Hello, I'm Robert Dale Parker of the Department of English and the program in

American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Before you signed up in this course, many of you have probably read at

list a little bit or heard about some of the most famous modern American poets,

T S Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost.

Probably few of you had any past experience with, or

perhaps past knowledge of, the American Indian poets from the same time.

Even those of you who may have read or

studied Native American literature Have usually learned only about

the great American Indian writers who emerged from the late 1960s on.

But there's a long history of American Indian writing and

a long history to American Indian poetry.

The first known American Indians to write poetry wrote at the same time

as the first known European settlers who wrote English language poetry and what is

now the United States in the middle of the 17th century, the time of Ann Bradstreet.

They were students at Harvard College and in those days to get into

Harvard you had to write poetry and you had to write it in Latin and in Greek.

To learn Latin and Greek, Indian students in the 1650s,

1660s and 70s had to learn English first.

And for an even bigger obstacle they had to survive English food,

and English people, and English germs.

Unfortunately, the survival rate was low, both for the students and for their poems.

And today, the poems of American Indians before the late

1960s are almost completely unknown even until recently,

to most scholars of American Indian literature.

I made it a project to recover these poems and now they are attracting readers.

There are many wonderful Indian poets from the 19th Century and from our own time.

Today, our project is to look at a small selection of poems

written by Indian poets in the age of Frost and Williams,

Eliot, and Stevens from the late 1890s to 1930.

I've selected sample poems from six poets.

Alex Posey, Carlos Montezuma, Pento, also known as Bertrand Walker,

Ruth Muskrat, Ausonius Chaleco, and Lynn Riggs.

For those who want to see these poems and hundreds of others,

I've collected them in this book which came out a few years ago.

A book named after one of the poems we'll look at today,

Changing is Not Vanishing: A collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930.

Our goal today is modest.

Simply to introduce you to these poems and

to the exciting challenge of thinking about them.

Our first poet, Alex Posey, was famous at the end of the 19th and

beginning of the 20th century both for his work as a poet and for

his work as a newspaper editor and a brilliant political columnist and

commentator on local politics.

Posey was Creek Muscogee from what is now Oklahoma and

he was active in Creek politics.

He was fluent in Creek, but didn't begin to learn English until age 14.

After that, he also studied Latin and Greek.

Newspapers around the country reprinted many of the poems that

Posey published in local newspapers but he did not seek a national audience.

He wrote for Indian country and

he passed up opportunities to publish his work more widely.

In 1908, at the age of 34,

Posey drowned in the North Canadian Aractahutchie River in Oklahoma.

He had grown up by that river and often swam in it, but

that day, a huge flood overtook him and

more than a 100 people watched unable to help as he slowly drowned.

Poesy had often written about that same river,

including this poem from 1897 called My Fancy.

Which strangely seems to anticipate the drowning

that he could never have expected.

Why do trees along the river lean so far out over the tide?

Very wise men tell me why, but I am never satisfied, and

so I keep my fancy still, that trees lean out to

save the drowning from the clutches of the cold remorseless wave.

I can't think of another poem that so fully merges a respect for

the freedom of imagination with the opposite of that freedom

in the locked in limits of inescapable finality.

On the one hand, this little poem, written in traditional ballad form,

verges on animating the trees by saying that they lean over the river.

Anthropomorphically imagining them almost as if they were people.

Why do they lean that way?

Posey or his speaker, tells us that wise men tell him,

but he doesn't tell us what they tell him.

He leaves that a mystery, and only tells us that that mystery is no match for

the greater mystery of our human incapacity,

to find the satisfaction that we search for to explain the world around us.

And to explain our difficulty in understanding that world.

Our lack of satisfaction quote, never satisfied,

unquote hangs over the poem almost as the trees hang over the river.

The rhyme of tide and

satisfied puts weight on that last accented syllable of satisfied.

A syllable that takes a long time to say, that has a long duration, and

that hangs out even more because of the colon that follows it.

Leaving us In suspense as the rhyme, the colon, the long duration and

the placement at the end of the line and quatrain all working together hold us

waiting to see in the rest of the poem What might respond to or

even compete with are our unsatisfied craving to understand.

The poem offers only one more rhyme, the closing rhyme that stops the poem and

concludes with a suddenness that, in the word wave another

accented syllable gives us another sound that takes a long time to say.

