Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations
Edited by CMarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader
Tupelo Press, 2019
NATIVE VOICES invites us to immerse ourselves in the poems and essays of forty-four contemporary indigenous poets. Essays regarding writers who have influenced them add both background and gravitas.
The poems honor a past that resonates in Native DNA. Diane Clancy (Cherokee) writes in “The Bat House” that “Those voices have always been with me” and “I have been a controversial non-fit in both worlds.” Past and present resonate in Clancy’s “Without Title:”
It’s hard you know without the buffalo,
the shaman, the arrow,
but my father went out each day to hunt
as though he had them.
He worked in the stockyards.
All his life he brought us meat.
No one marked his first kill,
no one sang his buffalo song.
Deborah A. Miranda (Esselen / Chumash) casts us into the tragic reality of serial colonialism as she dispels the romanticized history of the Spanish Missions of old California. Miranda writes in her essay, “The Bones Speak: Excavation and Reunion” that “I didn’t grow up knowing that any Native writers existed.” Turn the pages and Miranda writes, “here are the voices that have been silenced, here is the ugly, gruesome truth.” She writes of historical erasure and “her “grief, ending in the quiet rage that comes on the heels of genocide.”
Many poems blend painful history with natural and urban imagery, such those of Sherwin Bitsui (Diné). In “Atlas”, “He sings an elegy for handcuffs, / whispers its moment of silence / at the crunch of rush-hour traffic.” Later in the poem, Bitsui asks, “How many Indians have stepped onto train tracks, /hearing the hoofbeats of horses / in the bend above the river?”
Cedar Sigo (Suquamish) reminds us in “Rant and Roll” by John Trudell, that “Life doesn’t have to be bitter / Even when it’s not always sweet.” Laura Daʼ (Eastern Shawnee) writes lyrically in “Perspective” that “Occasion divides time by tense / in an exacting sapphire blaze” as she alludes to the “sky door of the personal.”
The final poet in the book, Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), proceeds to explain in prose poem “38” that “The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hang- / ing, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln” the same week that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
The writing in “Native Voices” spirals outward as the poets revise traditional presentations of indigenous peoples. This anthology showcases strong, effective and lyrical writing. Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley (Onondaga) credits Gail Tremblay’s influence as his “ethno-spiritual clan mother” who has written in her own poem “Indian Singing in 20th Century America” that “We wake: we wake the day, / the light rising in us like sun” acknowledging that “we dance in two worlds.”
Tupelo Press, 2019
NATIVE VOICES invites us to immerse ourselves in the poems and essays of forty-four contemporary indigenous poets. Essays regarding writers who have influenced them add both background and gravitas.
The poems honor a past that resonates in Native DNA. Diane Clancy (Cherokee) writes in “The Bat House” that “Those voices have always been with me” and “I have been a controversial non-fit in both worlds.” Past and present resonate in Clancy’s “Without Title:”
It’s hard you know without the buffalo,
the shaman, the arrow,
but my father went out each day to hunt
as though he had them.
He worked in the stockyards.
All his life he brought us meat.
No one marked his first kill,
no one sang his buffalo song.
Deborah A. Miranda (Esselen / Chumash) casts us into the tragic reality of serial colonialism as she dispels the romanticized history of the Spanish Missions of old California. Miranda writes in her essay, “The Bones Speak: Excavation and Reunion” that “I didn’t grow up knowing that any Native writers existed.” Turn the pages and Miranda writes, “here are the voices that have been silenced, here is the ugly, gruesome truth.” She writes of historical erasure and “her “grief, ending in the quiet rage that comes on the heels of genocide.”
Many poems blend painful history with natural and urban imagery, such those of Sherwin Bitsui (Diné). In “Atlas”, “He sings an elegy for handcuffs, / whispers its moment of silence / at the crunch of rush-hour traffic.” Later in the poem, Bitsui asks, “How many Indians have stepped onto train tracks, /hearing the hoofbeats of horses / in the bend above the river?”
Cedar Sigo (Suquamish) reminds us in “Rant and Roll” by John Trudell, that “Life doesn’t have to be bitter / Even when it’s not always sweet.” Laura Daʼ (Eastern Shawnee) writes lyrically in “Perspective” that “Occasion divides time by tense / in an exacting sapphire blaze” as she alludes to the “sky door of the personal.”
The final poet in the book, Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), proceeds to explain in prose poem “38” that “The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hang- / ing, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln” the same week that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
The writing in “Native Voices” spirals outward as the poets revise traditional presentations of indigenous peoples. This anthology showcases strong, effective and lyrical writing. Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley (Onondaga) credits Gail Tremblay’s influence as his “ethno-spiritual clan mother” who has written in her own poem “Indian Singing in 20th Century America” that “We wake: we wake the day, / the light rising in us like sun” acknowledging that “we dance in two worlds.”
Mary Ellen Talley’s reviews have been published in Compulsive Reader and Sugar House Review, among others. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Raven Chronicles, Banshee, and Ekphrastic Review. A chapbook, “Postcards from the Lilac City,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.