, dark,
seventeen, silver on her fingers,
in the name of the father, son,
and me, the holy ghost.
Why not? Mormons do less
with less . . .
now I see my role–religious.
Much American Indian humor derives
from a consciousness of the complex interrelatedness of things,
of the delightfully multiple significance of events. Consider,
for example, Geary Hobson's wonderful one-liner:
–roam on, brothers . . .
5
(or)
The poem is a genuine wish for
buffalo liberation. It is also a sidelong glance at the parallel
histories and interrelatedness of buffalo herds and tribal peoples,
and at officialdom's comic consternation when confronted by freeroaming
creatures, however mild-tempered and outnumbered those creatures may be; Hobson's buffalo
are related in more ways than one to the ghost-dancing Sioux
of Wounded Knee.
Surrealism is another contemporary mode that accords with older
American Indian ways of seeing and saying. Most western tribes
value dream and vision as sources of knowledge and power; sacred
and secular oral literature and written autobiography have all
incorporated dream and vision. More than any other single movement
in modern mainstream literature, surrealism has made contemporary
poetry congenial to young American Indian poets. For example,
Richard Hugo probably attracted such brilliant American Indian
students as James Welch and Roberta Hill not only because of
his regional bias and notoriously seductive line rhythms, but
also because of his inclination to write in dream-vision form.
In any case, much recent American Indian poetry is marked by
surrealism, by images that shift and blend, and by ordinary objects
and beings suddenly invested with extraordinary significance
and power.
These techniques, of course, are common to much contemporary
Anglo poetry as well. But to an even greater degree than most
poets, American Indian writers often seem to take for granted
that such power is not merely symbolic. Dream and vision are
not surreal, not beneath, above, beyond, or at some remove from
reality. They are not interesting mental distortions of reality,
nor are dream images Freudian or Jungian shorthand for circumstances
and states of mind. They are reality, not something that stands
for it.
Dream and vision, of course, are sources of subject matter as
well as technique for American Indian poets. In a cycle of poems
scattered throughout Duane Niatum's Digging Out the Roots,
the speaker seeks to heal himself of the spiritual wounds
dealt him in childhood by his father's desertion. Ultimately,
he learns release and acceptance through a dream, a dream he
has been preparing himself to experience throughout a number
of earlier poems in the cycle, much like a Klallam elder seeking
a vision. When the dream does come to him, he apparently accepts
its validity:
6
. . . I'll try
Salmon Berry Woman's feathered charm,
gift of a recent dream. "Your father," she said,
"Leave him in owl's cave without light, shadow."
But in contemporary poetry, as
in many traditional accounts of visionquests, the vision may
be failed. The seer may misinterpret, or doubt, or overlook entirely
what he is meant to see. Many of the poets seem to share the
prayer of Black Elk's Lamenter: "Oh Wakan-tanka, help us
all to be always attentive!" In "Getting Things Straight,"
James Welch's speaker watches a hawk stoop and miss its kill. The
speaker then wonders if the hawk sees any pattern to its existence,
or if it only feels confronted by a monotonous rolling succession
of days filled with hunger and anger. He thinks of a titanic
ancestor, "the last giant," who, after experiencing some
unnamed final vision atop Heart Butte, "Came back to town
and drank himself to death." Finally, the speaker wonders whether
the luckless hawk may be his own vision7
That there are meaningful visions
is certain, but Welch is unsure about what knowledge the hawk
embodies, and even about whether that knowledge, whatever it
may be, is particularly addressed to him.
Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee) is especially absorbed in the
questions that can haunt acculturated American Indian poets like
himself, questions about the validity of vision. In his essay
"The Man Made of Words," he describes reading over his own
manuscript of The Way to Rainy Mountain, and feeling unexpectedly
overwhelmed by the doubt common at times to all creators: his
words seem merely gabble, neither fitting nor meaningful. Suddenly
Kosahn, an old woman Momaday once knew who figures importantly
in the Rainy Mountain narrative, literally comes before him,
"stepping out of the language."When he protests to this
presence that she is "not actually here,"she gently rebukes
him, and goes on talking quietly for a while about the absolute
reality of the events narrated in the Kiowa emergence stories–events
she, a nineteenth-century woman, has seen in her
mind's eye, in her blood's memory. Then, says Momaday,
she turned slowly around, nodding once, and receded into the language I had made. And then I imagined I was alone in the room.
Other traditional themes besides visionary experience continue
to occupy the new generation of western American Indian poets.
