SOURCE: "You May Consider Speaking about Your Art …," in I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, pp. 56-63.

[In the following essay, Cook-Lynn discusses the reasons she became a writer, her poetic themes, and her use of Indian myth and history in her poetry.]

Ever since I learned to read, I have wanted to be a writer.

I was born in the Government Hospital at Fort Thompson, South Dakota, in 1930, and when I was a "child of prairie hawks" (Seek the House of Relatives), I lived out on the Crow Creek (a tributary of the James and the Missouri) in what anthropologists like to call "an extended family." And I loved to read.

Reading, if it is not too obvious to say so, precedes writing, though I teach college students today who are examples of an apparently opposing point of view. They have read nothing.

On the contrary, I read everything: the Sears catalog, Faust, Dick and Jane, Tarzan of the Apes, The Scarlet Letter, the First Letter to the Corinthians, David Copperfield, "The Ancient Mariner," Dick Tracy, "Very Like a Whale," Paradise Lost, True Confessions, and much more. I went to whatever libraries were available as often as I went anywhere.

But I read nothing about the Dakotapi. Much later I took a history course at South Dakota State College called "The Westward Movement," and there was not one mention of Indian Nations! I keep the text for that course on my own library shelf as a marvelous example of scholarly ineptitude and/or racism.

Wanting to write comes out of that deprivation, though, for we eventually have to ask, what happens to a reasonably intelligent child who sees him or herself excluded from a world which is created and recreated with the obvious intent to declare him or her persona non grata? Silence is the first reaction. Then there comes the development of a mistrust of that world. And, eventually, anger.

That anger is what started me writing. Writing, for me, then, is an act of defiance born of the need to survive. I am me. I exist. I am a Dakotah. I write. It is the quintessential act of optimism born of frustration. It is an act of courage, I think. And, in the end, as Simon Ortiz says, it is an act that defies oppression.

In those early days, even though I had a need to write—that is, survive—I lived in a world in which the need to write was not primary. The need "to tell," however, was. And so I listened and heard about a world that existed in the flesh and in the imagination, too, and in the hearts and minds of real people. In those days I thought the world was made up of "Siouxs" and "Wasichus" [whites].

It is this dichotomous nature of the real world and the literary world and, yes, the present world that accounts for the work I do. It is the reason I call myself a Dakotah poet, however hesitantly I accept the label, however unclear the responsibilities that come with that label.

The best way to begin a philosophical discussion concerning the nature and substance of the work of a contemporary Dakotah poet is to admit, oddly enough, to a certain kind of timidity and lack of confidence and to conclude by saying that I do not speak for my people.

First of all, one must be timid because there is the consideration that poets have a tendency to think too much of themselves. It is quite possible that we poets think we are more significant, more important than we are; that the events we choose to signal as important for one reason or another are, after all, something else; that the statements and interpretations we have given to these events are mistaken and/or irrelevant.

Second, the idea that poets can speak for others, the idea that we can speak for the dispossessed, the weak, the voiceless, is indeed one of the great burdens of contemporary American Indian poets today, for it is widely believed that we "speak for our tribes." The frank truth is that I don't know very many poets who say, "I speak for my people." It is not only unwise; it is probably impossible, and it is very surely arrogant, for We Are Self-Appointed and the self-appointedness of what we do indicates that the responsibility is ours and ours alone.

Therein lies another dichotomy: I claim to be a Dakotah poet by disclaiming that I speak for my people.

I am not greatly surprised that this dichotomy does not exist for the "real" poets of our tribes, the men and women who sit at the drum and sing the old songs and create new ones. That is an entirely different matter, for it remains communal. Thus, when I hear the poetry of the Crown Butte Singers, the Porcupine Travelers, and the Wahpekute Singers, I have every confidence that they speak in our own language for the tribes, Oyate.

"A Poet's Lament: Concerning the Massacre of American Indians at Wounded Knee" is a good example to use to discuss and illustrate the problems that I see involved in the matter of responsibility for a poet like me, one who writes English, using contemporary forms.

This poem describes what was and is a very public event. Yet as a self-appointed poet I bring my own perceptions into this tribal event even as I am aware of the public nature of the event and the history that surrounds it. The private histories which do not rely upon the written word, research, and text are a part of that perception.

       All things considered, they said,
       Crow Dog should be removed.
       With Sitting Bull dead
       It was easier said.
 
       And so the sadly shrouded songs of poets,
       Ash-yellowed, crisp with age
       arise from drums to mark in fours
       three times the sacred ways
       that prayers are listened for; an infant girl stares
       past the night, her beaded cap of buckskin brightens
       Stars and Stripes that pierce
       her mother's breast; Hokshina, innocent
       as snow birds, tells of Ate's blood as red as plumes
       that later decorate the posts of death.
 
       "Avenge the slaughtered saints," beg mad-eyed
       poets everywhere as if the bloody Piemontese are real
       and really care for liberty of creed; the blind
       who lead the blind will consecrate the Deed, indeed!
 
       All things considered, they said,
       Crow Dog should be removed.
       With Sitting Bull dead
       It was easier said.

In this specific case I mean to suggest that it is the responsibility of a poet like me to "consecrate" history and event, survival and joy and sorrow, the significance of ancestors and the unborn; and I use one of the most infamous crimes in all of human history, which took place against a people who did not deserve to be butchered, to make that responsibility concrete. Only recently has the mainstream of American society been confronted with the monstrous nature of this historical act and others like it, but Indians have always known it.

The ceremony I describe in the second stanza really did occur, I'm told; the people and the warriors gathered within hours after the dreadful killing, and they swept into the grounds and guarded their dead, placing twelve red-draped markers at the perimeters of the site. I don't know if this is "true." I wasn't a witness. I have not read any account of it. Surely, though, in the memories of the people, this ceremony took place in order to consecrate the event. And the poem that I write in English and in contemporary form, and the songs that continue to rise from drums in Dakota and in traditional forms a century later, recreate that consecration. That is what I mean to hold on to when I talk of responsibility in the creative process.

It is no accident that I refer to the number "twelve" to record this event in sacred terms, for that number figures prominently in sacred ritual. It is no accident that I begin and end with the names of Sitting Bull and Crow Dog, both religious leaders of the people, because I mean to deliberately place this event which is usually described in military terms into the religious context to which it speaks.

Ceremony, in literary terms, can be said to be that body of creative expression which accounts for the continued survival and development of a people, a nation. In this instance, it relies upon ancient symbols which are utilized spontaneously in a communal effort to speak with the givers of prayers, to recall the knowledge about life and death that has its origins in mythology and imagination.

The people who gathered to perform this ceremony a hundred years ago did so at risk of their lives. It was then and remains now an important commitment to nationhood and culture. They imagined the grief of the Unktechies who arose from the water, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, to give the people a religion and then went deep into the Earth to listen for the sounds of our drums, songs, poetry, and prayers. The people wept and sang of their own grief and sorrow.

Years ago when I was twenty and I first started sending out my poems, an editor wrote on an acceptance letter a question that has haunted me for the rest of my so-called career as a poet. She asked, "WHY is Native American poetry so incredibly sad?"

Now I recognize it as a tactless question asked out of astounding ignorance. It reflects the general American attitude that American Indians should have been happy to have been robbed of their lands and murdered. I am no longer intimidated, as I once was, by that question, and I make no excuses for the sorrow I feel in my heart concerning recent history. I do not apologize for returning to those historical themes, for that is part of the ceremonial aspect of being a Dakotah poet.

Attending to ceremonial matters as a writer does not mean, however, that I am not writing about myself. Quite the opposite is true. There is a self-absorption in my work which is inherent in my survival as a person, and my identity as a Dakotah. This self-absorption has always been a part of tradition, I think, for Dakotahs, in spite of the pervasive articulation in recent times of the idea that the Indian "self" was somehow unimportant; that Indians have been absorbed in the contemplation of the natural world, readily giving themselves up to it, mastered by it philosophically as well as physically; that submission to environment dominates American Indian life and belief.

This overstatement has been handy for the perpetuation of the longed-for nineteenth-century idea concerning the ultimate and expected disappearance of Natives and Native America from this continent. It is convenient to suggest from this imagined obsession with the natural world that the American Indian would become an artifact, too unreal and obsolete for survival in the modern world. The Indian's "journey," then, as a race of people, would be concluded.

The function of contemporary American poetry is to disavow that false notion.

One of what I consider my best poems is entitled, "Journey," and it is an attempt to express that disavowal:

       I. DREAM
 
                              Wet, sickly
       smells of cattle yard silage fill the prairie air
       far beyond the timber; the nightmare only just
       begun, a blackened cloud moves past the sun
       to dim the river's glare, a malady of modern times.
                              We prayed
       to the giver of prayers and traveled to the spirit
       mounds we thought were forever; awake, we feared that
       hollow trees no longer hid the venerable ones we were taught
       to believe in.
 
       II. MEMORY
 
       Dancers with cane whistles,
       the prairie's wise and knowing kinsmen
       They trimmed their deer skins
       in red down feathers,
       made drum sticks from the gray grouse,
       metaphorically speaking, and knocked on doors
       which faced the East.
       Dancers with cane whistles,
       born under the sign of hollow stems,
       after earth and air and fire and water
       you conjure faith to clear the day.
       Stunningly, blessedly you pierce the sky
       with sound so clear each winged creature soars.
 
       In my mind Grandmothers, those old partisans of faith
       who long for shrill and glowing rituals of the past,
       recall the times they went on long communal
       buffalo hunts; because of this they tell the
       lithe and lissome daughters:
                     look for men who know the sacred ways
                     look for men who wear the white-striped quill
                     look for dancers with cane whistles
                     and seek the house of relatives to stay the night.
 
       III. SACRISTANS
 
       This journey through another world, beyond bad dreams
       beyond the memories of a murdered generation,
       cartographed in captivity by bare survivors
       makes sacristans of us all.
 
       The old ones go our bail, we oblate preachers of our tribes.
       Be careful, they say, don't hock the beads of
       kinship agonies; the moire-effect of unfamiliar hymns
       upon our own, a change in pitch or shrillness of the voice
       transforms the ways of song to words of poetry or prose
       and makes distinctions
       no one recognizes.
       Surrounded and absorbed, we tread like Etruscans
       on the edge of useless law; we pray
       to the giver of prayer, we give the cane whistle
       in ceremony, we swing the heavy silver chain
       of incense burners. Migration makes
       new citizens of Rome.

The journey theme is pervasive in contemporary Native American poetry. The oral traditions from which these expressions emerge indicate a self-absorption essential to our lives. They follow the traditions of native literatures which express as a foremost consideration the survival of the individual, thus the tribe, thus the species, a journey of continuing life and human expectancy.

The final responsibility of a writer like me, and an essential reason to move on from "wanting to be a writer" to actually writing, is to commit something to paper in the modern world which supports this inexhaustible legacy left us by our ancestors. Grey Cohoe, the Navajo poet and artist, once said to a group of Native American students we were working with: "Have confidence in what you know."

That is difficult when we ordinarily see ourselves omitted from the pages of written histories, but not impossible.