Removal Acts

The third poem in Erin Marie Lynch’s Removal Acts encloses a rectangular blank that contains the phrases “© The Trustees of the British Museum” and “Sorry, this image is not available for download.” We learn that the British Museum holds the rights to the original photograph of Lynch’s great-great-great grandfather, Mato Sabi Ceya, an influential leader of the Dakota people, who was forced to sign four treaties with the government of the United States:

They […] rowed Mato Sabi Ceya into the Atlantic, his first time seeing that ocean. […] they gave him a choice: sign the treaty or go overboard. He signed, fingers shaking, ink mixed with salt spray.

In “Screenshots,” words are spaced such that the outline of a person is visible on the page. Earlier in the same poem, the poet tracks down a relative’s virtual memorial page on “findagrave.com”: “She was born in winter. In a place where November is winter.” A few pages later:

[Re]

 

[She would have been 16]

[Nails gnawed on skin. Arms crossed over her chest as she walked. Eyes trained on dust rising up from the heels of those before her, dust settling again on the road. Breath of footsteps moving dust.]

[moval]

By compiling absences, silences, and censures, Lynch exposes the colossal scale of settler violence on the American continent. She wields punctuation marks—brackets, arrows, and spaces—like weapons. The lives of her ancestors are abruptly end-stopped; there is no closure or consolation.

In the poem “To This I Come,” she writes:

From my stomach walls collapsing, night after night—

From the hunger inside me, surging toward
            a love over whom I no longer held claim—
[…]

From the prairies of the Dakota homelands,
             where Elisabeth lived when she was younger—

From settlers who claimed that land for statehood—

What is the relationship between the speaker’s illness and the land theft her ancestors endured? Perhaps that violence is its own legacy. The speaker here is both descendent and chronicler of a brutal history; somehow it follows that her stomach is given to collapsing.