We Are Still Here

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of  Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo with LeAnne Howe, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and contributing editors. W.W. Norton & Company. $19.95.

Recently appointed to a third term as the United States Poet Laureate, the first Indigenous poet to hold that distinction, Joy Harjo’s introduction to When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through proposes a sweeping rereading of Native poetry produced in this part of the North American continent since the seventeenth century. Two hundred and forty-five years following the Declaration of Independence, the inclusion of Indigenous poets in the nation’s consciousness, Harjo argues, “is still an afterthought, and fraught with tension, because our continued presence means that the mythic storyline of the founding of this country is inaccurate,” further pointing out that the hideously flawed assumption made by white colonizers that Native tribes were illiterate was swiftly turned into “a tool for genocide.”

At contact with European invaders we were estimated at over 112 million.... Today we are one-half of one percent of the total population of the United States. Imagine the African continent with one-half of one percent of indigenous Africans and you might understand the immensity of the American holocaust.

Lovingly assembled by executive editor Harjo (Mvskoke), who was assisted by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) and Jennifer Elise Foerster (Mvskoke), this anthology covers a terrifically vast terrain, its five sections organized according to geographical areas, namely “Northeast and Midwest,” “Plains and Mountains,” “Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Pacific Islands,” “Southwest and West,” and “Southeast,” a decision made in recognition that land is “central” to the cultures and identities of Indigenous communities. The choice of landscape as the book’s organizational principle transcends the linguistic and cultural heterogeneousness of Native Nations, as well as contends with the ambiguity of borders, given that tribal nations inhabiting lands near Mexico and Canada must endure the presence of political boundaries cutting through their territories, separating families and communities from one another, the Tohono O’odham Nation of the Sonoran Desert being a well-known example.

Gathering the work of one hundred and sixty-one poets representing over five hundred federally recognized tribal nations speaking more than one hundred and fifty languages, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through further distinguishes itself by being the first work of its kind to showcase a hitherto unseen historical breadth, taking the reader from the late 1600s to the present day, with the youngest poets born in the 1990s. Sadly, given Harjo’s more than justified thoughts on the suppression and misinterpretation of countless Native oral texts, the anthology’s first pages unsurprisingly open onto a reality still enveloped in the historical cloudiness caused by that very loss. This is perhaps best enshrined in the earliest text included in these pages, namely “Eleazar’s Elegy for Thomas Thacher.”

Written by a student of Harvard’s short-lived Indian College, of whom we know nothing save his first name, “Eleazar’s Elegy for Thomas Thacher” is a tribute penned to mark the death of Thomas Thacher, an Anglo-American minister. Alternating between praising its subject (“your virtue was known, and sacred was your faith”) and alluding to classical authors and biblical texts, the poem is composed of twelve distichs in Latin followed by a quatrain written in Greek. The unlikely survival of “Eleazar’s Elegy for Thomas Thacher” over the past three centuries may be largely attributed to its inclusion in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Wondrous Works of Christ in America (1702), which served as both an ecclesiastical history and a propagandistic pamphlet to exhort Puritan elites to convert their African slaves and Indian neighbors to Christianity. In fact, what little we do know about Eleazar is directly sourced from Mather’s pen, who states that he inserted the poem in his Magnalia Christi Americana on the strength of its “curiosity” since it was produced by “an Indian Youth.”

Mather’s rationale for doing so was in perfect alignment with “enlightened” attitudes of the time, whereby certain texts were utilized to demonstrate that non-white people were, on rare occasions, and with the right training, able to mimic European culture, if not wholly master it. This enduring attitude toward the continent’s original inhabitants was neatly spelled out decades later in an issue of the Boston Monthly Magazine, published in 1825, which noted that poems like Eleazar’s constituted proof that Indians were “capable of classical attainments” despite the fact that “their modes of living, their dress and their food” were “savage and disgusting.” Instead, closer inspection reveals that rather than an attempt to “demonstrate efforts to master European genres” as an American academic once put it, “Eleazar’s Elegy for Thomas Thacher” may actually be read as a veiled critique of the white master culture and the Indigenous writer’s place within it.

On examining the poem’s original Latin text, the reader will note that its third line, “memnona si mater, mater ploravit achillem,” or as the anthology’s English version translates it, “thus the mother mourned/Memnon, mourned Achilles,/with just tears,” is directly lifted from the opening line of Elegy IX in Book III of Ovid’s Amores. Purportedly written on the occasion of the death of his friend Tibullus, Ovid’s elegy drastically deviates from the norms of typical Roman funerary tributes. Indeed, not only does he openly mock any sentimentality around the notion of death, but he further questions the worthwhileness of living a pious life, since, as he argues, death awaits us all regardless of one’s level of devotion, and that poetry alone survives the “greedy pyre,” a fiercely individualistic and irreligious statement, making it an intensely odd poem for Eleazar to quote in the context of the Puritan mores in which he was supposed to operate.

