Words like Thunder

New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers

Lois Beardslee

• Editore: Wayne State University Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780814347492
• Argomento: Literatura
• Categoria: Poesía

Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers is a collection of poetry by award-winning Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee. Much of the book centers around Native people of the Great Lakes but has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide. Beardslee tackles contemporary topics like climate change and socioeconomic equality with a grace and readability that empowers readers and celebrates the strengths of today's indigenous peoples. She transforms the mundane into the sacred. Similar in style to Nikki Giovanni, Beardslee might lure in readers with the promise of traditional cultural material, even stereotypes, before quickly pivoting toward a direction of respect for the contemporaneity and adaptability of indigenous people's tenacious hold on traditions. Made up of four sections, the book is like a piece of artwork. Parts of the word-canvas are quiet so the reader can rest and other parts lead the reader quickly from one place to another, while always maintaining eye contact. More than anything, Beardslee emphasizes the notion that indigenous peoples are competent and wonderful, worthy of praise, and whose modernity is a function of their survival. She writes unapologetically with a strong ethnic identity as a woman of color who witnessed and experienced community loss of resources that defined her culture. Her stories transcend generations, time, and geographical boundaries—varying in voice between first person or that of her elders or children—resulting in a collective appeal. Beardslee continues to break the mold and push the boundaries of contemporary Native American poetry and prose. This book will appeal to a general readership, to people who want to learn more about indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes, and to people who care about the environment and socioeconomic equality. Even young readers, especially students of color, will find parts of this book to which they can relate.

GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF HEARTS AND LUNGS OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Geography

Somewhere outside of Minneapolis,

Where a soft prairie hill was scooped away to level a parking lot

Back behind the casino . . .

There is a long sandy ravine

That curls its way downward to the river that goes on forever.

Under desiccated roots of small, stranded jack pines,

West Wind and North Wind lean against opposing sandbanks.

Their knees are bent,

And their wide winter work boots rest flat against frozen clay.

The old blue enamel coffeepot is propped up over coals

By three glacial stones

As smooth as a loving woman’s lips,

Each balanced in perfect harmony with the tilt of prairie demands

Upon curving soils and incessant winds.

West Wind suggests a smoke,

But North Wind says, no, better save the red willows

For making dream catchers to sell at pow wows,

. . . For making gas money to their next destination,

Where their extended families might be in need of a satisfying breeze.

West Wind and North Wind are playing three-handed pinochle with a dummy hand,

Because the Anishinaabeg have been scattered about

So far in every direction,

Some even as far south as Oklahoma, says North Wind.

West Wind says he heard that the Kickapoo got to Oklahoma,

Then decided to keep going just across the border to Mexico,

Where brown Indian men and women fell in love with them

And wrapped their arms around them.

Now they build their wigwams out of red cedar

Instead of elm and birch barks;

They eat fatty seeds from cholla and rich pine nuts

Instead of beechnuts and hazelnuts from wide water basins.

The Kickapoo, who named themselves after lake-effect snows

At the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan’s watershed,

Now dance in circles of desert sands.

They sing in a soft blend of Anishinaabemowin and Spanish, he says.

And the two old men snigger,

As they have never learned the European tongues that sound to them jumbled

Like waves tumbling boulders of ice

Into pebbles that melt away

Like change in old men’s pockets.

North Wind has pneumonia, has had it for months.

His laughter morphs

Into wild fits and short gasps as he croups up sputum,

Turns his head toward Indiana steel mills,

Where prairies flatten into the southern basins of Great Lakes and waterways.

He’d been gifted the illness by a child in Traverse City

Who had stuffed a finger inside her congested nostril,

Then handed the old man a store-bought cookie

In lieu of opportunity.

One time, North Wind ambled out into a broad parking lot where buffalo once grazed above twin bays in the wake of wildfires.

There, he sought out others who had been afflicted,

Asking for their remedies, like spare change

On the salty paved floors between grocery carts and rusted pickup trucks.

He volunteered for recess duty at an elementary school

Where children’s eyes weeped,

And their infected windpipes constricted to make them howl

Like coyotes filling a niche

Where wolf cubs once slid behind tall pines.

He peeked into a teacher’s lounge

And smiled at a young Scandinavian,

Asked if she knew how to cure

Lack of access to fresh, cool air.

She told him to use his paid sick leave

To visit a physician

Who would cure him with expensive herbal teas from distant laboratories

And textbooks about tolerating diversity.

But the old man only had high-deductible health insurance

That paid for nothing.

Healers had always prayed to him . . .

To deliver fresh white blankets of respite to hillsides exhausted by endless growth.

His strength was the throwing of fresh, soft snowfalls

At children in need of fireside arms to comfort them

With long lessons about history

And how to twist fibers into survival and memories.

For the next three hundred years,

North Wind stumbled about with his head down,

In and out among jack pines and summer cottages

On the peripheries of each of the watersheds,

With nickels jangling in his pockets like muffled wind chimes.

He wanted to sleep

Or to pass on his responsibilities,

But he had made a commitment

To deliver his services predictably and infinitely.

He swam through dense water’s edge balsams,

Parting northern airs in a rippling breaststroke,

At each Anishinaabe village slipping into a kitchen chair

By the cookstoves of knowledge keepers and clan elders,

Instructing each to lean forward, double over,

Soft, giving, and invisible

Until limited opportunities flowed from their lungs to the tops of tall spruce trees;

But he inadvertently spread the virus like kindness.

The old men used to have a fish camp

On the north shore of Lake Superior,

Where they rested in doldrums between rainstorms

And stockpiled birch logs and fragrant balsam.

Summers, South Wind would join them,

The three playing three-handed pinochle,

Shuffling and dealing out barometric pressures,

Waiting for the Anishinaabeg to finish harvesting wild blueberries and rice . . .

So that they could play doubles with pairs

Teamed up against one another,

Opposing forces and neediness battling for matchsticks

With childish smiles on their faces.

The three old men would strip down to their long johns,

Shuffling and bidding on the next season’s windstorms.

They left the kitchen table long enough

To scatter fish eggs and pollen

While they chewed on long strips of dry, smoked lake trout.

South Wind stopped coming after de Soto came up the Mississippi

Spreading measles and smallpox

To unsuspecting villages

Where his soldiers had been greeted with smiles and fresh oysters.

It was all South Wind could do to cope with the decomposing bodies.

He wanted to cover each of his relatives’ eyes and ears

With clamshells and love songs,

To bury them under undulating earth ...