780 The American Century: Literature since 1945A historical sense of dispossession, the search for a place and past rooted in the
oral tradition, the presence and pleasure of a communal identity coextensive with
the land, the transformative power of language: these themes sounded in the poetry
of Simon Ortiz are common in contemporary Native American writing. The writers
speak them, however, and other themes, in a variety of voices. The poetic voice of
Roberta Hill Wideman (1947–), for instance, a member of the Oneida tribe, is
quieter, more indirect and economical. “Indians know how to wait,” she writes in
“Lines for Marking Time” (1984); and her poems reveal the rewards of waiting,
patient attention to a particular event or object – a house and museum (“In the
Longhouse, Oneida Museum” (1984)), a familiar street (“Scraps Worthy of Wind”
(1984)) – as a preliminary to emotional release and discovery. “I think we (Indian
people) ... have an intuitive sense of our own exile,” Wideman has said. “But it is
never dealt with.” She adds “there’s no comment on it”; “we know this emotionally
and spiritually and we understand it.” That understanding feeds into poems that
capture the larger narratives of history in small nuances of event and feeling. So, in
“Underground Water” (1984), a child who “awaking, takes the long way home” to his
parents’ bed becomes a paradigm, an emblem of exile and the comforts of
community: compulsions and consolations that have a general resonance, but also a
particular, pressing relevance for the Oneida and other Native American peoples
that are the poet’s main subject. As the title of her collection Star Quilt (1984)
intimates, Wideman sees her project as a weaving together of the apparently trivial
and mundane into significant pattern: a knitting together of the scraps and fragments
of memory into forms that invite revelation.
While sharing certain themes in common with Ortiz and Wideman, the poetic
voice of Wendy Rose (1948–) is, in turn, different from either. Of mixed Hopi,
Miwok, English, Scottish, Irish, and German extraction, Rose also reaches out in her
work (a useful selection of which is to be found in Bone Dance: New and Selected
Poems, 1965–1992 (1994)) to women of any race, although particularly to those of
mixed-blood origin like herself. “Remember I am a garnet woman,” one of her
poems called “If I Am Too Brown or Too White for You” (1985) begins. Through a
series of linked images, of woman, water, stories, and jewels, Rose then explores the
fluid nature of her identity and the chance song gives her to celebrate what she calls
here the “small light / in the smoke, a tiny son / in the blood” – “so deep / it is there
and not there, / so pure / it is singing.” That light is a crystalline clarity of self that,
for so many women like her, so often remains secret, unacknowledged. It is up to
Rose, as she sees it, to lay bare the secret. Some poems turn from the lyrical to the
historical, using a historical occasion to declare a humanity that has been consistently
denied. In “To the Hopi in Richmond (Santa Fe Village)” (1985), for example, it is
what Rose calls “my people my pain” that supplies the impulse, as she records how a
colony of Hopi were dispossessed and denied, carried away in boxcars to help build
a railroad. In “Julia” (1985) the subject is the plight of one woman, a Mexican Indian
of the nineteenth century known as the Ugliest Woman in the World. A carnival
performer, she was married eventually to her manager, who wanted to protect his
investment; when she died, he had her body stuffed and mounted, so that she couldGGray_c05.indd 780ray_c 05 .indd 780 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM