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The Heart As a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry

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By Robin Riley Fast

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 1999 Robin Riley Fast
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472110772

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CHAPTER 1. Contested Spaces, Contending Voices

Girl, I say,

it is dangerous to be a woman of two countries

--Linda Hogan, Seeing through the Sun

This morning,

I have to buy a permit to get back home.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

SEE MUSEUM FOR MORE INFORMATION

--Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone

We have learned

to barricade

the village

and have our weapons

closer at hand

--Wendy Rose, Going to War with All My Relations

Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan's lines, from "The Truth Is," allude most directly to dangers known by a person of mixed blood, for whom questions of identity, affiliation, and responsibility can be starkly aggravated in a world shaped by theft and denial. Equally painful is the experience of dispossession evoked by Simon Ortiz's "A Designated National Park." Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) voices what might be the ultimate dread of the colonized. The park and museum, where the remains of an ancient people and their culture are preserved, are exposed as contested sites. They symbolize the lines drawn by the dominant society around contemporary Indians, too, who are cut off from home literally, as they are excluded from ancestral lands, and spiritually, as they bear the cultural costs of such exclusion.

Hopi/Miwok Wendy Rose's "December" recognizes both danger and the necessity, in murderous circumstances, of protective barriers. This poem's epigraph alludes to the Wounded Knee Massacre; we can read it as a response to that particular event in the history of the American Indian holocaust and a defiant appropriation, perhaps, of the practice of drawing boundaries--a practice integral to the displacements of Native peoples and the enclosure of their lands. Because Rose is imagining the voice of a survivor, we can read these lines as speaking, too, for contemporary survivors--responding to the conditions of extremity in which many Native Americans today find themselves.

The two worlds often clashed in me . . . The rez is another nation, another worldview that functions in a space relevant only to the elements strung together with language that also relies on the elements. The space is so specific that translation is impossible . . .

We are city cousins. The ones who didn't know how to ride. Or jump arroyos. Sometimes it didn't matter if you were full-blooded because they knew you weren't from the rez.

--Esther G. Belin, "In the Cycle of the Whirl"

I grew up in a household where Indian was spoken all around me but never to me. I would sit on the periphery, unable to comprehend, though I did manage to learn a few words. This experience precipitated my love of language.

--Gloria Bird, "Breaking the Silence"

Esther G. Belin's memories of a childhood divided between the city and her Navajo parents' reservation home demonstrate how a geographic border can also mark a cultural one and how such divisions, which may be simultaneously imposed by external pressures and internalized, can be painful regardless of one's blood quantum. As Gloria Bird (Spokane) recalls a particular experience of impossible translation, she, too, testifies to the divisions produced within Indian families and communities by colonization. Yet Bird also tells us that the experience of being linguistically marginalized became the source of her love for language, a love that in turn has empowered her as a witness and an activist for resistant survival.

Sometimes, we whispered, it was the missionaries who needed to be saved. We lived in a world of comedies, thunderstorms, chances like a flight of passenger pigeons over the lake, and surprises, dreams about whales in a fish barrel . . . The biblical stories were fun to tell, the old men turned them over in the oral tradition . . . these missionaries were never loons, never bears, their wives and mothers were never killdeers on the shoreline. We were animals and birds, even when we were converted, and that was the difference between culture and civilization.

--Gerald Vizenor, The People Named the Chippewa

What Oklahoma becomes, in a sense, is a dream, an alive and real dream that takes place inside and outside of the writer . . . Our words begin inside of the dream . . . Living voices surround us and speak from the diverse and many histories that we have been . . . The stories and poems are in motion within the red earth--which has the boundaries that dreams have.

--Joy Harjo, "Oklahoma"

In Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor's "Shadows at LaPointe" tribal people elude the divisions and distinctions imposed by outsiders, by creatively adapting, transgressing, or blurring those imposed categories, by continuing ancient and empowering habits of mind, vision, and story. In "Oklahoma: The Prairie of Words" Joy Harjo (Creek) shows how what was once primarily known as a place of exile for displaced peoples of many tribes, a place of confinement within imposed boundaries, is transformed. As Oklahoma becomes one with dream and language, it becomes a source of power, conceptual boundaries become fluid, and visionary creativity, as in Vizenor's story, offers the possibility of continuity.

These passages by Vizenor and Harjo offer ways out of the imprisoning definitions and the despair of "two worlds"--out of the assumptions and story endings imposed on Indian people by the concept, and the history, of "two worlds," one of them superior in physical power and, by self-proclamation, in civilization. Making their worlds multiple and changeable through story, dream, and vision, they suggest ways of resisting dualistic constructs (and politics) and thus the dominance of one "world" over the other. They claim spirited imagination as a way of healing, a way of changing the terms by which their people live--a way of reclaiming, adapting, transforming a still-vital inheritance.