Any possibility that Eleazar may have mistakenly selected an inappropriate passage is quickly disproven when he later reaffirms this controversial pick by utilizing his elegy’s fifth and sixth lines to underscore his approval of Ovid’s thoughts: “Mens stupet, ora silent, justum nunc palmo recusat/Officium: Quid?” or “the mind is struck senseless, the/lips are silent,/now the palm refuses funeral rites;/Duty: what?” While earlier non-Native readers and scholars usually chose to interpret such “misquotes” as gaffes committed by Indigenous authors ill at ease in a culture they didn’t fully understand—a brazen presumption to make given that Eleazar clearly spoke at least three languages, if not more—it is almost impossible not to interpret Eleazar’s choice of words as a subtle intertextual critique of the forced renunciation of his own culture, which simultaneously mocks the Puritan traditions he was made to adopt. The ability to reinterpret texts like “Eleazar’s Elegy for Thomas Thacher” is one of this anthology’s supreme joys, albeit only one among many.

Indeed, within these pages one will find works inspired by family histories, captivating tribal myths, tales imbued with intense spirituality, ecological intimacy, painful historical awareness, and a fantastically broad emotional palette. That being said, I could not help but be drawn to poems characterized by beautifully sublimated wrath. The Mohawk artist Peter Blue Cloud (1935–2011) and his poem “The Old Man’s Lazy” spring to mind. Ostensibly an account of enduring visits from an Indian agent who criticizes the author for neglecting his land, the poem slowly develops into a paean of the author’s landscape and its history of occupations, leading Blue Cloud to muse,

Maybe sometime I’ll
tell him that the fence
isn’t mine to begin with,
but was put up by
the white guy who used
to live next door.
                  It was
years ago. He built a cabin,
then put up the fence. He
only looked at me once
after his fence was up.

Blue Cloud later adds,

                  Well that guy
dug holes all over his
place, looking for gold,
and I guess
                  he never
found any. I watched
him grow old for over
twenty years, and bitter,
I could feel his anger
all over the place.

While the poem might have been simply devoted to the experience of colonization, Blue Cloud also looks to the future and how his children, who moved to the city, now regret leaving their land and tell him he’s lucky to still be living out there.

Another highlight in this vein is “The Real Indian Leans Against” by Chrystos (Menominee), which was inspired by the sight of advertisement figures of cigar store Indians covered in “beadwork” and “For Sale” signs:

There are certainly more fake Indians
than real ones but this is the u.s.a.
What else can you expect from the land of sell
your grandma          sell our land          sell your ass
You too could have a fake Indian in your parlor
who never talks back
Fly in the face of it
I want a plastic white man
I can blow up again & again
I want turkeys to keep their feathers
& the non-feathered variety to shut up
I want to bury these Indians dressed like cartoons
of our long dead
I want to live
somewhere
where nobody is sold

Poems like “The Real Indian Leans Against” aptly illustrate what Cedar Sigo (Suquamish) writes in his introduction to the Pacific Northwest section, that he’s come

to think of Native Poets as warrior/prophets that can move (almost routinely) beyond our own bodies. We are hovering, scribing entities, free to drop back into our trenches as needed. It is the poems themselves that provide the bedrock for further resistance and redefinition.

Although the prospect of navigating four hundred pages of poetry spanning three centuries may initially seem a daunting task, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, while leaving a heavy impression on one’s mind and heart, proves to be a wonderfully breezy read, for a very specific reason. Though readers of verse anthologies are often tempted to skip past the prose interludes, eager to get to the poems, this would be inadvisable since the geographic introductions stand as works of scholarly research, mission statements, and prose poems in their own right. Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen/Chumash) and her preface to the Southwest and West chapter is a key example:

As we journey through this poetic space, languages ripple like mountain ranges: Diné, Western Apache, Yaqui, Spanish seeps in, legacy of early colonization left behind like a worn scar; English gets pulled and stretched into Indigenous syntax and rhythms, as older languages like Keres, Cahuilla, Esselen, Mojave, Kumeyaay, Yurok, Chumash, Yuman, and Koyongk’awi push up against English like submerged rivers, slowly and relentlessly indigenizing the footprint of another colonial invader.

The decision to showcase Native languages unitalicized, and thus unforeignized, alongside their English counterparts should be highly praised, reinventing how writers from earlier eras are represented to modern audiences, as is the case with Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe). The first known female Native writer, Schoolcraft was born in 1800 and grew up speaking Ojibwemowin and English, composing her poems in both languages, her English versions adopting the standard literary conventions of her time. Here, “To the Pine Tree” appears first in Ojibwemowin, then in literal English translations by Margaret Noodin, and finally in Schoolcraft’s own English sestain:

Zhingwaak! Zhingwaak! Ingii-ikid,
Weshki waabamag zhingwaak
Dagoshinaan neyab, endanakiiyaan.
Zhingwaak, zhingwaak nos sa!
Azhigwa gidatisaanan
Gaagige wezhaawashkozid.

____

Pine! Pine! I said,
the one I see, the pine
I return back, to my homeland.
The pine, the pine my father!
Already you are colored
Forever you are green.

____

The pine! The pine! I eager cried,
The pine, my father! See it stand,
As first that cherished tree I spied,
Returning to my native land.
The pine! The pine! Oh lovely scene!
The pine, that is forever green.

