Category Archives: Literature

Writing about Julia

author photo

Vanessa Pérez. Photo courtesy of author. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Vanessa Pérez

In the early morning hours of July 5, 1953, two New York City police officers spotted a figure on the ground near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. As they approached, they saw the body of a woman with bronze-colored skin. Once a towering woman at five feet, ten inches, she now lay in the street, unconscious. They rushed her to Harlem Hospital, where she died shortly thereafter. The woman carried no handbag and had no identification on her. No one came to the morgue to claim her body. No missing person’s case fit her description. She was buried in the city’s Potter’s Field. One month later, the woman was identified as award-winning Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos. Her family and friends exhumed and repatriated her body.

When I began writing about Julia de Burgos, I hesitated to mention her notorious death, seeking to move away from the narratives of victimhood that have shrouded her life for more than half a century. I wanted to focus on her poetry, her activism for women’s rights, social justice and the independence of Puerto Rico, and her legacy. Most Puerto Ricans already know her story, and many both on the island and in New York have been captivated by her life. However, I soon realized the importance of recounting even the most difficult details as I introduced her to new audiences. Her migration experience and her death on the streets of New York capture the imaginations of readers everywhere. Becoming Julia de Burgos builds on recent approaches to her work that focus on movement, flow, and migration. This book proposes a new way of reading Burgos’s work, life, and legacy, focusing on the escape routes she created in her poetry to write herself out of the rigid confines of gender and cultural nationalism.

For those of you who are not familiar with Burgos, let me offer a brief biographical sketch. Julia Constanza Burgos García was born on 17 February 1914 in the town of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the eldest of Paula García de Burgos and Francisco Burgos Hans’s thirteen children. Julia was intimately familiar with struggle, hardship, and death. She watched six of her younger siblings die of malnutrition and other illnesses associated with poverty. She obtained a teaching certification, a two-year degree, from the University of Puerto Rico, but would only work as a teacher for a year. In 1934, she married Rubén Rodríguez Beauchamp who she divorced only three years later. As a divorced woman in a conservative Catholic society, Burgos found that gossip, speculation, and vicious rumors undermined her respectabil­ity. During this time, she wrote her first collection of poetry, Poemas exactos a mí misma (Poems to Myself), which she later considered juvenilia and never published. In those early years, she also wrote “Río Grande de Loíza,” which became one of her most well-known works and was later included in her first published collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938). This early work explored social justice and feminist themes, which she would continue to write about throughout her life. In poems such as “Pentacromia” and “A Julia de Burgos” she would write about her frustration with the institution of marriage and the limited roles available to women. In “Pentacromia” she repeats in each of the six stanzas the line “Hoy, quiero ser hombre (Today, I want to be a man),” expressing her desire for greater freedom to travel, and be an active participant in the world. In the poem, “A Julia de Burgos” she voices her frustration with social expectations of femininity through a split or double consciousness, suggesting postmodernist ideas of identity as performance. The speaker dramatizes the conflict between her socially acceptable constructed identity and her inner voices as a woman artist, as can be noted in the lines below.

Tú en ti misma no mandas; a ti todos te mandan;

en ti mandan tu esposo, tus padres, tus parientes,

el cura, la modista, el teatro, el casino,

el auto, las alhajas, el banquete, el champán,

el cielo y el infierno, y el qué dirán social.

 

En mí no, que en mí manda mí solo corazón,

mi solo pensamiento; quien manda en mí soy yo.

Tú, flor de aristocracia; y yo flor del pueblo.

Tú en ti lo tienes todo y a todos se lo debes,

mientras que yo, mi nada a nadie se la debo.

 

(You in yourself rule not; you’re ruled by everyone;

in you your husband rules, your parents, relatives,

the priest, the dressmaker, the theater, the casino

the car, the jewels, the banquet, the champagne,

the heaven and the hell, and the what-will-they-say.

 

Not so in me, who am ruled only by my heart,

only by what I think; who me commands is me.

You, aristocratic blossom; and I plebian floret.

You have it all with you and you owe it all to all,

While I, my nothing to no one do I owe.)

These lines offer an example of her commitment to freedom from prescribed roles for women. Burgos wrote and published her second collection of poetry, Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth), in 1939. Her third and final collection of poetry, El mar y tú (The Sea and You), was published posthumously in 1954. In January 1940, Burgos left Puerto Rico for New York where she stayed for six month. She then moved to Havana where she lived for two years before returning to New York in 1942. Several factors influenced her decision to leave Puerto Rico in 1940. The turn in Puerto Rican politics away from the nationalist and independence movement was one of the reasons. Also, many Puerto Rican writers, artists and musicians left for New York in those years in search of a wider audience, publishing houses, recording studios and greater opportunities to continue to develop their craft. Julia de Burgos wanted to be a part of this.

From late 1942 until her death, Burgos lived in New York where she struggled to make a living as a writer. She wrote for the Spanish-language weekly Pueblos Hispanos from 1943 to 1944, further developing her political voice. However, her journalism shows her political commitment to radical democracy and the struggle for immigrant and Puerto Rican rights and her advocacy of solidarity with Harlem’s African American community. In addition, these writings as well as her poetry reveal her understanding of cultural identity as fluid and unbound by national territory. While in the hospital months before her death, she wrote her two final poems in English, “Farewell in Welfare Island,” and “The Sun in Welfare Island,” describing the condition of exile and her sense of seclusion and desolation. These poems can be read as precursors to the literature of Nuyorican and U.S. Latina/o writers of the 1970s in both theme and emotional intonation.

Becoming Julia de Burgos recuperates a savvy, ambitious and influential intellectual who was a creative force both on the island and in New York. She is claimed by later generations as a beloved and inspiring icon and a fierce ancestor. There are at least two historical moments where we see a renewed interest in Julia de Burgos’s life and work. The civil rights movement of the 1960s is one of those moments. The women’s movement of that era led to a renewed interest in the poet on the island by feminist writers, artists and literary critics. The Nuyorican Movement of the 1970s led to ethnic revitalization and search for a deeper understanding of Puerto Rican history and culture that so many New York Puerto Ricans were distanced from. This coincided with first translations of some of her poems into English. As Latina feminists sought for intellectual genealogies during the women of color movement, they reclaimed Julia de Burgos as an ancestor. Julia de Burgos is remembered, reinvented and invoked in the poetry, prose, and artwork of various New York Latino writers and visual artist such as Sandra María Esteves, Mariposa and Andrea Arroyo, just to name a few. She is inscribed in the neighborhood of El Barrio in the form of murals, a cultural center named in her honor, and a street named after her. Sixty years after Julia de Burgos was found unconscious on an El Barrio street corner, she now forms part of the neighborhood’s urban landscape and cultural mythology.

Vanessa Pérez is an Associate Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. She serves as an associate investigator on the City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

by Theresa Delgadillo

This essay, originally prepared in 1996 for Professor Cherríe Moraga in her course on “Prophets/Scribes of Aztlán” at UCLA, has been updated and edited to meet Mujeres Talk requirements. Professor Moraga required students to do a kind of writing different from that typically required in a graduate seminar. She asked us to put ourselves into our critical work, and I took this to mean that we should write in a way that explicitly acknowledged the perspective from which we wrote, making clear and concrete, in writing, our investments and histories in the intellectual projects we undertake. For me, what it yielded was a creative non-fiction essay about a piece of literature, a form different than the academic article and made more so here through editing into a blog essay, a form that also calls upon authors to share more of oneself that one might in an academic journal. The blog essay is also a form necessarily focused on a small part of the literature under discussion, meant to provoke reflection, discussion, and further reading. I refer interested readers to the many excellent articles on Silko’s novel on the MLA International Bibliography.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Leslie Marmon Silko re-writes the history of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is no longer the story of “civilization” meeting the barbarians, not the moment at which Indians begin to disappear, but a brutal, cunning, bloody, savage conquest that spawns equally brutal societies. It is almost as if Silko, in one massive novel, attempts to reverse generations of schooling on the history of this continent, though one has to be open and ready to hear new stories in order to understand the Almanac.

