There Will Be Blood Run: Sophie Mayer explains why everyone should read Salt’s Earthworks Series
The last indigenous poet to wow British audiences was Canadian Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake, in 1907, on her third visit to what was then the Mother Country. In 1894, on her first visit, her collection The White Wampum was snapped up for publication by Bodley Head. Hailing from the Six Nations Indian Reserve outside Brantford, Ontario, Johnson charmed England with her tales of native life presented elegantly in the traditional metric and stanzaic forms of English verse. This European persona – her mother was English, and had inculcated a love of the English classics in her daughter – may have buoyed her success in Canada, but it was the content and performance of indigeneity that drew London audiences, her reception coloured by the poem that probably remains the dominant account of Native America in the British imagination, Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
A hundred years later, English readers have taken very few indigenous writers to heart as they did Johnson. There have been hoaxers like Grey Owl, and the mimicry of films such as Dances With Wolves, but – with the outstanding exception of novelist and poet Louise Erdrich (and singer Buffy Sainte Marie) – even writers who have experienced both critical and popular success in the US and Canada, including big names such as N. Scott Momaday, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, have struggled to make it into print in the UK. It’s perhaps a reflection of the prevailing transatlantic currents, which bring over Michael Ondaatje but not the equally-lauded poet and novelist Dionne Brand from Canada, or John Ashbery but not Kay Ryan (currently Poet Laureate) from the US. It flows both ways: many conversations that I had in Canada about contemporary British poetry began and ended, with depressing regularity, with the same two words: Simon Armitage.
Ignorance of the indigenous writers of Turtle Island suggests more than the vexed international circulation of poetry. Many of these writers and their books fall swiftly out of print in the US and Canada as well, most dramatically, in the case of Menominee poet Chrystos. There’s a persistent lack of interest that has deep roots in what could be called Hiawatha Syndrome, the insidious myth that the “red man” is no more, whether literally obliterated or so acculturated by Euro-American capitalism as to be unrecognisable. It’s easier to feel guilty for what’s gone (and to rush in, with New Age spirituality and nature poetry, to take its place) than to engage with the complex and challenging indigenous voices that pour scorn on the idea that they’ve fallen silent or can be substituted.
That eloquent rage is everywhere in Salt’s Earthworks series, which represents the first attempt by a British publisher to introduce British readers coherently and consistently to contemporary indigenous writing from the Americas. Why should you read the Earthworks series? There’s more to it than special pleading or special interest groups. Comparable in scope and focus to the legendary Heinemann African Writers series, Earthworks is no mere marginal concern: Qwo-Li Driskill’s Walking With Ghosts ranks regularly in Salt’s top ten sales list, and Adelle Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run garnered many votes in Salt’s recent JustOneBook campaign. Like US President Barack Obama, Hedge Coke, Driskill, Deborah A. Miranda and many of the Earthworks poets refuse easy definition or the pigeonhole of identity politics: in their work, they mould a way of being multiple in a hybrid world, in voices plangent and breathtaking, sometimes witty, often sensual, always grounded, and speaking insistently inventive and intricately braided language(s).
Many Earthworks take up the challenge of “reinventing the enemy’s language,” as Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird put it in the title of their excellent anthology of Native women’s writing, few more so than arch and anarchic trickster genius Gerald Vizenor. These Indians are as passionate and pungent in their creative (mis)uses of English (and, as in Johnson’s work, English literary forms), Queen’s and Rez [i] admixed macaronically with words from indigenous languages, as the subcontinental Indian writers whose work is a fixture of Booker shortlists and postcolonial literature courses. In fact, indigenous writers feature only as a glaring absence in anthologies of, and awards for, postcolonial literature – perhaps because they are, as Vizenor frequently asserts, still colonised.
“Weird” Englishes and postcolonial reinventions offer two frameworks which have become part of the mainstream of British literary culture, within which Earthworks’ selections shine. There’s also the specific relation of English history to the history of the American continent: it’s easy for contemporary Brits to respond to Vine Deloria Jr.’s provocatively-titled essay collection, Custer Died For Your Sins, “well, maybe for the Americans’ but not for ours.” It’s a weird form of disavowal that ignores the English incursions into Turtle Island from the Roanoke colony to the Boston Tea Party and beyond. Some historians have even suggested that one reason (among many) that King George III was removed from the throne was his willingness to make treaties with Cherokee and Cree leaders as representatives of sovereign nations: Britain had a hand in forming the colonial politics of bad faith in treating with indigenous peoples. With American independence, and later the end of Canada’s status as a Dominion, English metropolitan culture erased a long history of contact and exchange that informed more than Hiawatha and Westerns. In some sense, England’s (mis)adventures in the Americas shaped Romantic notions of the unpeopled sublime of the Lyrical Ballads (read Wordsworth’s “Lament of the Forsaken Indian Woman”) as much as French colonialism informed Rousseau.
