Native Roots
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union NATIVE ROOTS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS The power of Indian oratory has long astonished non-Indians, some of whose own attempts at eloquence have seemed appropriately pale by...
...In "The Significance of Veteran's Day" Simon Ortiz writes, "I happen to be a veteran/but you can't tell in how many ways/unless I tell you"—and he proceeds to do so in a characteristically Indian manner: Caught now, in the midst of wars against foreign disease, missionaries, canned food, Dick & Jane textbooks, IBM cards, Western philosophies, General Electric, I am talking about how we have been able to survive insignificance...
...A year ago the BCQ put out a chap-book called "Wounds Beneath the Flesh," featuring the works of 15 Native American poets...
...I was getting much more than I could possibly publish...
...The "Native American Renaissance" —to borrow the title of Kenneth Lincoln's recent work (University of California Press)—has been building for some time, sped along by a rising Jlass of educated Indians...
...Their art is the voice of shared life...
...Marie, the best known Indian performing artist of the period...
...In Black Elk's wake came a new breed of Indian writers untroubled by any need of white go-betweens...
...N. Scott Momaday, the Oklahoma Kiowa who studied at Stanford University with the poet Yvor Winters, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his lyric novel, House Made of Dawn...
...The book came out in 1932, to the acclaim of practically no one...
...We have walked away from history," complains Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a South Dakota Sioux poet, "/and dallied with a repetition of things I to the end of the bar and booze...
...the blue sky...
...If the new Indian poetry has been largely ignored by literary scholars and critics, it comes as no surprise to students of Indian literature, who have long marveled at the Indians' love affair with language...
...It was all pictures anyway...
...If the Indian voice today has "been able to survive insignificance," a good deal of the credit goes to Brother Benet and his brilliant magazine...
...The response astonished Brother Benet...
...all awaited a suitable medium like the Blue Cloud Quarterly...
...I am convinced there were times when we had more than ordinary means of communication...
...Astrov cited the explanation of Old Torlino, a Navajo medicine man, who said he always tried to tell the truth because the universe was watching: "the earth...
...Now Black Elk's heirs are groping for words, English words, that will mend the hoop and restore the center...
...the dawn...
...In "a circling remembrance," the Cheyenne poet Lance Henson faces east to "ask for something from the wind" something bright and clean to carry forward and leave behind On reservations, history can be a two-edged deprivation—as hard to make as it is to draw on...
...Both books bear unmistakable marks of the reigning Indian sensibility—a tendency to be ironic and full of sharp edges...
...In truth, what the poets want to get back may not be America so much as their own Indianness...
...Wendy Rose tell it, developed more or less by accident...
...It was something he had feared would vanish with the bison...
...Better still, much of it is sufficiently plain-spoken to be appreciated by readers on both sides of the ethnic fence...
...What Brother Benet had inadvertently discovered was a bonanza out there of Native American poets...
...Black Elk would have appreciated the persistence of tribally shared life...
...It is the thought and the word that stand face to face with the conscience of the native, not the deed...
...Most have had to settle for not-so-mainstream literary reviews, like the Blue Cloud Quarterly, published by the Blue Cloud Abbey ofMarvin, South Dakota...
...An essential bridge from spoken to written language was provided half a century ago by Black Elk, the remarkable Oglala Sioux prophet, and by his tireless interlocutor, the late John G. Neihardt...
...But 40years later, according to Nei-hardt, it "exploded into surprising popularity," chiefly "as a result of Dick Cavett's television interview with the author...
...Therefore I must tell the truth...
...He filled them, out of desperation, with the lyrics of Buffy St...
...Nowadays Indians are holding their words tight to their breasts in unexpected ways...
...He dreamed of leading his nation in that search, but the vision finally turned sour...
...I'm a fugitive from bad, futureless dreams in Southern California...
...For all its slangy slings and arrows, and for all its talk of cars, beer and postindustrial angst, Indian poetry bears a heavy load of tribal memories...