Growing up Chicana anywhere in the United States presents many challenges to one’s “story,” because our experience is undervalued or denied. We live in a nation where ours is not the official story, and yet it is ours. Like the speaker in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem who says, “I’m marked by the color of my skin” (35-7), so, too, have I been marked in every school I’ve been in since childhood. Though I knew it from my first day in school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I only began to understand it in seventh grade. One of my older brothers gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which I read while my Social Studies class studied the period of westward expansion into the Dakotas and the Black Hills Gold Rush. I was stunned by the glaring difference in these narratives. The two books had completely different things to say about the same events. While Indians were nowhere to be found in the school textbook, they were everywhere in Dee Brown’s account, prompting me to ask our teacher about this discrepancy.

My question to the teacher was not simply about facts or words, it was, as Linda Hogan says, about “ways of thinking and being in the world” (12). Around that time, there were a series of marches and protests by Wisconsin Native Americans in the news. Having already been mistaken for Native American, I knew that discriminatory treatment toward Native Americans was not unlike that directed against Mexican Americans. I was disturbed by how our textbook completely erased Native American peoples from history. Our teacher, however, insisted that our textbook was accurate. He dismissed my question. When I tried to explain what Dee Brown reveals in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he told me to be quiet. I continued, but the teacher yelled at me. I then did something completely surprising to all, myself included: I yelled back. Another supervising teacher was called in. Lots of tense whispering, then the bell rang, and so did discussion.

When I read Almanac of the Dead, I thought back to this youthful confrontation with history. Today, I also have to wonder about where Latina/os were in that curriculum, but back then I was just beginning to understand then what the novel illustrates so well — the difference between dominant history and story/ies/histories. A conception of history in the singular as the static and unchangeable past shields it from inquiry and allows it to be compartmentalized and separated from both the present and the future. New knowledge cannot alter it. History in that sense is perhaps why the teacher could not accept another version of the same events in the Dakota Hills and why he did not even consider it important enough to discuss–the events were safely in the past and therefore not of major concern, not to mention that Dee Brown’s version of events was in conflict with the textbook narrative.

In Almanac of the Dead, there are two conceptions of the past diametrically opposed to one another: dominant history versus story/ies/histories. These distinct conceptions are really competing worldviews and they create conflicts for individual characters, who must decide which view will guide their lives. One character who experiences this conflict is Sterling:

[He] had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

The past Sterling wants to forget is his banishment from Laguna Pueblo, yet he was raised on the stories of his Pueblo, including the dispossessions and indignities imposed upon them by  government and dominant knowledge systems (31). He cannot forget one portion of the past without forgetting it all. He enjoys reading the Police Gazette, with its stories of criminals past, in part, because this is one place where Indians to appear in the history of the West with some attempt at understanding their perspective (39-40).

An awareness of the contrast between dominant history and story/histories also operates for the character of Clinton, who, as an African-American Vietnam veteran now homeless, tracks on the discrepancies between the two. Clinton remains highly critical of what he learns in university classes  yet he also finds there, in Black Studies, research that confirms his sense of his people as more than mere pawns of history, and gains a wealth of knowledge on the experiences and cultures of Blacks (414-431). When he critically recalls how wealthy Cherokee Indians had been rounded up by orders of Andrew Jackson, Clinton insists that a “a people’s history” must include all the stories: “That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions” (415).

In the novel, characters who refuse the stories of others are racked with fear, and in the novel, doomed to failure. As Linda Hogan observes, “the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). This is what the characters Beaufrey and Serlo see in the future–cities burning and anarchy reigning–which is why they want to develop modules to survive in space (542). An apocalyptic ending is also what the character Menardo sees and why he is obsessed with insurance and security (266). In the novel, his first wife, Iliana, too, proud of the historical pedigree of having been descended from the conquistador De Oñate “still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them” (270). That fear is also one shared and preyed upon in the novel by characters representing the military regimes of Latin America and their U.S. collaborators.

Another view of the future emerges in the novel from the character of the Barefoot Hopi, who presents a perspective challenging for humans when he says:

            You destroyers….don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you….All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. (734)

Unlike Serlo’s view or Menardo’s view, this prediction of cataclysmic events is not a prediction of end, but of beginning. In the Hopi’s view, the world does not revolve around humans and therefore the end of things human is not a catastrophe. He predicts that the Earth will cleanse itself and continue; this he does not fear. His view parallels Yoeme’s, who says that the sacred Earth “would go on, [it] would outlast anything man did to it” (718). This is what Sterling comes to understand, too: “Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her” (762). In the course of the novel, several characters arrive at this understanding of the earth’s story, and must re-consider human interaction with it. Yet, do the Barefoot Hopi’s words leave us off the hook for what happens to the Earth or inspire responsibility?

The old woman Yoeme’s notebook, carried by the children in the novel, says, “sacred time is always in the Present” (136). Though it may sound like the same message of the magazines Sterling reads to cope with depression, it is not. Instead, it is akin to what Linda Hogan’s grandmother articulates: “Our work is our altar” (148); or what Hogan herself describes as “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). The idea of the sacred in the present recognizes the web of existence that links humans with the natural world. It is also an idea that imposes demands on characters in this novel. As Silko says in an article in Artforum, “for the old people, no one person or thing is better than another; hierarchies presuming superiority and inferiority are considered absurd.”

The conception of story in the novel knits together past, present, and future. Story is alive and everything has a story, but not the same one. Story in this novel is not only the narratives characters create to make meaning of life, but movements and experiences of peoples, the variety of plants and animals in the natural world, the Earth itself. To embrace story appears as a way to embrace a worldview that accepts the interconnectedness of organisms through time.

Many characters in Almanac struggle to make sense of their story, trying to fit their past with their present and future. Some try to forget their own story and instead embrace history, like Menardo; some are rejected because they are evidence of a past that their families want to forget, like Root; some think that their own history is everybody’s history, like Bartolomeo; some see only part of the past and therefore mistakenly think they know what the future will be, like Beaufrey and Serlo; some make connections between other stories and their own and organize people to act with others, such as Angelita and El Feo; some people tell their own stories/histories, such as Clinton, Tacho, the Barefoot Hopi, Wilson Weasel Tail Clinton, Angelita and Lecha; while others, most, struggle to understand the relationship between their stories and other stories. Like the children carrying the pages of the almanac north (246-253), each person in Silko’s novel carries a story that is incomplete without the other stories/histories.

The almanac-carrying children are fleeing “the Butcher” who is enslaving and murdering their tribe, an allusion to both a historical genocide and contemporary circumstances forcing children to flee north. In this storyline, the novel represents the very real experience of the Yaqui tribe, who created a testamento of their creation and their land that is passed down today in handwritten notebooks, and even, as Evers and Molina point out, has been carried by messengers who had the document sewn into their clothes (32). Like Silko’s fictional almanac, both a document and an oral story altered with the additions of each narrator, it is expected and necessary that the Yaqui testamento be “unfixed” by those re-telling it (Evers and Molina 23). These are only two examples of the many stories and histories that are embedded in Almanac of the Dead.

As the character Clinton points out in the Almanac, denying people their histories helps to ensure submission and subordination (431), cutting people off from the stories of their ancestors means stranding them in madness and meanness (424). The novel seems to ask us: Do we recognize story/ies/histories, recognize “differences” as Calabazas says (203), and learn from them? Or do we continue to privilege destruction?

Works Cited

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Evers, Larry and Felipe S. Molina. “The Holy Dividing Line: Inscription and Resistance in Yaqui Culture.” Journal of the Southwest. 34:1. (1992): 3-46.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “The Fourth World.” Artforum. 28:10. (1989): 124-125.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011. 

 

Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness

by Lizeth Gutierrez

“Because I, a mestiza

continually walk out of one culture

and into another

because I am in all cultures at the same time,

alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

Simultáneamente.”

– Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa is my academic godmother. She has provided me the tools to create a sense of home. A space of survival. A space to call my own in the academy. This piece is inspired by Anzaldúa’s work, specifically her writing in Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa provided me the tools to name my restlessness. “Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness” is about my journey to self-discovery. In this poem I recite ‘culture’ and ‘race’ as homogenous markers of identity only to strategically address the multiple identities I wear on my body. I do not seek to homogenize identity or discipline racial categories of identification. Culture and identity, as Anzaldúa’s writing reveals, are complex, multifaceted and fluid.

I wrote this piece when I was an undergraduate student at Grinnell College. As a current PhD student at Washington State University this poem continues to speak to me in painful ways. I am a first generation Chicana college student from Los Angeles, California who decided to pursue her Bachelor’s degree in small town Grinnell, Iowa. I oftentimes felt dislocated there and swore to myself that I would never go back to rural towns. I did not belong in those spaces. Ironically, my distaste for small towns brought me back to a similar rural town: Pullman, Washington. Maybe I am a masochist. Perhaps it is in that masochism that lies my sense of home. Who knows, but it is with this knowledge that I offer you a piece of who I am.

 

!Ya no!

No quiero sentirme marginalizada por tu hipocresía

Me exotizas por ser Latina.

Me llamas “lazy” por ser Mexicana.

Y te burlas de mi acento porque no es como el tuyo.

Tú dices “pizza” cuando yo digo “piksa.”

 

You tell me I can achieve the American dream, and yet set boundaries that aim to intimidate me and make me question my own abilities.

Si, vivo en un lugar de contradicciones.

I am in a college where I am the “exotic Latina,” pero soy la “outsider” en mi familia.

La “pocha.”

La “ya te crees muy miss thing porque vas a coh-ledge”

No me encuentro ni aquí, ni allá.

 

Why do you make me feel like I have to choose only one culture?

Soy mestiza, una hybrid, una mixture.

Anzaldúa me lo grita al oído in my dreams.

 

I, like Anzaldúa, believe in the new Latina consciousness.

Una conciencia que reconoce y tolera las contradicciones de mis dos culturas.

I love frijoles y las tortillas hechas a mano, and let’s not forget the smell of el cilantro en la salsa roja.

Y adoro el crispy chicken sandwich with large fries de McDonalds.

 

Soy Mexicana como mi abuela, like my mother who must constantly fight against the machismo of our patriarchal culture.

Y soy Americana: conquering my dreams and goals a como de lugar is the mentality of my gobierno capitalista.

 

Tú  te sigues sintiendo perdida, abandoned, ahogada en un mar that restricts your identity

because it tells you constantly that you are not enough Mexican, ni suficientemente Americana.

Date cuenta that you are more than one culture, no te de vergüenza, no te escondas.

 

Do not let the waves of assimilation trap you.

No te dejes.

Nada. Nada más rápido. Defiendete, you can do it.

 

Our history has shown us that Chicanas are guerrilleras.

Tú como yo somos la negotiation of two distinct worlds.

Anzaldúa dice que vivas sin fronteras.

 

No dejes que la corriente del mar te lleve.

Do not let it make you choose one culture over the other.

¡Lucha!

Lucha por tu crossroads.

 

This internal fight no acaba hasta que hagas tu propia negociación de identidad.

Revolutionize your sense of self.

No eres prisionera.

 

You are not less than one culture or more than the other.

You are all cultures.

La güera. La negra. La india. La mestiza.

Eres la voz de la nueva Chicana and you have the inner-strength to create your third space of survival.

 

A space Anzaldúa so proudly calls “una conciencia de mujer.”

 

Lizeth Gutierrez is a graduate student in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. She researches representations in popular culture of gendered and raced Latinidades and is particularly interested in the commercialization of mainstream Latinidad in relation to U.S. discourses on second-class citizenship.

Holders of the Light

People holding placards with lighted letters spelling out words.

Overpass Light Brigade at American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference, UW-Milwaukee, April 2014. Courtesy of Overpass Light Brigade.

by Kimberly Blaeser

In 1986, when I should have been writing my PhD dissertation, I was reading boxes (no exaggeration) of Department of Energy materials regarding the planned siting of high level nuclear waste repositories. One of the sites proposed was on my home reservation at White Earth, amid Minnesota’s basalt and granite hardrock deposits—very near the headwaters of the Mississippi River.  I don’t now remember details of the science I learned during that time about crystalline rock, fractures, and ground water, but I do remember the urgency with which I investigated, the weeks and months during which I wrote, went to meetings, knocked on doors, and testified.

I had reason to recall that urgent dedication recently when Edith Leoso, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Bad River Ojibwe of Wisconsin, spoke of the way her life had shifted unexpectedly with the proposal of mining in the Penokee Hills of Wisconsin. Likewise, Bad River Tribal Chairman, Michael Wiggins, Jr. was forced to quickly educate himself in the pertinent science and legal intricacies in order to lead the ongoing anti-mining efforts, to protect the land and the people, to guard the future.

Of the many ways to say please stand, I have chosen a few.

∂, Partial Differential Equation

All things being equal, things are never equal. Think of scope. Like the reach of the imperial.  Or consider variables. Value. Or commodity. Ways of seeing. Angles and perspectives. Or how to solve for survival. 

The consideration of seven generations. This wisdom rule has become common knowledge. Leaders teach that tribal decisions should be made taking into consideration seven generations in the past and seven generations in the future.

The national sacrifice.  Lesser known, and frequently unacknowledged, this convenience policy has marked many generations. Uranium mining. The fallout from atomic bomb detonation at White Sands.

What we erase from polite conversation. Bodies on fire. The historic cleansing of the landscape, the sweep of humanity west, west, west. Environmental r  ism. 

Zongide’en, Be Brave.

Another partial differential equation. Let’s say a corporation proposes a mine. Variables include Tyler Forks. Bad. Potato. Rivers. A 22-mile, 22,000-acre strip of land. Jobs. Maanomin. Open pit. Exceptional or Outstanding Resource waters. Legislation. Iron oxide.  Fish. Blasting and pulverizing. New legislation. The functions depend upon the continuous variables. Fluid flow, for example. And changing laws. Somewhere along the granite line, someone enters. Let’s say they have put down one life and taken up another: the solution of the PDE. They face arbitrary functions. Changing laws. Guards. Guns. If the life is stretched over two points.  It vibrates. We cannot measure that vibration in this generation. We can sing it, or make it into light. (See above for a partial illustration.)

Minobimaadizi, Live Well.

This past week an environmental warrior from the Pacific Northwest passed away. Billy Frank, Jr.  Frank was quoted as saying about himself, “I was not a policy guy. I was a getting-arrested guy.” But in the end he changed policy. A Nisqually tribal member, his battle for tribal sovereignty in resource management protected the salmon and left its mark on contemporary understanding of treaty law. To accomplish that he was jailed, beaten, tear-gassed, and chose to sacrifice much of his time and liberty. A life stretched over two points.

The Anishinaabe word minobimaadizi translated gives us the English live well. But it means something more. To live this good life in ways both obvious and less so. Though we may feel dwarfed by the largeness of passion and action of people like Billy Frank, Jr., we remain variables in the equation and can tip the balance one way or the other.

When we held an American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus recently, we invited my colleague Lane Hall and his Overpass Light Brigade to participate one evening. Lane’s idea to create lighted letters and spell out protest messages above freeways has caught on around the country. At our event, we spelled words in Anishinaabemowin. (For these Lane needed more vowels!)  I am not an OLB regular holder of the light, but I volunteered to be one of those to carry and display the large placards. You will find me at the “I,” the third “O,” and the “G.”  One lighted letter in a 14-letter word? Only a pair of legs beneath a billboard? Ahem. Can you spell m  taphor without me?

Gego Googiibike, Don’t Dive Into the Metal.

I’d like to ask you to fold up your deck chair and head to the Penokee Hills protests. But the truth is, you probably have an environmental threat within biking distance. Or canoeing distance. Mining companies are pushing to conduct a toxic new form of extraction for sulfide, right next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, near the 1,090,000-acre (4,400 km2) wilderness area that is located in the Superior National Forest.  Where insistence is a function of insanity. If x then why.  A mine parallel to 1,000 miles of canoe routes, in the habitat of moose, beaver, wolves, bear, lynx, deer, bobcats, bald eagles, peregrine falcons and loons, within easy polluting distance of our once remote family cabin. We’ve hardly hands enough to hold all the signs or mics needed in this indifferent world of resource capitalism.

And yet.

Poetry is one letter when we spell resistance.

Debwetaan, Believe.

Eloquence of Earth

Nominal signs, these words we use—future, ecology, seven generations—

have yellowed into clichés, editorials that line the cages

of captured birds, or burn in unransomed stone fireplaces

of America’s aspiring, royal mining families.

These green futures cast as fairy story,

sealed beneath the calloused ideals of legislators—

sleek smiling handshakes who seal bargains like Jabez Stone;

Our I-do-solemnly-swear paper-promise leaders

enticed by industry frenzy, slight of lips,

the short-sighted tally (seven hundred jobs)

coveted like Stone’s seven years of prosperity.

Though publicly professed (against all enemies, foreign and domestic),

and leather-oath sworn (will bear true faith and allegiance),

still quid pro quos reign, sell the soul of this land—

our waters our manoomin our children, abiinoojiihnyag.

Each season gavels strike new bargains with our oldest enemies

maji-manidoog, handsome fast-talking strangers disguised as prosperity.

 

Daily we watch patient warnings swim the Wolf River,

migrate to absent wetlands, trumpet old calls.

How do we translate the flashing fins of poisoned fish?

What other alphabet do you know to spell contaminated waters?

Like banned books words still burn on my tongue—reciprocity,

sacred, preservation, earth, tradition, knowledge, protect.

Even the vellum of justice has crumbled in fiendish fire.

Meanwhile we gather here, descendants of ajijaak and maang

lift our ancient clan voices in longing, for a chant of restoration

in a Faustian world.

Before a jury of the tricked and trapped and bamboozled,

before the very devil, Daniel Webster sang

the healing brush of common memory

a child’s wonder at each day’s waking

the freshness of a fine morning—waaseyaaban.

 

If I say Gichigami—Lake Superior—a turquoise plain, stretches

infinite, gete-gaming. If I say Wiikonigoyaang, she invites us to her feast,

how many will remember the eloquence of earth itself?

At dawn when jiibay mist backstrokes across the copper of northern prairies

eerie white hovering, damp and alive,

will you stretch out your hands in hope

cup the sacred like cedar smoke,

draw it toward you—a gesture

fervent and older than language?

Now I say wiigwaasikaa, everywhere we look

there are many white birch,

bark marked with sign, scrolls a history.

I say ritual, continuum, cycle of belonging,

I say daga, please; ninandotaan,

you must listen for it—aki.

Yes, our very earth speaks.

Who among us will translate?

Kimberly Blaeser is a 2014 Contributing Blogger for Mujeres Talk and a poet, critic and essayist. She teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature and American Nature Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a Professor. Her publications include three books of poetry: Trailing You; Absentee Indians and Other Poems; and Apprenticed to Justice. Her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota and worked as a journalist before earning her MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Her poetry has also been translated into several languages including Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian and French.