13. K. Tempest Bradford, "Until Forgiveness Comes."

As Tempest discusses here, this is inspired by, and commentary on, the anniversary ceremony conducted at Ground Zero. As a west-coaster, I am disinclined to make much comment, except to say that Tempest hits themes that matter to me very much.


14. June Jordan, "The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley."

Creative nonfic -- plus something like a sonnet! -- that serves as both a biography of and an ode to Phillis Wheatley, firmly positioning her as "the first" in the "not natural" enterprise of Black poetry in America: the first to negotiate the "difficult miracle" of persisting, regardless of being published, regardless of being loved.

I had never realized, until Jordan pointed it out, that Wheatley's surviving poems are juvenilia, written while she was enslaved and with the blessing and patronage of her owners; the poetry she wrote as a free adult, married to a law student who argued for universal emancipation, was never published. Jordan then draws the line forward to 1985 (the year of this essay's publication), to judging poetry prizes where all of the finalists are white:

But the miracle of Black poetry in America, the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as “political” or “topical” or “sloganeering” and “crude” and ‘insignificant” because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague, or grizzlies at the rain barrel under the dwarf willow trees. We will write, published or not, however we may, like Phillis Wheatley, of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we “neither sought nor knew,” as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

But not otherwise. And yet we persist.

And it was not natural. And she was the first.

60. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Bad River Boys.

A children's picture book of the encounter between the Sicangu Lakota and the Lewis and Clark expedition, told from the perspective of the three Sicangu boys who had swum out into the river to greet the expedition. The meeting between the Sicangu and the Corps of Discovery isn't simplified, moralized, or narrativized, which makes this book difficult to follow if you don't know the contexts or the history, and those looking for a neatly-told "story" will be disappointed. There are explanatory historical notes in the back, but they're brief.

(For those who are unfamiliar: the Sicangu controlled trade access on that stretch of the Bad River -- the Missouri -- and expected tribute from traders moving upriver. Whereas the French traders had been willing to pay such tribute, the U.S. Corps of Discovery was not only unwilling, but considered themselves forerunners of the new local authority. Add to that the fact that Sicangu authority wasn't invested in one guy and his underlings, the way the Americans kept behaving as if it was, plus inadequate translation, and the whole mess came down to an armed standoff between the Sicangu and the Discovery Corps, the only violence or near-violence of the expedition.^*)

One of the things I very much liked about the book is that it is framed as completely normal to be a Sicangu boy; there's none of the "explanatory" exoticizing one too often sees, and various details make it clear that the Lakota were not savages, but people who had a high respect for children, guests, and good manners. Similarly, I liked that the book put Lewis and Clark into an appropriate, non-mythic historical context: the boys are very familiar with white men and speak some French, while the chiefs decorate their tipis with French, British, and Spanish flags.

There are some things that I don't like, however: it is too easy, in my opinion, to misread the adults' demands for tribute appropriate to their status as merely greedy children wheedling for more candy, and York describes himself (albeit with the aid of a interpreter who has previously been established as faulty) as having "once been a wild animal," before he was captured by slave traders. One of the strengths of the book is that Sneve doesn't condescendingly tell the reader how s/he should be interpreting the story, but in both cases, I would have liked the text to be clearer about the intercultural mangling of POV that was happening in those exchanges.

I have mixed feelings about the illustrations, as well. The opening spread makes me happy, as do most of the shots of the children. (I especially like the children treading water in the river, having swum out to meet the Corps' boats and discovering them possibly not so friendly, covertly signing to each other to swim underwater if the encounter turns worse.) I adore this full-page shot of York, but the very next page is rampaging, openmouthed, braves-with-tomahawks, a la The Matchlock Gun and too many westerns. There's something a little too, I dunno, romanticized about this set of illustrations.

I feel like I'm being more critical than the book deserves -- I mostly wish there were a lot more children's books like this. Children's books that portray Indians as something that it's utterly normal to be, books that don't relegate Indians to backdrops or scenery, nor foreground them only as exotic, tragic fantasy material. I want children's books that talk about important cultural/historical markers from Indian points of view, instead of faux-Indian points of view. There's a lot that I like about this book, and some things that I wish were different, but my feelings about Bad River Boys mostly revolve around how incredibly rare it is to see a book like this.

* In his journal, Clark referred to the Sicangu as "the pirates of the Missouri" and "the vilest miscreants of the savage race." I note that it was hardly the Sicangu who were the pirates; Lewis and Clark had been trying to smuggle trade goods upriver past the Sioux!

61. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (ed), Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes.

Ten Native authors -- Geraro A. Baker (Mandan-Hidatsa), Roberta Basch (Puyallup and Coeur D'Alene), Richard Basch (Clatsop Nehalem), Roberta Conner (Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce), Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Debra Magpie Earling (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Allen V. Pinkham Sr. (Nez Perce), Mark N. Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock), and Bill P. Yellowtail (Crow) -- writing nine essays about Lewis and Clark and the so-called Corps of Discovery for the 200th anniversary of the expedition.

It's hard to sum this one up because the (white) editor deliberately exercised the loosest possible control: he selected the ten authors, then promised to publish what they wrote without editing for tone or position. Some authors brought on the snark, others wrote very personal reflections, others offered their own nations' accounts of the Corps of Discovery, others explicitly debunk aspects of the Lewis and Clark mythos. Some themes are consistent throughout the essays, however. Lewis and Clark were not the "first" anything that the mythos so often claims to be: not the first discoverers, not the first elections, not even the first white men. Also, the Corps of Discovery was a recent event, one that occurred within the stream of history, not at the beginning of it.

Two essays that I particularly wanted to mention:

Roberta and Richard Basch's "The Ceremony at Ne-Ah-Coxie," which gives the history of the Clatsop tribe, who had hosted the Corps of Discovery in their winter quarters at Fort Clatsop. There is a pizza parlor in Seaside that displays of a photo of a woman who is allegedly "the last of the Clatsop", but the Clatsop continue to exist, albeit federally unrecognized. In 1951 the Clatsop negotiated a treaty which formally ceded land and would have established a reservation; that treaty was never ratified, and the proposed reservation became a military base, and then a state park.

Bill Yellowtail's snarktastic "Meriwether and Billy and the Indian Business", full of lovely details sporking the L&C mythos -- such as L&C repeatedly arriving places to find that their trade goods had arrived months before them -- interspersed with Yellowtail's thoughts on modern Indian governance and entrepeneurship. The essay closes:

Clark was righteously sore about his loss of valuable horses, ostensibly to some nocturnal Crow Indian entrepeneurs. He vented his pique by actually drafting an extensive speech by means of which he would chastise the Crows. "Children. Your Great Father will be very sorry to hear of the (Crows) stealing the horses of his Chiefs warrors whome he sent out to do good to his red children on the waters of the Missoure." But then he goes on magnaminously: "Children. If any one two or 3 of your great chiefs wishes to visit your great father and go with me... You will then see with your own eyes and here with your own years what the white people can do for you. They do not speak with the tongues nor promis what they can't perform."

We can only wonder how the Crows would have reacted, had Clark ever found them to deliver his diatribe.

It is not so hard to imagine how we would respond to that speech today.

Probably we would say: Meriwether and Billy. Welcome back after all these years. Bring horses.

62. Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

Poem cycle by Afrilachian poet Frank X Walker, narrating the Corps of Discovery's expedition in the voice of York. These are gorgeous and subsversive snapshots of moments of the journey; taken together, they build a life-story that is very obviously operaticin its sweep.

Sprit Mound

We returned to the boat at sunset, my servent nearly exosted with heat thurst and fatigue, he being fat and unaccustomed to walk as fast as I went wast he cause.
—William Clark, August 25, 1804

Capts. Clark an Lewis together with nine mens
an me along to carry an cook
walked 'most a whole day to see Spirit Mound.

I didn't want to go no place
so sacred even the Indians afraid to step,
so I pretends to be more tired than I was.

This piece a land so full a spirits
I felt little hairs praising on the back a my neck
but Capt. Clark don't seem to understand
what be sacred to others any more
than he see the difference
between me ana pack mule.

Maybe the chief should have bade him
to think a it as the Great White Father's
mother's undergarments or that
what's under her skirt.