Other highlights in this vein include “Namahta’soomaheveme” or “We Are the Spirits of these Bones” by Richard Littlebear (Northern Cheyenne), presented in both Cheyenne and English, which discusses the reburial of ancestral bones and how they will “sleep restfully” even though they “do not know this place so well,” and “Ivaghulluk Ilagaata” or “Prayer Song Asking for a Whale” by Lincoln Blassi (St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik).

Accommodating the breadth of our human experience in a manner that usually eludes the thematically specific nature of most compendia, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through comfortably switches gears between the rhetorical and lyric, and the traditional and avant-garde, peppering the contents with texts that look like nothing I’ve ever seen before, as evidenced by Tlingit poet Nora Marks Dauenhauer (1927–2017) and her riveting three-page “How to make good baked salmon from the river,” which utterly redefines what a cultural recipe looks and sounds like. Overall, the project explodes the racist myth of the noble savage and their special relationship with nature while simultaneously reaffirming the ecological consciousness linking many of the featured poets. As such, the anthology generously extends its web of connections beyond the Indigenous universe, as illustrated by Hershman R. John’s (Diné) “A Strong Male Rain,” inspired by his grandmother’s stories of how storm clouds are male because they “gather anger” and “cry thunder and rain,” a story that leads him to strike a bond with Darcy, “a Jewish girl from Phoenix,” swapping his story of the “Male Rain” for hers about the “Kugelblitz,” which, while literally meaning “ball of lightning,” was also the code name for a Nazi operation against Jews and Communists during WWII:

I guess Jews and Navajos aren’t all that different.
We were both afraid of thunderstorms.
We have other past storms we were afraid of too.
She had the Holocaust
And I had America.

Lightning flashes.... Thunder follows....
I begin whipping my horse, trying to escape the storms.

While most anthologies may resemble compilations of rock ’n’ roll hits, this anthology is more like a triple-LP of improvisational jazz, whose riffs coalesce into a dynamic orchestra, albeit one lacking a single conductor, given that the project as a whole instinctively rejects all notions of gatekeeping, being birthed out of a communal effort. Initially informed by Harjo’s class on anthologies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the project was forged out of exchanges with numerous poets, then put together by a team of seven contributing editors, thirteen assistant editors, and nine regional advisors, with the book’s final form emerging out of a week-long stay in Santa Fe that coincided with the Institute of American Indian Arts’ low-residency program.

Above all, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through consciously strives to radically enlarge the scope of Native literature, even redefining what “anthologizing” means in the first place, considering the complications surrounding “canonical” Native literature in the US. As Foerster explains in her preface to the Southeast section:

To “preserve” their idea of authentic Indianness, many cultural critics and canon-makers left out such writers as Alexander Posey and Mary Cornelia Hartshorne. Especially because these writers, many of whom were women—Stella LeFlore Carter, Ruth Margaret Muskrat Bronson—were writing political poems. Another reason for exclusion: ... poetry by Native writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often engaged the same language that was stripping them of human rights: English lyric metricism and romantic themes ... any writer of this kind of verse, it was assumed, had lost their “Nativeness.”

Readers will nonetheless encounter familiar luminaries like Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), John Trudell (Santee Dakota), Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe-White Earth Nation), Simon Ortiz (Acoma), Luci Tapahonso (Diné), Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe-Turtle Mountain Band), Ray Young Bear (Meskwaki), and nila northSun (Shoshone/Anishinaabe), although the editors decided to pick some of these poets’ lesser-known poems to present a different facet of their work. Eschewing the tendency of most anthology editors to limit their parameters to writers of their own generation, the book generously devotes much space to younger voices like Jake Skeets (Diné), Michael Wasson (Nimíipuu), No‘u Revilla (Kanaka/Maoli/Tahitian), Tanaya Winder (Duckwater Shoshone/Southern Ute/Pyramid Lake Paiute), and spoken-word poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio (Kanaka Maoli), whose poem “Kumulipo,” also the name of the Hawaiian creation chant, points to the need to keep cultural memories alive:

There is a culture
Somewhere beneath my skin that i’ve been searching for since
        i landed here
But it’s hard to feel sometimes
Because at Stanford we are innovative
the city of Macintosh breeds thinkers of tomorrow
and i have forgotten how to remember

But our roots cannot remember themselves
Cannot remember how to dance if we don’t chant for them

I predict When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through will quickly cement itself as one of the cornerstones of an updated understanding and appreciation of Native/Indigenous letters. The joy, excitement, and open-endedness that led to its creation rings out of every page, a sentiment embodied by Howe’s outroduction, where she writes that “this collection of poems, born of these lands, is not an end nor a beginning.” This book should feature on all essential reading lists, particularly since, as Harjo stresses, “the United States is a very young country and has been in existence for only a few hundred years” while “Indigenous peoples have been here for thousands upon thousands of years and we are still here.” America’s notion of itself remains aggressively circumscribed without a true acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples’ presence, and the editors and poets involved in this project know that better than anybody. As Howe says, quoting the Choctaw chant, “Issa hal-a-li haa-toko Ik’sa illok isha shkee”—“because you are holding on to me I am not dead yet.”