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An artifact.
The shards of things
Their hands have held
And used
And laid aside
Remains.
I touch a fragment of their days.
by Edith Purevich

 

A gathering of wounds to strengthen our spirits:

Reading A Gathering of Spirit, A Collection by North American Indian Women
edited by Beth Brant (Degonwadonti), published by Firebrand Books in 1984. All works copyrighted by the authors.

 

I Am Not the Woman I Am
by Diane Glancy

You are looking at my ghost,
not the woman I am, nor even was
when prairie buckled under black wagons, clammed
shut the grip of plains.
The yellow flowers, the curd of watery faces;
wagons like fish on banks, flopping,
gulping for last breath. Our men watched them
from the hill; we hear the talk of their silvery
breath.
Our broken tribes weep on spirit trails where the man
with a sword in his gizzard and outspread arms
calls us to the prairie's rusted gate.

 

The pain of American Indian women springs fully felt from the pages of A Gathering of Spirit. It is the pain of a holocaust that continues to this day.

Indian people see with their own eyes what we know only from words in the back pages of a newspaper, that the waters beneath their ancient Sioux lands in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, are polluted with radioactive uranium and 60-70 percent of children born in 1979 suffered breathing problems caused by underdeveloped lungs, as Winona La Duke reports in an interview reprinted from the magazine Science for the People. And it continues today at Big Mountain in Arizona, where the Dine people try to hang on to ancestral lands that are being taken from them for uranium mining.

Indian people remember when they were chased off the barren lands the white men had given them with one day's notice, so that the Army could have use the place for bombing practice, as told in "Grandma's Story," movingly retold by Lynn Randall.

Indian people remember, as Jews remember, children roughly removed by men in uniform, sent away on trains to attend government schools to be robbed not only of their family but of their heritage. So Beth Brant recalls in tears that dampen the page the loss of her own daughter to her white father's family because Beth is not only Indian but a lesbian. In "A Long Story" she juxtaposes her own terrible loss with the story of the wholesale removal of Indian children a century ago:

I would have killed him if I'd had the chance. He took her hand and pulled her to the car. The look in his eyes of triumph. I know he will teach her to hate us. He will! I see her dear face. Her face looking out the back window of his car. Her mouth forming the words over and over . . . Mommy Mama.

These are the stories of our own worst nightmares, and so, as women reading the words of women, we come not only to know but to feel deeply in our wombs that are the same as these wombs the violation &endash; the unending sequence of violations &endash; that has been patriarchy's legacy.

Ah, but we are prosperous now, here in white America, and the streets are clean, and the markets are full of foods from around the world, and we can buy whatever we want, those of us who have the dollars to buy them, us, the liberated women with jobs and careers and some sort of independent means; and young women say they take their rights for granted now, so much has been accomplished.

But if we read the strong words collected here in A Gathering of Spirits like some potent brew ripening in the cellar of our suburban dream house, we are stirred to realize that it is not yet done, the suffering and the pain, the cynical disregard for the sacred wisdom of our woman's bodies, the reckless violation of the spirit of the native peoples who know the value of the land, who are given no opportunity to forget what was done to them because it is still going on!

In these beautiful stories and poems, the language is often incantatory like stories told by the fire in the hogan on a wintry night, the tales of the people that sound like the beautiful voice of Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook speaking at the Bioneers Conference last October about the beautiful victory of returning to the birthing practices of her people. [link]

Here is Linda Hogan describing in "New Shoes" the breaking heart of an impoverished Indian mother trying to raise a daughter alone, for whom a meat loaf dinner is a rare luxury:

Saving things when the girl wanted something pretty to hold now and to touch. No good. A mother and daughter alone in the city, no good. It was what happened when you married a man who drove up in the heat of summer after being gone two years and you had to tell him about the death of his son and then you wept and went away with the man, going anywhere just to get out of that desolate place and the heat. Just to get out of that place where your uncle had come drunk and shot his wife, the place where your cousin sold off everything you owned one day just to buy a bottle and then tried to kiss your neck. Not that it was much to look at, but he sold it off to a young couple in a pickup truck that looked like they came from back east. And you went away with the white man and he went into the army. So the hawk would say.

A chant of grief.

Not every poem is as good as another, but by and large most of the writings in this collection speak their truth with a power that cuts straight to the heart &endash; through the gut. To read this collection is to remember within one's body (where real knowing resides) what it is that happened many long years ago when those Kurgan warriors clattered on horseback into the peaceful villages of Old Europe, scattering women and children like so many flies on a rotten carcass and setting their fields on fire, as Mary Mackey has described in her vivid book, When the Horses Came.

That thundering murdering invasion of humanity's ancient hearth is our shared experience, which spawned the White Man's ravaging stampede across this continent. And if we, the daughters and wives of the murderers, find ourselves one step removed or more from the horror of what the Indians suffered directly, none of us has been spared.

The suffering of the native peoples throughout this world is a dreadful sacrifice that has been forced upon them by the same marauding hordes as the Nazis were. Their terrible losses, and the pain of those who continue to witness such crimes, must be held sacred by those of us who were spared. Until we feel in our bellies and bones the pain of every rape victim, we will not be able to access the collective power we need as women to stop the devastation which fiendishly ensures the prosperity of the nation, nor arrive at the wisdom of how we may rebuild the edifice of culture on the more fertile soil of respect and decency. The great clan mothers have much to teach us. This book and others like it should be required reading in our schools, that women may remember and all men heed the bloody lessons of history not as it was written by the victors but as it has been lived.

 

This woman that I am becoming
is a combination of the woman that I am
and was
this journey backward will help me
to walk forward

Sister
the rape of a woman
is the rape of the earth
the rape of a child
the rape of the universe

As i voice these words
i watch you turn your well-kept
Sunday morning presence
from this body that is heavy
with emotion

...

Sister
hear me now
let us take this
journey together.

From the poem "this woman I am becoming" by Marcie Rendon (Awanewquay)

 

 

Order A Gathering of Spirit directly from the publisher, Firebrand Books.

All quotations made with the permission of the publisher, including the reprinting of Marilou Awiakta's powerful essay, "Amazons in Appalachia," reprinted here >>>>>next.

 

Order Mary Mackey's trilogy based on Marija Gimbutas' studies of Old Europe from Powell's Independent Bookstore!

 

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