Poems about nature, for example, are common, as indeed they are
in almost any body of poetry. The poems usually embody traditional
Native American philosophy, viewing the natural world as a vibrantly
conscious and spiritually significant whole in which humanity
participates. But in contrast to the Native American nature poetry
being written twenty years ago, contemporary poems are no longer
likely to be limp rehashes of the powerful phrases of the great
chants like Nightway, asserting simply and often that
the speaker walks in beauty, and depending for their force upon
the mere limitation of tradition. Many of the contemporary poems,
while preserving the old metaphysical attitudes, are fresh,
sophisticated, and highly unsentimental. Here is Linda Hogan
(Chickasaw) on the proper way to deal with mosquitoes:
When one hums silently
8
Momaday and a number of other contemporary
poets are far enough removed from primary ceremonial experience
to question, at times, the validity of a given vision. But, as
in the passage above, the questionings are usually depicted as
weaknesses, as failures of understanding or courage; doubts are
likely to end in affirmations.
9
around my ears
bends its knees upon my arm
I will be still as a stone
at the edge of water watching
my blood carried into air.
The destruction of nature is of
course a frequent concern in the poems, but lately there are
few didactic outcries against Anglo earth-rapers. Although their
rage and regret are very real, many poets are finding their strength
in subtlety. In "Deer Hunting," Geary Hobson quietly juxtaposes
accounts of Anglo and Cherokee hunters dressing their kills;
with understated poignancy, the Last Wolf of Mary Tall Mountain
(Koyukon) trots panicked through an apocalyptic urban landscape
to seek out the speaker:
I heard him snuffle at the door and
he laid his long gray muzzle
10
I watched
he trotted across the floor
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow
his small dotted eyebrows quivered
yes, I said
I know what they have done
Growing up with doubled vision–being at once American and American Indian–is another rich theme for these poets, all of whom, whether they like it or not, have been influenced by two cultures, and many of whom are breeds by blood as well. Recent poetry tends less toward flat condemnations and rhetorical rejections of the larger culture, and more toward attempts to come to human terms with this doubled experience. Still, all the poets affirm more strongly the tribal part of their heritage and its traditional emphases upon sharing, reverence for life, close family and tribal ties, and the ceremonial significance of all human actions, from hunting, cultivating, and eating, to loving, birthing, dreaming, and creating.
Contemporary poets often voice
wistfulness and longing for a fully native past, for older ways
they themselves can seldom fully experience. In contrast to contemporary
Anglo poems about family, which often center upon personal psychological
conflict between relatives, a number of western American Indian
poems deal movingly with cultural alienation from beloved older
people. In "A Hunting Story" by Leslie Silko (Laguna), the
quarry the speaker so passionately seeks is her own grandfather,
separated from her now not only by his death but by the incompleteness
of the communication between them even during his life. Though
the poem ends with a haunting sense of his presence evoked through
the sensuous powers of memory and love, powers that transcend
all separations, her earlier image of trying to resuscitate the
dying old man suggests the futility not only of trying to revive
him, but also of breaking through to him:
11
It might have been possible then
except you clenched your teeth
I could not push through with
my breath or fingers . . .
Again, nila northSun (Shoshoni-Chippewa),
in her cycle of poems about "gramma," tells of the old woman's
growing bewilderment over her grandchildren, even though she
herself has urged her own daughters to marry white men from the
cities:
gramma thinks about her grandchildren
12
they're losing the ways
don't know how to talk indian
don't understand me when I ask for tobacco sad sad
they're losing the ways
how could we grandchildren learn
there are no rabbits to skin
in the city we have no gramma there to
teach us the ways
you were still on the reservation
asking somebody anybody
please
get me tobacco
More than almost any other American Indian poet, northSun unflinchingly acknowledges her own acculturation, even celebrates it a little, while valuing the ways gramma has been unable to pass on. The title of the poem quoted above "the way and the way things are," neatly sums up the conflict and northSun's perception of the impossibility of fully reclaiming a lost heritage.
But northSun and many of her contemporaries
also have visions of at least tenuous compromises, possible returns,
means of affirming one's native self and center that are neither
phoney nor hopelessly romantic–of ways to be validly Indian
within the context of "the way things are." Joy Harjo (Creek)
writes of an apparently quixotic 3:00 a.m. expedition to an airport,
seeking a flight to Hopi Third Mesa. The airline personnel may
think her deranged, but she discovers within herself the seriousness
of her half-joking sortee:
. . . I remembered
3 am is not too late
13
that time Simon
took a yellow cab
out to acoma from albuquerque
a twentyfive dollar ride
to the center of himself
to find the way back
In a lighter and more immediately
practical vein, in the "Prayers for a New Home" section
of his recent collection On Mountain's Breath, Harold
Littlebird (Laguna) recounts the joys and the ironies of being
an educated Pueblo Indian finally in midlife learning with some
difficulty how to lay adobe and mix whitewash, while he and his
patient friends listen to
14
old tapes, hour after hour,
Hank Williams and war dance songs from Rocky Boy
and Bismark
and feast on sweet corn and Coors.
I once heard a confident Anglo
critic tell Luci Tapahonso (Navajo) that a poem of hers mentioning
Navajo children watching the Flintstones on T.V. couldn't qualify
as "a really Indian poem." In her "Hills Brothers Coffee,"
she quietly makes clear how parts of Anglo culture like storebought
brand-name brew can be incorporated into the warm heart of Navajo
family life:
My uncle is a small man
He doesn't know English but
One morning he sat in the kitchen
I pour him more coffee and
I sit down again and he tells me
I pour us both a cup and
So I usually buy hills brothers coffee
These poems and others offer the
possibility of accepting some of what the Anglo world offers,
and using it as a means to help preserve spiritual integrity,
the possibility of keeping at one's center native values, native
places, even though native languages may be lost, and some ways
are not recapturable.
Finally, a related theme in many recent poems by both men and
women is that of a heritage still exuberantly
alive. Old stories and the presences who move through them are
not dead anthropological data; not only do the stories remain
meaningful for the values they speak of, they are still quite
literally happening, even though names and outer circumstances
may be changed in a world of superhighways and fast food chains.
Simon Ortiz delights in discovering Coyote multitudinously reincarnated,
rattling off his slick stories, making deals in barrooms and
Greyhound bus stations, fooling and being fooled, and somehow,
like the spirit of the peoples he embodies, still beautifully
surviving.
Ortiz certainly means to affirm his whole people's survival through
Coyote, but sometimes it seems most particularly a male survival
figured forth in that shaggy, fast-talking entity. In the last
few years, a growing number of feminist American Indian poets
are perceiving and invoking the old strengths of women gods and
heroic women still at work. Pocahontas, Ramona, Little White
Dove–those uncomplaining martyr-maidens so beloved of, and
often invented by, Anglo culture are pale heroines indeed compared
to the motherspirit Joy Harjo hears speaking in the voice of
a certain mountain, rumbling prophetically in an old language
about a new order for women:
It is the ground murmurring, and Mt. Ste. Helen's erupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born to begin another
time. 16
Paula Allen's Sacagawea in "The
One Who Skins Cats" is a far cry from the woman in high school
history texts helpfully pointing Lewis and Clark on their way
through the river-veins of her own mother-continent. Allen's
Sacagawea knows people say that, because of her, "The Indian
lost our place," but her response is a shrug: "We was losing
it anyways." She is the survivor who has weighed and takes responsibility
for the choices she has made:
Allen's Sacagawea remains her own woman, well
at ease–a tough, witty, wise, uncompromising realist.
In terms of their own craft, for
western American Indian poets of both sexes, the stories of Grandmother
Spider and equivalent beings are perhaps the most vital. "Grandmother,"
another poem of Allen's, suggests the enduring power of those
stories. In the poem, Grandmother Spider, having miraculously
spun all creation out of her own body and thought, tactfully
withdraws, but her actions and her spirit reverberate in the
poet herself, and in all of Grandmother's children, male and
female, who choose to be makers and healers:
in Navajo, we call him little uncle
my mother's brother.
his name in the white way is Tom Jim.
He lives about a mile or so
down the road from our house.
drinking coffee
I just came over, he said,
the store is where I'm going to.
He tells me about how my mother seems to be gone
everytime he comes over.
Maybe she sees me coming
then runs and jumps in her car
and speeds away!
He says smiling.
We both laugh just to think of my mother
jumping in her car and speeding.
he spoons in sugar and cream until
it looks almost like a chocolate shake
then he sees the coffee can.
Oh, that's that coffee with
the man in a dress, like a church man.
Ah-h, that's the one that does it for me.
Very good coffee.
some coffee has no kick but
this one is the one.
It does it good for me.
while we wait for my mother,
his eyes crinkle with the smile
and he says
yes, ah yes, this is the very one.
(putting in more cream and sugar. )
once or sometimes twice a day
I drink a hot coffee and
it sure does it for me.
17
I didn't lead 'em, you know. I just
went along for the ride, and along the way
I learned things a Chief should know,
And because I did my own Snake people survived.
And what I learned I used. I used every bit
of the whiteman's pride to make sure
my Shoshone people would survive
in the great survival sweepstakes of the day.
Maybe there was a better way
to skin a cat,
but I used the blade that was put in my hand–
After her
18
the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,
memories of light and ladders . . .
After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug
and mend the tear with string.
Clearly, Grandmother numbers among her children the writers I have named in this essay.
PATRICIA CLARK SMITH, University of New Mexico
Notes 1. Marnie Walsh, "Bessie Dreaming Bear: Rosebud, So. Dak. 1960," in The Remembered Earth, ed. Geary Hobson (Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979), p. 369.
2. Carroll Arnett, "Powwow," The Remembered Earth, p. 127. 3. For a discussion of the role of ceremonial clowns among southwestern tribes, see Barbara Tedlock's fine essay "The Clown's Way," in Teachings from the American Earth, ed. Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock (New York: Liveright, 1975), pp. 105–118.
4. James Welch, "Arizona Highways," in his Riding the Earthboy 40 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 18.
5. Geary Hobson, "Buffalo Poem # 1," The Remembered Earth, p. 99.
6. Duane Niatum, "In New York City," in his Digging Out the Roots (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 34.
7. James Welch, "Getting Things Straight," Riding the Earthboy 40, p. 53.
8. N. Scott Momaday, "The Man Made of Words," in Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1975), p. 99.
9. Linda Hogan, "Mosquitoes," The Remembered Earth, p. 55.
10. Geary Hobson, "Deer Hunting," The Remembered Earth, pp. 96–97; Mary Tall Mountain, "The Last Wolf," The Remembered Earth, pp. 414–415.
11. Leslie Silko, "A Hunting Story," in Southwest Women's Poetry Exchange, ed. Carol Merrill, No. 2 (April 1976), n.p.
12. nila northSun, "the way and the way things are," Diet Pepsi and Nacho Cheese (Fallon, Nevada: Duck Down Press, 1977), p. 13.
13. Joy Harjo, "3AM," in her What Moon Drove Me to This (New York: I. Reed Books, 1979), p. 43.
14. Harold Littlebird, "Building a Dream," in his On Mountains' Breath (Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982), unpaginated.
15. Luci Tapahonso, "Hills Brothers Coffee," in her Seasonal Woman (Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982), pp. 29–30.
16. Joy Harjo, "For Alva Benson, and for Those Who Have Learned to Speak," in her She Had Some Horses (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983), p. 18.
17. Paula Gunn Allen, "The One Who Skins Cats," in Sinister Wisdom, ed. Beth Brant, no. 22–23 (1983), pp. 12–17.
18. Paula Gunn Allen, "Grandmother," in her Coyote's Daylight Trip (Albuquerque: La Confluencia, 1978), p. 50.
Selected Bibliography Much contemporary Native American writing, especially poetry, appears in publications from small presses. I have tried to be realistic in this bibliography and limit it to publications readily available. The Hobson book listed under "Anthologies" is an excellent and inclusive collection of contemporary poetry.
Anthologies
Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Contains an excellent sampling of contemporary American Indian women's poetry, narrative, essays, and fiction.
Hobson, Geary, ed. The Remembered Earth. Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979. The largest collection to date of contemporary Native American writing. Arranged according to regions of the United States. Weighted toward poetry, but contains some short fiction, essays, and drama as well, and an excellent introduction by Hobson.
Niatum, Duane, ed. Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Another good anthology; more poems by fewer writers than in the two anthologies listed above.
Books by Individual Authors
Allen, Paula Gunn (Laguna). Shadow Country. Los Angeles: Native American Series, U.C.L.A., 1982.
Harjo, Joy (Creek). What Moon Drove Me to This. New York: I. Reed Books, 1979.
. She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983.
Hogan, Linda (Chickasaw). Calling Myself Home. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1979.
Littlebird, Harold, On Mountains' Breath. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982.
Momaday, N. Scott (Kiowa). The Gourd Dancer. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Niatum, Duane (Klallam). Ascending Red Cedar Moon. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, 1973.
northSun, nila (Shoshoni-Chippewa). Diet Pepsi and Nacho Cheese. Fallon, Nevada: Duck Down Press, 1977.
Ortiz, Simon (Acoma). Going for the Rain. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Rose, Wendy (Hopi). Hopi Roadrunner Dancing. Greenfield Center, New York: The Greenfield Review Press, 1973.
Silko, Leslie (Laguna). Laguna Woman. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1974.
Tapahonso, Luci. Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982.
Walsh, Marnie (Sioux). A Taste of the Knife. Boise: Ahsahta Press, 1976.
Welch, James (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre). Riding the Earthboy 40. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
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