Tears and Stitches: Native Poets Featured
By Norma Wilson
Four Native poets from the University of South Dakota were featured in a special session of the Native American Literature Symposium held at Mystic Lake Casino located in the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, April 10-13, 2002. The symposium brought together over two-hundred writers and scholars from throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. This was the largest gathering of Native scholars and writers that has ever assembled in one place.
Poets, Mary Blackbonnet, Victor Singingeagle, Natasha Bordeaux and Joel Waters, who presented a reading of their work at a luncheon on April 13, moved the audience to laughter and tears as they shared their varied experiences and their perceptions.
English major, Mary Blackbonnet, was adopted as a child by non-Indian parents who prevented her from participating in her native Lakota culture. She spoke of her journey back to her birth parents, her indigenous culture and her place. Her poems, including "I come from," voice the personal significance of this return to her home, her roots in South Dakota and is a poignant chronicle of the pain of having been separated from the home she needed, yet the joy of returning.
The formal poems of Ph.D. student Victor Singingeagle with their satirical view of both pan-Indian and non-Native American society brought laughter to the audience. Among the poems he read was "The Powwow." Written in Spenserian stanzas, this poem descibes a Chumash gathering, complete with all the trappings of modern America--Winnebago rvs, a Peacemobile, items for sale and litter. At the poem's end the elders "spy their littered Earth with dread."
M.A. Mass Communications and English student Natasha Bordeaux followed with poetry reflecting her strong connections with her relatives on the Rosebud Reservation. Bordeaux grew up in an extended family of eighteen brothers and sisters. Her poem "Ojanjanpi" is addressed to her mother, who as a child, hid beneath the porch in order to hear words spoken in the Lakota language by her parents. "I see you mouthing the words / Placing them in the picket of your heart," Bordeaux says.
English major Joel Waters, also from the Rosebud Reservation, ended the reading with several poems reflecting his experiences in contemporary American society. The audience especially enjoyed his poem, "No, I'm not Chinese," as it reflected with humor the difficulty of negotiating a life that is true to one's indigenous culture while living in an ever-changing, globalized America.
It was wonderful to see these students perform so well for a large audience that included Native authors and scholars such as Carter Revard and Lee Ann Howe. I was also very proud of the two English Ph.D. students who also attended the poetry reading and presented papers at the symposium, and I also enjoyed presenting there. On April 11 Keith Collett presented "Trickster Figures and Trickster Discourse in Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart." On April 13 Patricia DiMond presented "From the Treaty of 1868 the the Wounded Knee Massacre: Festerings from a Single Wound;" and I presented "Pele's Pen: Native Hawaiian Poetry."
The symposium made us all more aware of the diversity and vitality of Native American literature as an integral part of the intellectual and creative life of our own university and of the larger world of literature and culture.