So we’re tied together, English readers and indigenous poets. And that’s a profoundly good thing. Few writers bring more considered thought and inventive form to the urgent questions we face globally, not least the relation between humanity and the natural world. Hedge Coke’s Blood Run, for instance, makes a perfect pair with Alice Oswald’s Dart: as ferocious of focus, as versed in the particular, and as diverse of approach, Hedge Coke gives a deeply-felt account of the threatened landscape that runs in her blood. Moving from line to line through multiple states of relation – ritual, historical, imaginative, individual, familial, alienated, inspired – Hedge Coke asserts that “Our wealth abounds / within what we preserve” (“Clan Sister”). It’s a poetics as well as an ecology, extended in the same poem’s elegant claim that “She remakes herself / in each made thing”: making and remaking across cultures and languages, between nature and human needful ingenuity, with an eye to the past’s gift to the future, is the work of poetry.
Note the “made thing”: indigenous writers speak of more than the natural world, and its disappearance, with which they have been perniciously identified. Driskill, at once angry and tender, essays a new love poetry from hir Two-Spirit embodiment [ii] that challenges received notions of beauty and blazon, muse and observer, in lyric conventions. Likewise, LeAnne Howe and Cathy Tagnak Rexford (whose work appears in the Hedge Coke-edited anthology Effigies) bring a subjective eye to the cinematic technologies that once objectified indigenous people as anthropological curios, stripping them down from the inside to remake metaphors of seeing and being seen. Rexford’s “Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film” takes up the presence and durability of the “made thing,” suggesting the influence of scrimshaw and the Beaufort Sea’s “white crested etchings” on early cinema. This is a poetry, like scrimshaw, that makes art with what’s there, wise to how it will “resurface in the lyric of your documentary.”
The quality of documentary, one of the strongest threads in American experimental poetry from William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson onwards (for both of whom the Native American appears as a trope of national consciousness superceded/absorbed by the poet, as discussed by Michael Castro), is rewritten by Diane Glancy across her long career, creating alternate histories as striking as those of E.L. Doctorow or Rosemarie Waldrop; her new and selected for Salt, Rooms, excerpts her groundbreaking poem cycle Lone Dog’s Winter Count. Her work lays its net wide, catching travellers’ tales and unfolding histories in a dazzling weave of Spanish, Rez English, Creole, neologisms and daring experiments with mise-en-page and language. Debates about experimental vs. traditional (both English and indigenous) verse forms are as alive across the indigenous writing community as any other; regardless of their approach, the Earthworks writers slough off externally-imposed notions of authenticity and purity on the one hand, and servitude or mimicry on the other, emerging as inimitable and individual.
It’s not just a case of tradition and the individual talent, though. There is a consciousness of community, of identity braided not only into contemporary nation-states and cities but generation-spanning nations with both a history and – “within what we preserve” – a future. This emerges vividly in the work of Deborah A. Miranda and Cheryl Savageau as they approach, celebrate, dissect and remake metaphors of mother/land, as Savageau titles her collection. Miranda’s The Zen of La Llorona takes as its titular figure the weeping mother of Spanish legend (familiar, perhaps from PJ Harvey’s “Down by the Water”), offering a new understanding of what has been lost, how we grieve, and how we rebuild from “splintered memories” (“Swarm”). The poems have the intense intimacy of Sharon Olds’ early work, but enunciated through images and metaphors that connect the mother-daughter and (and, daringly, as) erotic relationships to the layers of Chumash and Esselen cultures that Miranda observes on her walks through California and keeps alive in her poetry.
Cherokee literary theorist Jace Weaver coined the term “communitism” to describe the community-centred practice of indigenous writers and scholars, where a commitment to continuity and an ecology of care (conservation without conservatism) connect writers within and across nations without suppressing their innovation or multiple, negotiated identities. Poetry, for these writers, is an act of making, a “made thing” as physical as grinding corn or (as many of Erdrich’s characters do) hauling trash. Norma C. Wilson notes that, in the collections of anthropologists and ethno-musicologists, there are thousands more songs recorded to do with planting than with making war. And yet the war-chant (which prefigures the lament) remains the dominant image of indigenous poetry, from Hiawatha to the haka. As British politicos reconnect with Amitai Etzioni’s communitarian philosophy, the communitist poetry of the Earthworks series (and the series, and its anthologies, as communitism) reminds its readers that another world is possible.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited