Native American Poetry: Tradition, Resilience, and Truth

The first thing to recognize about the Indigenous poetry of North America is that it is neither monolithic nor homogeneous. When Europeans first arrived as traders and colonists, North America was already fully populated with Native nations. Today, there are still 573 officially recognized Native nations in the United States and 634 in Canada, where they are called First Nations. The 634 in Canada are in addition to the Métis and Inuit peoples of Canada. Just as inaccuracies would arise by lumping together the poetry of all of the countries of Europe under the rubric of “European poetry” and making generalizations, so it is a simplification to lump together all of the poetries of the diverse Native nations of North America.

Each Native nation has its own culture and its own language. That being said, there are some common threads in the traditional Indigenous cultures of North America. These include an identification with and belief in the sacredness of the land, belief in the value of families and in working together to provide the necessities of life, and participation in ceremonies to connect with the spirit world and celebrate the cycle of the seasons and one’s own life. All of this is reflected in Native American poetry.

Poetry existed in the Native cultures of North America long before the Europeans arrived. Contemporary Native American poets are influenced both by their traditional poetry and cultures and by contemporary issues and experience, as well as by the broader body of American poetry written in English.

Traditional Native American poetry was presented orally and included songs, such as lullabies, love songs, complaints, laments, curses, war cries, and death songs. It also included songs embedded in narratives that were performed by storytellers at dramatic or emotionally charged moments. Finally, traditional poetry included ritual poems that were used, for example, in ceremonies to bring about healing, affirm a political victory, or appeal to a deity. All of these types of poems continue today, evolving to meet current needs.

Repetition and parallel structure are used extensively in traditional Native American poetry. Here’s a brief Pima song that uses both:

Bear Song

I am the Black Bear. Around me
You see the clouds swirling.
I am the Black Bear. Around me
You see the dew fall.

This song was transcribed around 1889. Typically, a song like this would be repeated more than once. Along with many other traditional and contemporary songs and poems, “Bear Song” can be found in Native American Songs and Poems: An Anthology (1996), edited by Brian Swann.

Traditional Native American songs and poems can be philosophical as well as driven by images. The following song, first published in 1890, is described as a famous Pawnee song in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993):

Let us see, is this real
Let us see, is this real
This life I am living?

I think we can all relate to that! In addition to being either imagery-driven or philosophical (or a combination), a traditional song or poem can be either short, such as these two examples, or long and involved.

“Luiseño Songs of the Seasons” is a longer traditional work in Native American Songs and Poems, but the people who wrote these songs do not call themselves Luiseños. Luiseño was a name bestowed by the Spaniards who colonized California. The Luiseño’s name for themselves is Payómkawichum. Many Native nations have two names. One name is what the European settlers called them; the other is their true name, i.e., what they call themselves.

These are the Luiseño, or Payómkawichum, songs:

I

      The ant has his season;
he has opened his house.
      When the days grow warm he comes out.
The spider has her house and her hill.
      The butterfly has her enclosure.
The chipmunk and squirrel have their hollowed logs for acorns.
      It is time for the eagle to take off.
It will soon be time for the acorns to fall from the trees.
 

II

      In the north the bison have their breeding grounds,
and the elk drops her young.
      In the east the mountain sheep
and the horned toad have their young.
      In the south other animals give birth.
In the west the ocean is heaving,
      tossing its waves back and forth.
Here, at this place, the deer sheds his hair
      and the acorns grow fat.
The sky sheds, changing color,
      white clouds swept away.
 

III

      The Milky Way lies stretched out on its back,
making a humming sound.
 
      From the door of my house I recognize in the distance
Nahut, the stick used to beat Coyote, and Kashlapish,
      the ringing stones. I look up.
Look: Antares is rising.
            Altair is rising. The Milky Way,
                        Venus is rising.          
 

The Payómkawichum songs are nature poems, and I find them every bit as compelling as modern nature poems. Attitudes toward nature are embedded in cultures. Needless to say, the environment is a very important issue for Native Americans and other Indigenous people worldwide, and it is not a new issue for them. Historically and culturally, Indigenous people have revered the Earth.

In her anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020), U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation, included excerpts from a speech that Chief Seattle gave in 1854. This is just a bit of what he had to say: “Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. // Even the rocks which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with the memories of past events connected with the lives of my people.” In Chief Seattle’s worldview, the Earth was sacred and even the rocks were permeated with a kind of consciousness.

Chief Seattle was a great orator. Indeed, he could be called a poet. His worldview was very different from the one expressed in the Bible, one of the foundational books of Western civilization. In the Revised Standard Version, the first page of the Bible (Genesis, chapter 1, verses 27 to 29) says the following: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.’”

Chief Seattle saw the Earth itself as divine, whereas the Bible can be interpreted as saying that the divine is separate from the Earth, and that the Earth and its creatures were created to serve people. Unfortunately, I believe, this underlying assumption of Western culture has served to promote environmental plunder and devastation and is now contributing to global warming.

Belief in the sacredness of the Earth is a continuing theme in contemporary Native American poetry. It is expressed in a poem by Karuk poet Judi Brannan Armbruster in Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California (2016), an anthology I coedited with Lakota poet Kurt Schweigman:

Klamath River Meditation

There is a trail
down through tall cedar,
down to the River.
 
The Sun shines
in shafts of gold
creates patterns
on the red dirt.
Light beams glisten
and dance on the water.
 
I sit on a boulder
flat and gray
that lies partway
under the water.
 
I feel warmth
from   this rock
from   the Sun
from   somewhere
deep inside.
 
I listen . . .
the Water’s voice
speaks to me.
 I feel . . .
  Peace.
I am . . .
  Peace.
 
All I see is sacred.
I am . . .
  sacred.
 
Ha’a
 

Here’s one more poem from Red Indian Road West that addresses the sacredness of the land:

Murder in the Modern West

Pomo gambler hits the card rooms
meth labs and bar brawls
feed the heartbreak
playing on the juke box
 
songs should be sung about God’s country
stolen   the inhabitants exiled
instead of divorcées in go-go boots
cowboy ramblers   one-night stands
 
the fight for Indian land rights  doomed
a dam got built   it drowned a sacred place
where willow plants and sedge root grew
the harvest used for feather baskets
 
Kahowani  ancient village prevailed
thirteen millennia  flooded forever
families once gathered   laughed   gossiped
at hot springs become Lake Sonoma
 
a reservoir for water sports 
motor boats   jet skis   a marina
and a culture museum
to house dead things that remain

 

 

This poem, by Ojibwe poet Dave Holt, describes a sacred place that was flooded after a dam was built. This is something that has happened innumerable times nationwide: land of many Native nations has been flooded following construction of dams.

There is continuity between past and present in Native American poetry.  This is a traditional Yaqui song:   

Many pretty flowers, red, blue, and yellow.
      We say to the girls, “Let us go
            and walk among the flowers.”
                                    The wind comes and sways the flowers.
                        The girls are like that when they dance.
                                                Some are wide-open, large flowers, and
      some are tiny little flowers.
 
The birds love the sunshine and the starlight.
 
                        The flowers smell sweet.
 
            The girls are sweeter than the flowers.
 

 

And this is a poem from Red Indian Road West by contemporary Yurok poet Shaunna Oteka McCovey:

The Wildflower of Vunxarak
            for Kiaunna
 
Pray for us little wildflower as we pass by
on our way to the dance grounds
just above the place where the
Salmon River flows long
and without bend.
 
Sing a blessed flower dance song,
let it make its way from camp to ridge
as we give name to the girl who
is arriving, who opens her petals
to the rising sun of life.
 
Wildflower, your roots plunge deep
and fix you sturdy to the earth, your
grace in the whirl of spring winds
reminds us to live and love
always in balance.

 
In both poems, there are flowers, sun, and dancing, and in both poems, girls are associated with flowers. In the Yaqui Song, all of the girls are like flowers. McCovey’s poem celebrates the birth of a girl who is like a flower.           

The Yaqui song and “The Wildflower of Vunxarak” are sweet and beautiful, but Native American history and poetry are not all flowers and dancing. There was much oppression and land theft by white colonists starting in the 17th century, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. government attempted to stamp out Native cultures by banning dances and religions, and by forcing Native children to attend boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their own languages.
           

By the 19th century, Native poets, including Wyandot poet William Walker, Jr., were writing in English as well as their Native languages. Walker, whose Wyandot name was Hah-Shah-Rehs, lived from 1800 to 1874. He was a Wyandot rights activist who served both as a principal chief of the Wyandots and as the first provisional governor of the Nebraska Territory, which at that time also encompassed present-day Kansas. A polyglot who knew nine languages,  he was educated in English, Greek, Latin, and French, and also spoke Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, and Potawatomi. This is his poem, “Oh, Give Me Back My Bended Bow”:

Oh, give me back my bended bow,
      My cap and feather, give them back,
To chase o’er hill the mountain roe,
      Or follow in the otter’s track.
 
You took from me my native wild,
      Where all was bright, and free and blest’
You said the Indian hunter’s child
      In classic halls and bowers should rest.
 
Long have I dwelt within these walls
      And pored o’er ancient pages long.
I hate these antiquated halls;
      I hate the Grecian poet’s song.
 

In this poem, Walker has used English eloquently and subversively to undermine the idea that any educated person would choose European culture over Indigenous culture.

Another Native poet born in the 19th century was Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. She was a Dakota writer, editor, musician, teacher, and political activist who lived from 1876 to 1938. Her Dakota name was Zitkala-Sa, which means Red Bird. These are the first two stanzas of her poem “The Red Man’s America”:

My country! ’tis to thee,
Sweet land of Liberty,
My pleas I bring.
            Land where OUR fathers died,
            Whose offspring are denied
            The Franchise given wide
            Hark, while I sing.
 
My native country, thee,
Thy Red man is not free,
Knows not thy love.
            Political bred ills,
            Peyote in temple hills,
            His heart with sorrow fills,
            Knows not thy love.
 

In both “Oh Give Me Back My Bended Bow” and “The Red Man’s America,” the poets are using not only the English language but also such conventions of English poetry as stanzas, rhyme, and iambic meter as they express their discontent.

“Land where OUR fathers died” is tragically apt when applied to the original people of North America. A conservative estimate of the Indigenous population of North America in 1491 is 10 million. Some anthropologists and historians estimate that it was as high as 25 million, but by 1900 it was down to about 250,000. Today, the Indigenous population of the U.S. is about 7 million, or about 1.7 percent of the total population.

As a result of losing so much—life, land, and culture—people of the Native nations of North America suffer from historical trauma, as do African Americans. Historical trauma is trauma that gets passed down through the generations. Some people think it even includes genetic changes. Having trained as a biologist, I don’t think changes in DNA are likely, but epigenetic changes, where a gene is turned off or on for many generations, are conceivable and have been demonstrated in other species. Another possible explanation for historical trauma is the psychological impact of each generation on the next. People impacted by historical trauma can feel the pain and heartbreak of what happened to their ancestors as though it happened not long ago but yesterday, not to someone else but to themselves. The immense pain of genocide experienced by Native Americans and slavery experienced by African Americans does not disappear quickly.

Due to historical trauma, Native communities today suffer disproportionately from addiction, domestic violence, and poor mental and physical health. Native people have exceptionally high rates of diseases like diabetes and heart disease. This is coupled in many places with widespread unemployment and lack of access to quality education.

The hard truths of historical events and historical trauma are reflected in contemporary Native American poetry. Mojavi poet Natalie Diaz, a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, has a prose poem called “A Woman with No Legs.” This poem, which appears in both Red Indian Road West and Diaz’s collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), describes a woman with diabetes who had attended one of the infamous Indian boarding schools. It contains the following passages:

Can’t forget being locked in closets at the old Indian school   Still cries telling how she peed the bed there   How the white teachers wrapped her in her wet sheets & made her stand in the hall all day for the other Indian kids to see 

…

 
Told me to keep my eyes open for the white man named Diabetes who is out there somewhere carrying her legs in red biohazard bags tucked under his arms
 

Another poem from Red Indian Road West, this one by Lakota poet Marlon Sherman, brings up the issue of drug addiction. It’s called “Blood Brothers”:

Five years ago
 
He said to me,
“Let’s be blood brothers;
we’ll mingle our blood
like in the old days.”
 
“That’s a great idea,” I said,
“because we already are
brothers in the spirit.
But mixing blood is
a sacred thing,
and we need to do it right.”
 
So we built a sweat lodge,
sprinkled sage on hot rocks,
steamed ourselves and
sang until we cried;
then we burst out, ran and jumped under
the cold lawn sprinkler;
dried ourselves with
chamois and sweetgrass.
 
We oiled and braided our hair,
wrapped our braids in mink,
wrapped the mink in red ribbon,
painted our faces,
painted circles over our hearts,
sang a song of brotherhood,
cut our right wrists with
my Buck knife.
 
As we reached to clasp
each others’ arms
            wrist to wrist,
I saw the scars over his veins,
rough tracks
rubbing my smooth skin
            (As his drug-rough life had
            rubbed against mine).
 
Blood mingled in
a ceremony older than
            memory.                                                                  
 
Last week he died of
AIDS-related illness.
            Just before he died,
            he asked me to clasp arms
            one more time,
                        blood brothers until the end.

 
“A Woman with No Legs” and “Blood Brothers” show the aftermath of historical trauma. “38,” a poem by Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, tells about one of the many, many events that caused historical trauma. This is an excerpt from the poem, which appears in Long Soldier’s collection Whereas (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award:

You may or may not have heard about the Dakota 38.
 
If this is the first time you’ve heard of it, you might wonder, “What is the Dakota 38?”
 
The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln.
 
To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in U.S. history.
 
The hanging took place on December 26th, 1862—the day after Christmas.
 
This was the same week that President Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation.
 
There was a movie titled Lincoln about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
 
The signing of The Emancipation Proclamation was included in the film Lincoln; the hanging of the Dakota 38 was not.
 
In any case, you might be asking, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hung?”
 
As a side note, the past tense of hang is hung, but when referring to the capital punishment of hanging, the correct tense is hanged.
 
So it’s possible that you’re asking, “Why were thirty-eight Dakota men hanged?”
 
They were hanged for The Sioux Uprising.

 
The poem goes on for about five more pages, and we learn that almost all of the traditional Dakota homeland in Minnesota was taken away by white settlers and the U.S. Government, and the Dakotas were forced onto a small tract of land. This land was insufficient for hunting, gathering, or agriculture, and the Dakota people were starving. Moreover, government-sanctioned traders would not give them credit to buy food. The Dakotas responded by stealing food and by attacking and killing some of the settlers on their traditional land. This was The Sioux Uprising. After the Dakotas were defeated by the U.S. military, a military court sentenced 303 Dakota men to death by hanging. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but 38 of these men. It was a compromise that was acceptable at the time to the military and to white settlers in Minnesota. Abraham Lincoln may have thought he’d done the Dakotas a favor by saving the lives 265 men and executing only 38, but this was not acceptable to them. It was not just.

All of the surviving Dakota people were then exiled to Nebraska and South Dakota. The great injustice of these 38 executions has not been forgotten by the Dakota and Lakota people, and it will never be forgotten. An article about it was published as recently as December 26, 2020, in the online journal Indian Country Today.

Historical injustice and historical trauma, though, are far from the last word on the Native nations of North America and their poetry. If I could pick one word to characterize the Indigenous people of North America and their poetry, it would be “resilient.” The people themselves have come back from being reduced from many millions to 250,000. Although their languages, cultures, and religions were long suppressed by the U.S. government, they have survived. Native Americans were not granted freedom of religion in the U.S. until Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. Think about that. A country supposedly founded in part to ensure freedom of religion did not grant that freedom to the people who were here first until 1978. Starting in the 19th century, not only were Indigenous religions banned, but so were songs, dances, ceremonial objects, and access to sacred sites because they were expressions of the outlawed religions. Yet people did not forget the sacred sites and objects, and many songs and dances were performed secretly and therefore survived.

Many Native languages also survived, allowing Native nations to have language recovery programs today that enable both children and adults to learn their original languages. Banning of Native languages goes back even farther than banning of Native religions and back to way before the time of the boarding schools. The first Indigenous language banned in North America was that of my Wampanoag ancestors, which was banned after King Philip’s War in 1678 (his Wampanoag name was Metacom, but the settler’s called him King Philip). Even the Wampanoags have a language recovery program today, which was initiated by Jessie Little Doe Baird in 1993.

Resilience appears throughout Native American poetry, along with hope, humor, and joy. “Winter Within,” a poem in Red Indian Road West by Koyoonk’auwi, or Konkow, poet Linda Noel, a former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, concludes as follows:

I look into winter and know that
No frost can freeze the spirit
No thousand winters of ice
Could extinguish the flaming
                        Heart of
                                     My people 

Humor radiates from this delightful poem by Kurt Schweigman:

         Earthquakes Defined

In my Oakland condo
daughter plays oblivious
to a slight tremor
asking her if she felt it
she did not
I tell her we need
to stand in the arch
of the door between
the bedroom and living
room area for safety
just in case a more
powerful quake arrives
 
Daughter is curious
on what causes earth
to shake, I explain as best
tectonic plates shifting
it is lost on my 5-year-old
she dismisses a father’s
explanation, to replace it
with one of her own
telling me, maybe
earthquakes happen
because Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit)
stubbed his big toe 

 
Ofelia Zepeda is a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation of southern Arizona. In addition to being a poet, she’s a professor of linguistics and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education and recovery, and she writes in both the O’odham language and English. Her poem “In the Midst of Songs” from her collection Where Clouds Are Formed (2008) expresses the hope and joy present in Native nations poetry today. It contains the lines “We are in the midst of songs. / Our heart is full of joy. / Our mind is good. / Our land is good. / The land is all beautiful, take a look.”

In addition to affirming the sacredness of the Earth and its creatures, Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem” from In Mad Love and War (1990) expresses optimism, the conviction that humans are part of something much larger than themselves, and the belief that human action matters. Connecting traditional and contemporary Native poetry, this poem is an invitation to pray and to celebrate survival:  

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness of all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
 

# # #

 

References

Diaz, Natalie. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

Harjo, Joy. In Mad Love and War. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

Harjo, Joy; Howe, LeAnne; and Foerster, Jennifer Elise (eds.). When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. New York: Norton, 2020.

Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017.

Preminger, Alex, and Brogan, T. V. F. (eds.). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Schweigman, Kurt, and Day, Lucille Lang (eds.). Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. Oakland, CA: Scarlet Tanager Books, 2016.

Swann, Brian (ed.). Native American Songs and Poems: An Anthology. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1996.

Zepeda, Ofelia. Where Clouds Are Formed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008.

 

Acknowledgments

The poems by Judi Brannon Armbruster, Joy Harjo, Dave Holt, Shaunna Oteka McCovey, Kurt Schweigman, and Marlon Sherman are used by permission of the authors.

The poems by William Walker, Jr., and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin and the traditional songs are in the public domain.