"Poetry is a way of reaching out to what is reaching for you" -- Survival This Way, Interviews with American Indian Poets, Vol. 15 by Joseph Bruchac / The Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie / Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan / and others

American Poetry Review, The, Jul 1995 by Cliff, Michelle

To begin: Before Contact; there were in the Western Hemisphere of this planet an estimate

When a people are destroJred where does their sound go? Where does the noise of their poetry escape to?

Whose dreams are cut intc> that rock, a spiral, a flute-player, a snake bird?

I can stare into the landsc;spe of this country and not lmow what I am looking at.

I am watching the news on Memorial Day. Amid the excitement of D-Day, the spectacle of now-old men scaling the bluffs along Omaha Beach, the anchorman offers his viewers a surprise. A new head is being dynamited into Mount Rushmore. The head is Crazy Horse; he will be completed by the turn of the century. Any irony--that this is Memorial Day, that the Omaha were among the 2000, that Crazy Horse was one Indian who refused to have his image captured by the whiteman, that in Indian eyes the blasting into this particular landscape is sacrilege--is lost on this anchorman. Th camera pans to the almost-finished head, *title quote from Simon Ortiz, i.n an interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way. where a generic redman looks out over the Black Hills. Ersatz Crazy Horse might as well be on a baseball cap, a football helmet, in the doorway of a tobacco store, cast in iron, as hood ornament. To add insult to injury, look who he's got for company.

Actual Crazy Horse believed that the worid which is apparent to us, the world which we wake to, is not the real world at all. He believed that to enter the real world one had to enter one's dreams. He took the name Crazy Horse for himself because in the real world of his dreaming the horses were out-of-control, wild, unbroken--crazy.

Lance Henson, in Joseph Bruchac's collection of interviews with Indian poets, Survival this Way, speaks to dreaming.

"I...like to deal with the relationship between growing darkness and growing light, the dusk and the dawn, those times when there is a chance to see transition....The dream is a connection, another transitional time. An example would be light coming into the world at dawn. In dreams we sometimes can see resemblances of where we really came from, whether we can explain it or not."

Dreaming may be a glimpse into the Great Silence out of which we come, it may be a way into memory, past. Dreaming may be a way to wrap the imagination around an unimaginable history. The Indian writer needs to reckon with the past again and again. Re-enacting the past is part of the process of decolonization. To confront this history means oniy survival, as Simon Ortiz notes:

There are still those preseures on Indian people to hide and not to allow ourselvee to see....I know that when you tell the truth it's a political ect. When you acknowledge history and point out euch thinge as Sand Creek--maybe nobody wants to hear about Sand Creek--it is a politieal statement and the truth. It is neceseary to tallr about it beeause it is a political statement and the truth. It is necessary to tallr about it because it's a part of how we are going to live, how we are going to fulfill ourselves on that journey....If we don't, there will always be a black blot, e dark spot in our minds. There will be a continued sicknese if you don't tallr about it.l

When Ortiz casts his imagination back to Sand Creek, he places himself in the landscape and time collapses. Sand Creek is now and he is there.

At the Salvation Army

a clerk

caught me

wandering

among old spoons

and knives,

sweaters and shoes.

I couldn 't have stolen anything;

my life was stolen already.

protest though,

I should have stolen.

My life. My life.

She caught me;

Carson caught Indians,

secured them with his lies.

Boud them with his belief:

After winter,

our ourn lives fled.

I reassured her

what she believed

Bought a sweater.

And fZed.

I should have stolen.

My life. My life.

(From "Sand Creek")

Edouard Glissant spealrs of the necessity that the writer engaged in a political struggle of imagination "introduce temporarily a form of despair which is not resignation. Exhausting this despair...means reopening the wound....Therein does not lie pessimism, but the ultimate resource of whoever writes and wishes to fight on his [herl own terrain."(2)

Sherman Alexie is a dazzling writer who does what Glissant describes. He lays bare a terrain of reservation housing, commodity food, 7-11s, fancydancing, pick-up trucks, tequila, IHS casualties. He joins past with present, as does Ortiz, as do many Indian writers; Crazy Horse works

in the 7-11, Crazy Horse, in Alexie's "Crazy Horse Dreams," Part III of The Busiltess ofFoncydancing, returns to the reservation from Vietnam: Crazy Norse asks the Bartender for a beer free, because he's some color of hen, although he doesn't know ifits red or white because there are no mirrors in the bush, only eyes tracing paths through the air, eyes tean'ng into the chest, searching for the heart. Cmty Horse selks his medals when he goes broke, buys a doz en beers and dn'nks them oll, tells the Barteluler he's short on time now, """"' """"" ("War All the Time") Eyes in a firefight searching to tear the heart from the chest, searching for the heart buried in the frozen earth of Wounded Knee where ghostdancers waited for his spirit to rise in the spring.