So that it hangs in the air like satisfied evoking through it's conclusiveness,

the cold, remorseless finality of the drowning that it describes.

Around 1900, the United States government intensified its pressure on

many Indian nations to give up communal ownership of their lands and

divide up or allot, communal lands into individual

parcels that governments could tax, and that white people could buy,

thus indirectly transferring Indian lands to white people.

In Posey's Creek Nation, a legendary and

charismatic leader, Chitto Harjo Arose to resist land allotment.

Chito Harjo's name was loosely translated into English as Crazy Snake and

his followers were known as Crazy Snakes.

In the fall 1900 Chito Harjo's setup an alternative Muskogee Government.

And in January, 1901, federal troops arrested him and other snake leaders.

In response, Posey wrote the following powerful poem that I for

one find extremely difficult to interpret.

On the Capture and Imprisonment of Crazy Snake.

Down with him, chain him, bind him fast.

Slam too, the iron door and turn the key.

The one true Creek.

Perhaps, the last to dare declare you have wronged me.

Defiant, stoical, silent, suffers imprisonment.

Such coarse black hair, such eagle eyes, such stately mien,

how arrow straight, such will, such courage to defy the powerful

makers of his fate a traitor, outlaw, what you will.

He is the noble red man's still.

Condemn him and his kind to shame.

I bow to him, exalt his name.

This poem does contradictory, fascinating things.

But to see them, and to find a way through them,

we may need to look first at its language and tone.

When Posey says, slam too the iron door,

he uses a now dated expression that simply means shut or slam the door.

We have a photograph of some of the Crazy Snakes in jail a few years

later in 1905 and it's chilling.

Surely Posey does not approve of throwing Crazy Snake and his followers in jail.

On the contrary, these first two lines are sarcastic.

As the poem goes along then,

it gets difficult to tell when the sarcasm comes and when it goes.

When Poesy calls Crazy Snake a traitor and

an outlaw, does he mean those terms sarcastically as well?

Crazy Snake could hardly be a traitor to the United States when he and

other Native Americans in most cases couldn't be citizens of the United States.

For Crazy Snake and his followers to act as a so-called traitor to the Federal

government because you don't want it redistributing your people's lands,

means acting as a loyalist to a more traditional form

of the Creek Muscogee Nation and its cultural traditions.

And so when Posey concludes, condemn him and his kind to shame.

He calls on sarcasm again to underline how really he wants

as in the last line to bow to him and exalt his name.

In these ways this seems like a powerful poem of resistance to colonial conquest.

But again, the tone gets tricky making it hard to tell where

the sarcasm begins and ends.

When Posey calls Chitto Harjo Crazy Snake the one true Creek,

perhaps the last, he paints Crazy Snake through a condescending cliche

of traditional Indian leaders and cultures as if there can be only one leader.

And as if that one leader must always be the last,

because like last of the Mohicans the stereotype sees Indians and

Indian cultures as always vanishing over the horizon into the past and

unable to survive into the modernity of the present.

It's remarkable how many Indians have been called the last Indian and that

senseless paradox might seem revealingly funny if it weren't also cruel.

If it didn't try to erase the cultures that it also tries to memorialize.

In that way, this poem terribly oversimplifies Crazy Snake.

It sounds similarly stereotypical when it calls him stoical, silent,

and The Noble Redman.

On the other hand, what if we say those lines as more sarcasm?

As making fun of people who box their thought into those stereotypical cliches.

It's hard to tell whether to read those words

as sarcastically mocking the stereotype or as sadly caving into it.

We might even read Posey's poem to some extent as caught up in the stereotype and

as mocking it at the same time.

There's no reason why a poem or

the emotions it represents must go only in one direction.

People are more complicated than that.

We could understand why to some extent, Posey might have absorbed

the cliche anti Indian stereotypes and prejudices that circulated so

widely So widely around him even as an other ways he stood up for

Indian rights and culture specially for the creek nation.

In the same vein when he goes on to a rave of appreciatively

about Crazy Snakes cores black hair with an exclamation point,

he may genuinely speak with an exoticizing admiration.

Or he may sarcastically voice the exoticizing admiration of condescending

white outsiders.

In what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has called Imperialist Nostalgia,

such outsiders from the security of their position of conquest seem

eager to proclaim their admiration for cultures they trample over.

But only after they imagine that they or the government and

the culture they go along with have already destroyed it.

15 years later, in 1916 The Yavapai political activist Carlos Montezuma

who graduated from the University of Illinois in Chemistry in 1884,

and then completed an MD in Chicago wrote against that same idea of the vanishing

Indian that seems to have inflected Posey's poem about Crazy Snake.

Today Matism is remembered for his political activism.

He published a political journal called Wassaja

which was Montezuma's Yavapai name.

And in that journal he included his own striking political poems

such as this one called Changing is Not Vanishing.

Who says the Indian race is vanishing?

The Indians will not vanish.

The feathers, paint, and moccasins will vanish.

But the Indians, never.

Just as long as there is a drop of human blood in America,

the Indians will not vanish.

His spirit is everywhere.

The Indian will not vanish.

He has changed externally but he has not vanished.

He is an industrial and

commercial man competing with the world he has not vanished.

Wherever you see an Indian upholding the standard of his race,

there, you see the Indian man, he has not vanished.

The man part of the Indian is here, there and everywhere.

The Indian race vanishing?

No, never.

The race will live on and prosper forever.

In language which most of us wouldn't use today,

Montezuma represents all Indians as if they were men.

Even so, he fiercely opposes the stereotype that sees Indians and

Indian culture as locked in the past and

unable to adapt to, join, and help make modernity.

As a medical doctor, Montezuma felt just as modern as anyone else and

no less Indian for his maternity.

Where Posy wrote in rhyme and meter, Montezuma wrote in the long,

unmetered, and unrhymed lines that he found in the poems of Walt Whitman.

To him, that probably felt like the language of his own time.

The language of the modern.

In another poem in the year 1917 Montezuma wrote with great skepticism

about American Indians signing up to fight with the American Army in World War I

when Indians were still not citizens of the United States.

Fight for your country and flag, he wrote, is noble and grand.

But have you a country, is that your flag?

On the contrary he proclaimed to Indian readers they have taken your country.

Nevertheless, a great many Indian soldiers signed up to fight and

many of them fought with bravery and skill.

Many Indian nations felt enormous pride for their citizens who fought in

World War One and there remains today a powerful tradition of pride and

the Indian people who have joined the United States Armed forces.

As you can see for example at any contemporary pow-wow,

a learned Wyandot poet, who published under his Wyandot name,

Hento, and also went by the name Bertrand N.O.

Walker, wrote a poem, first published in his 1924 book of poems.

In the voice of a Wyandot man whose friend has gone off to fight in War War I.

Hento wrote some of his poems including this one in the colloquial language

of those Wyandots who had less book education than he had.

People who spoke a working class English

inflected by the grammar of the Wyandot language.

To JWC and his leaving for Army during The Great War.

You my friend no difference what say anyone.

If i seen you now, or don't see for years, you know reason taint when I done,

you could look my eye don't see a tears, when you said it goodbye.

You my partner, you said it one time.

It's long ago but me, I don't forget.

If you go flat bust and I got one dime, I know we can find nickel I bet or

maybe ten cent.

It's just that way all time me and you.

We been known each other, how you say.

Well I don't care 400 snakes what you do.

Even you tell at me, you go Hell, I could do it, easy.

You come back war trail, it be just same.

Kind of smile and said it, you my partner yet.

I just look at you and said it you name, maybe so

wink it, then said it, you bet, I don't forgot nothing.

Posey, sometimes read in a similar way using Greek English, and

his writing probably influenced Hen-toh.

Posey in turn, and perhaps Hen-toh, drew on the popularity of so

called dialect writing in the late 19th century.

Most famous today in the writings of Mark Twain such as Huckleberry Finn and

the poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

I especially like the humor when the speaker says that if his friend goes flat

bust and the speaker still has one dime, he would let his friend have a nickel and

then seems to realize that he may have compromised his proclamation of devotion

by saying just a nickel.

And so, he changes his mind, and

says after all his friends could have ten cents, maybe.

With poignant and direction, we also get a sad hint of incompletion.

We hear about the friend that leaving to fight in the Great War.

But we never hear that he survives to come back home.

Native American Poetry from the 1890s to 1930 (Part 1)

Modern American Poetry

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