It is crucial to recognize that Vizenor and Harjo are not denying the material, political realities of the past or the present. Both of these pieces bear witness to those realities, as do the previously quoted passages. Rather, they are suggesting how, through language, dream, and vision, Indian people can know that incarceration in museums, alienation from home and culture, utter defeat, are not the only possible outcomes of their stories. This is one implication of Gloria Bird's paradox, the empowering love for language growing out of exclusion from language. It is a healing and resistant recognition that moves much contemporary Native American writing (including the other works quoted above) and that, even in its remarkably varied manifestations, unites many contemporary Indian poets as they write for survival and continuance.

The passages I have quoted in the preceding pages suggest some of the ways in which Native American writers--mixed-and full-blooded; men and women; urban and reservation identified--have responded to circumstances they all recognize. These circumstances, consequences of colonialism and its aftermaths, may all be said to have originated in contests for land, and thus often involve relationships to geographic places, but they are equally likely to affect any aspect of experience--historical, cultural, spiritual, linguistic, emotional. How contemporary American Indian poets deal with such circumstances and their effects was the originating question for this book.

"THE FIRST AND LAST GHOST DANCE OF LESTER FALLSAPART"

It rained buffalo

in a wheat field

just off the reservation.

Confused and homeless

but otherwise free

of injury, the buffalo were rounded up and shipped

to Spokane's Walk in the Wild Zoo.

From behind a symbolic chain link fence the buffalo stared

intelligently

at white visitors

who soon became very nervous.

Everything beautiful

begins somewhere.

(Sherman Alexie 18)

American history, past and present, conspires to make the whole continent a contested space for Native Americans and to make virtually inevitable, for contemporary Indians, an acute awareness of boundaries and divisions--between Native and non-Native, the reservation or ancestral lands and the city, and also, for example, within tribal communities, between traditional and modern ways, full-blood and mixed blood, Native languages and others, Native spirituality and Christianity. We have seen Ortiz's "National Park," Hogan's "two countries," Belin's "two worlds," Bird's "periphery." Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Sherman Alexie's poem gives us the wheat field, the reservation, and the zoo as contested spaces. The chain-link fence is a startlingly vivid image of the boundaries dividing Natives and whites; symbolically, the buffalo and the fence together suggest European-Americans' history of taking over or redefining not only land but political, cultural, emotional, and spiritual "spaces," while the buffaloes' intelligent gaze suggests the potential of resistant consciousness to break through those fences. As all of the passages quoted here imply, contested spaces may be internal as well as external, and their implications can be as varied as the writers themselves are diverse. A rich spectrum of possibilities is evident in contemporary Native American poetry, which often reflects both an awareness of division and conflict and a commitment to traditional beliefs regarding the wholeness of the universe and the relatedness of all beings. Both Harjo and Vizenor, in the passages I've just quoted, evince that awareness and variations on that commitment. So, in yet another way, does Alexie's poem. Such a double perception implies, in many instances, the mutability of boundaries, literal and other, and the fluidity of experience in the fields of tension and possibility that surround them.

Contemporary Indian poetry itself suggests that, with important modifications, the terms border, borderland, and border writing, used most frequently in discussions of Chicano/a culture, can help to elucidate these diverse and variously contested spaces and the responses they incite. Revised to acknowledge the differing realities of Native American experience, some elements of border theory are well suited to serve a poetry often defined by its commitment to political struggle.

Gloria Anzaldua, with reference to Chicano/a experience, defines borders as being "set up to . . . distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary" (3). This statement implies major differences between Native and Chicano/a borderlands: while for Anzald ´ua there is one border, that between Mexico and the United States, and the geography of the borderlands is subject to shifting, for American Indians there are many such political borders. Further, a reservation (whether or not the concept is contested) is not such a "vague and undetermined place," and the reservation, literally or otherwise, is a major site, source, and image of much Native American border experience. (Yet it bears recalling that reservations have been subject to encroachment and forcible redefinition, and thus "vague and undetermined" might not be wholly inappropriate in relation to such Native borderlands.)

The borderland, Anzaldua continues, in terms applicable both to ´reservation lands and to other contested spaces, cultural, spiritual, and emotional, "is in a constant state of transition . . . Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger" (3-4). Oppression clearly is also no stranger: borders are often imposed by the powerful to contain and control the disempowered (as in the history of Indian removal, reservations, and relocation in the United States). Yet the ambivalence Anzaldua notes is implied, too, in Renato Rosaldo's observation, also applicable to many Native writers, that, "for Chicanos, the border is as much a homeland as an alien environment" (67). For American Indians borderlands can be considered "alien environments" with certain important qualifications. People uprooted from ancestral lands, especially if they have been relocated to cities or to institutions like boarding schools, may find themselves in "alien" borderland environments that are both geographical and emotional locations. Gail Tremblay's "Relocation" (16-17) and Robert Davis's "At the Door of the Native Studies Director" (27-28) evoke such experiences. Harjo's "Oklahoma: The Prairie of Words," on the other hand, shows how a developing relationship between land and people can make an alien place a home. As for those who remain on or near ancestral lands, while the physical environment is hardly alien, the land and people have often been subjected to alienating pressures that create cultural, political, and emotional borderland effects. Simon Ortiz's "A New Mexico Place Name" (Woven Stone 207-9) and Davis's "Saginaw Bay: I Keep Going Back" (14-21) are representative. In such conditions ambivalence like that which Rosaldo implies seems especially likely to surface.

Inevitably, borders and borderlands, geographical and other, harbor conflict; thus, border writing enacts and reflects conflict in its voices and languages: D. Emily Hicks notes that "border writing emphasizes the differences in reference codes between two or more cultures" (xxv), and Jose David Saldovar refers to border culture in the Southwest as "a serious contest of codes and representations" (259). Such a contest characterizes much contemporary Native poetry, too.

For writers like Anzaldua and Rosaldo and, I argue, for contemporary American Indians, border and borderland connote more than a political-geographic reality. The depth and the multivalenced changeability of border experience derive from the fact that it is internal as well as external. "The two worlds often clashed in me," Belin tells us. Anzaldua identifies ´the interior self as the central site of border conflict: "The struggle has always been inner and is played out in the outer terrains" (87). Here another important difference must be noted: historically, for Native Americans border conflict began with the external assaults of colonization; the ongoing, related pressures of land loss and aggression against traditional cultures eventually made the conflict an internal one for many. For contemporary Indians, and in contemporary Native poetry, inner and outer struggles have often been simultaneous, with different aspects coming into sharper focus, depending on the context.

Rosaldo signals the relation between struggle and creativity when he suggests that "the creative space of resistance for Chicanos be called the border, a site of bilingual speech" (67); for Native Americans analogies might include bilingual speech, foregrounded dialogism in one language, or some combination of these. Anzaldua manifests a creativity born of struggle when she imagines "a new culture--una cultura mestiza," the product of knowledge, growth, and the courage to cross borders and to challenge "all three" of her cultures: "white, Mexican, Indian" (22). Contemporary Native poets express and assess mixed cultural influences variously. While they may associate the tensions and fluidity of borderland experience with creativity, they are often engaged in reclaiming or affirming aspects of traditional culture--even as they acknowledge and participate in the change that is inevitably part of all living cultures. Among the Native writers I've quoted so far, none makes that clearer than Vizenor, in "Shadows at LaPointe." Thus, I would argue that Hicks's claim that "border writers ultimately undermine the distinction between original and alien culture" (xxiii), while consistent with Anzaldua's intent, is contrary to the practice of most contemporary Native writers. Further, an important concern for some, as for Wendy Rose in "December," and one that sets them apart from Anzald ´ua's project (and Hicks's claim), is the maintenance of protective boundaries, as a way of asserting and defending cultural integrity. (This position may parallel Indian communities' actions to defend tribal sovereignty and reservation lands, and may also be evident in other contexts--for example, in ongoing debates about sharing Native spiritual traditions with non-Indians.)

While the experience implied by Anzaldua differs in some important respects, then, from those of contemporary Native Americans, the border theory that she, Rosaldo, and others elaborate offers insights into American Indian experience and poetry, as it illuminates some of the implications of tensions that engage many contemporary Native writers. Especially relevant to contemporary Indian poetry are Anzald ´ua's location of such conflicts within the individual as well as between the self and others, an insight that allows for the recognition that the self (or the community) may be experienced as a borderland; Rosaldo's identification of the borderland as not only alien but home, and as a site of creativity; and the foregrounding of culturally centered political struggle. Border conditions and contexts, of course, will be differently meaningful for differently situated writers. Thus, though I have chosen mainly to discuss work by poets who address fairly directly the experience of borderland contests, each responds distinctively, their responses colored by such factors as their cultural and geographic locations, and family and tribal histories.

The usefulness of border theory is at once confirmed and enhanced as it is modified by Native American critics who are both attuned to the potential utility of theories originating outside Native communities, and wary of language and approaches that in effect would recolonize the literature. Cherokee/Choctaw novelist and critic Louis Owens illuminates the conflicts and creative potential of the borderlands even as he defines his preferred term frontier. Despite this term's highly charged implications "within the language of the colonizer," he suggests that, seen "from the other direction," it may be particularly apt for "transcultural zone[s] of contact": "because . . . 'frontier' carries with it the burden of colonial discourse it can only be conceived of as a space of extreme contestation." A "trickster-like, shimmering zone of multifaceted contact . . . frontier is always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate--a liminal space existing as a matrix for communication, including, of course, unequal political struggles." He distinguishes between frontier and territory, which he defines as "that space which is mapped fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue the wild imaginations of imagined Native peoples" (" 'The Song Is Very Short' " 58-59).



Continues...

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Excerpted from The Heart As a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry by Robin Riley Fast Copyright © 1999 by Robin Riley Fast. Excerpted by permission.
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