...All the many things I've heard about Chicago narrow into the frame of this hour: yellow light slanting across the smoke, hands groping toward what is hoped is a real coffee pot, lights whirling and spinning the planes to earth, alien promises served on toothpicks in the cocktails, Ojibwa songs from behind the jukebox...
...the evening twilight...
...Everybody started sending me their poetry," he says...
...A Preface correctly noted the poets' talent for "speaking vigorously and hopefully even out of seemingly unfavorable circumstances...
...Come to think of it, I still am...
...The journal, to hear Brother Benet EAST OF SAN DIEGO I tell the bus driver but he doesn't hear, "Keep to the hills and avoid America if you can...
...When the photographer one day upped and departed for Europe, however, never to return, the young editor was suddenly faced with a scary surfeit of blank pages...
...I am never out of sight," concluded Old Torlino...
...The Sioux of old looked upon the bison as a gift from the good spirit, and after the bison had disappeared Black Elk understood that "from the same good spirit we must find another strength...
...Always I felt it a sacred obligation to be true to the old man's meaning and manner of expression," Neihardt has written...
...In "Harlem, Montana: Just off the Reservation," Welch tells of "the three young bucks who shot the grocery up, I locked themselves in and cried for days, we're rich, / help us, oh God, we're rich...
...Simon J. Ortiz CHICAGO is a mystery to me for it does not extend beyond the foodless corridors of O'Hare Airport yet does bring out the foreigner in me feeling her way along the ground touching ice and earth, determining existence, and mapping a path from west to east and back again...
...I hold my word tight to my breast...
...As Margot Astrov pointed out 30 years ago, in her anthology of American Indian Prose and Poetry, "the word" to Indians is "the reality above all tangible reality...
...The nation's hoop is broken and scattered," he mourned in Yeats-like measure...
...States of the Union NATIVE ROOTS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS The power of Indian oratory has long astonished non-Indians, some of whose own attempts at eloquence have seemed appropriately pale by comparison...
...In language it blends casual Americanese with old-fashioned Indian formality...
...I didn't know anything about putting out a publication," Brother Benet recalls, "but that didn't seem to matter...
...The Abenaki poet Joseph Bruchac wryly sums up one such dilemma in a single line (that he says he overheard at a tribal ceremonial dance) addressed to the white majority: "Love America or give it back...
...long-dead heroes like Sitting Bull and Geronimo make dramatic cameo appearances...
...Much of the poetry deals with aspects of wealth (white) or poverty (red), neither of which wins the poet's approval...
...Only a few Indian poets have been lucky enough to find big-name publishers...
...the heavens...
...Like poets the world over, they are keepers of the dream...
...in content it confronts dilemmas of life style and loyalty that all Indians must face...
...Fora dozen years now, under the inventive editorship of Brother Benet Tvedten, the BCQ has devoted its pages exclusively to the work of Native American poets...
...Grandparents and their elderly surrogates are extolled and cherished with a frequency unfamiliar to the white reader...
...A major aim in such poems, one guesses, is to invoke a coherent Indian past to cope with an anomic Indian present...
...Now, in a serendipitous spin of the colonial wheel, many talented Indians have turned from the spoken to the written word...
...Their poetry is assertively bi-cultural...
...All had a message...
...They are producing a gutsy brand of poetry entirely worthy of the oral tradition from which it springs...
...Patriotic holidays—white contrivances, of course—are seldom taken for granted by Indians lost in the celebration...
...One of his first duties when he arrived at the abbey in 1970 was to edit a fund-raising quarterly that consisted for the most part of photographs displaying the mission's good works...
...There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead...
...Whatever the means, Neihardt was able to translate Black Elk's visionary chronicle, uttered in Lakota, into the rolling rhythms of Black Elk Speaks...
...In 1976Harper&Row brought out first volumes of poetry by James Welch, a Blackfoot/Gros Ventre from Montana, and Simon J. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo from New Mexico...
Vol. 67 • September 1984 • No. 17
