pm 8'

The image/the pawnees

in their earth-lodge villages

the clear image

of teton sioux, wild

fickle people the chronicler says,

the crazy dogs, men tethered with leather dog-thongs to a stake, fighting until dead,

image: arikaras

with traded spanish sabre blades mounted on the long

heavy buffalo lances,

riding the sioux

down, the centaurs, the horsemen scouring the. level plains

in war or hunt

until smallpox got them,

4000 warriors

image of a desolate country,

a long way between fires, unfound lakes, mirages, cold rocks, and lone men going through it,

cree with good guns

creating terror in athabaska among the inhabitants, frightened stone-age people, “so that

they fled at the mere sight

of a strange smoke miles away.”

This western country crammed with the ghosts of indians, haunting the coastal stones & shores, the forested pacific islands, mountains, hills and plains:

beside the ocean ethlinga

man in the moon, empties

his bucket, on

a sign from Spirit

of the Wind ethlinga empties his bucket, refreshing the earth, and it rains

on the white cities;

that black joker, broken-

jawed raven, most prominent _ among haida and tsimshyan tribes, is in the kwakiutl

dance—masks too——

it was he who brought fire,

food and water to man,

the trickster;

and thunderbird hilunga,

little thought of

by haida for lack of thunderstorms in their district, goes

by many names, exquisite disguises carved in the painted wood,

reprinted from Notes for a Native Land edited by Andy Wainwright

what completeness

* ""7""'"”‘"UNRSITY OF PRINCETEDWARD;:I; r I'

THE PRIDE

by john newlovc

he is nootka tootoooh, the wings causing thunder and the tongue

or flashing eyes engendering

rabid white lightning,

whose food was whales,

called kwunusela by the kwakiutl, It was hewho laid down the house- logs for the people at Place

Where Kwunusela Alighted;

in full force and virtue

andl terror of the law, eagle— he is the authority, the. sun assumed his form. once,

the sun which used to be

a flicker’s- egg, success-

fully transformed;

and malevolence comes to the land, the wild woman of the woods; grinning she wears

a hummingbird in her hair, d’sonoqua, the furious one——

they are all ready

to be found, the legends

and the people, or

all their ghosts and memories. whatever is strong enough

to be remembered.

But what image, bewildered son of all men

under the hot sun,

do you worship,

do you hope to have \ from these tales,

a half-understood massiveness, mirage, in men’s minds—What is your purpose; \

with what force

will you proceed

along a line

neither straight nor short, whose future

you cannot know

or result foretell

whose meaning is still obscured as the incidents occur and accumulate?

The country moves on;

there are orchards in the interior, the mountain passes

are broken, the foothills

covered with cattle and fences, and the fading hills covered;

but the plains are bare,

not barren, easy

for me to love their people, for me to love their people without selection.

In 1737,, the old cree saukamappee aged 75 or thereabout, speaking then of things that had happened

when he was 16,

. just a man, told dlavid thompsom

of the raids the shoshonis,

the snakes, had made on the westward-reaching peigan,

of their war parties sometimes sent ten days’ journey to enemy camps, the men all afoot in battle array for the encounter, crouching '

behind their giant shields; ‘

V the peigan armed with guns , drove those snakes out of the plains,

the plains where their strength had! been,

. where they had been settled since

living memory (though nothing is remembered beyond. ' a grandfather’s time), to the west of the rookies;

these people moved without rest, backward and forward with the wind. the seasons, the game, great herds,

, in hunger and abundance—.

in summer and in the bloody fall they gathered on the killing grounds, fat and shining with fat, amused with the luxuries of war and death,

relieved from the stream of know- relieved from,~ the stream of

. knowledge, r

consoled by the stream of blood and stream rising from the fresh hides andi tired horses, wheeling in their pride on the sweating horses, ‘ their pride.

Those are all stories;

the pride, the grand poem

of our land, of the earth itself, will come, welcome and sought for, and found,

in a line of running verse, sweating, our pride:

we seize on

_-what has happened before,

one line only

~ will be enough

a single line and

the sunlit brilliant image suddenly floods us with understandinn , shocks our attentions, and all desire stops, stands alone;

we stand alone,

we are no longer lonely but have roots . and the rooted words

‘ recur in the mind, mirror, so that

wedeell on nothing else, in nothing else,

‘ touChed, repeating them,

at home freely atlas-t, in amazement;

‘ 7 v :r‘ r ‘ ’1 V _ .

“the unyielding phrase

in tune with the epoch.”

the thing made up

of our desires,

not of its words, not only

of them, but of something else, as well, that which we desire so ardently, that which

will not come when

it is summoned alone,

but grows in us

and idles about and hides until the moment is due—

the knowledge of

our origins, and where we are in truth, whose land this is

and is to be.

The unyielding phrase

when the moment is due, then It springs upon us

out of our own mouths, unconsideredi, overwhelming

in its knowledge, complete——

not this handful

of fragments, as the indians are not composed of

the romantic stories

about them, or of the’ stories they tell only, but

still ride the soil

in us, dry bones a part

of the dust in our eyes,

needed and troubling

in the glare, in

our breath, in our

ears, in our mouths,

in our bodies entire, in our minds, until at last we become them

in our desires, our desires mirages, mirrors, that, are theirs, hard-riding desires, and they become our true forebears, moulded by the same wind and rain, and in this land we

are their people, come back to life again.