Review Essay
Abstract
A Contemporary Tribe of Poets Kenneth Lincoln I weave the night, I cross the weft with stars and the dark hollows of your eyes; I plait the words you've said into my hair. -Anita Endrezze Probst Astounding: less than twenty years ago, there were no acknowledged, much less published, Native American "poets" in America. Exceptions proved the rule: John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, Will Rogers, Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear. The historian, Stanley Vestal, argued that Sitting Bull was a poet in a native epic sense, but the Wild West still framed Buffalo Bill's "American" Indian. Indian literature fell under the pall of ethnological field work. Poor translations perpetuated the stereotype of the unlettered savage, and tribal anonymity shawled any personal sense of craft. Reliving Hiawatha in the nineteenth century, George Copway acculturated as the White man's Ojibwa visionary and died of alcoholism. Until the present generation of post-war Indian writers, who publish in English as a first language, native singers, tellers, and seers were effectively segregated from American literature. The new Indian poets are children of the old ways, students of historical transitions, teachers of contemporary survivals. In the last two decades seminal writing has come from young Native Americans emerging from tribal settings, going to American schools and studying formal literatures, then going back to their own people to write personal versions of native experience. Add "woman" to "man" to "native" American, since these poets, many from matrilineal cultures, are equally gendered. Concentrate, sever, and migrate family histories from country toward city; recombine racial lines, mix cultures, and relocate tribes on the edges of city limits. Voice the truths of pain and love, loss and survival among indigenous peoples. Politicize the poet's sensitivity over centuries of historical dispossession. Break into the caucus of the printed word, through labels of "savage," "heathen," "pagan," and "primitive."