WE BEGIN in the East and go North. As Joy Harjo has said, “to be gracious, we should begin with Northeast–Midwest, and then wind up with the Southeast.” This collection of poems, born of these lands, is not an end nor a beginning.
The undertaking for our anthology of poems by ancestor-poets has been thousands of years in the making, especially considering the song chants. We’ve pulled together more than 240 poems from authors of Native Nations around the Western Hemisphere into a body of work that we could recognize. Native chants have no beginning and no ending as they reverberate around the universes and sing.
Here now, I am back at dirt’s door, my own homeland. I hear someone softly playing a sacred song as I write. A song cords its way up through the arms of the giant elm tree growing outside my grandparents’ house. I’m cradled back into the place where memories of music and poetry began for me, Ada, Oklahoma, in the 1950s. Here again I hear my grandfather’s solitary fiddle whining against my great-aunts’ voices in a three-part harmony. My great-uncle plays rhythm guitar. I feel as if they play and sing all Sunday afternoon into dusk, but I can’t quite be sure my memory serves. I see myself waving good-bye as they drive away in an old farm truck back to Stonewall, Oklahoma. I don’t want their images to fade, so I keep waving long after they are gone.
Because I am so young, time slows down and is splintered by great fissures of sorrow. I’m back where I must be in order to write about my first encounters with poetry.
Like music, poetry also came to me through my grandparents. They both wrote poems. My Cherokee grandmother composed poetry on the backs of envelopes of letters she’d received, or in the margins of her books. I still have them. She told me when she was young, they couldn’t afford paper. Iva’s early life was one of poverty, and great sadness. At seventeen, she married a white man. My mother was born a year later in 1917 in a one-room cabin at Stonewall. The Mvskoke Creek midwife was named Izola, so my grandmother named her newborn daughter after the Mvskoke Creek woman.
My grandmother lost her husband and their farm in the 1918 pandemic. She and her two-year-old daughter, Izola, moved from Stonewall to Ada, where she worked as a housekeeper for fifty cents a week, plus board. Her poetic voice comes from all these losses. She usually wrote poems about dying flowers, faded rose gardens in late summer, and wilting bluebells. She never wrote about love, or her children, or all the death and dying she’d witnessed as a young woman.
Grandmother didn’t write poetry about “the angel of death that would come in the spirit of a bird for her friends, and husband,” but she would tell those stories to me. I know more of her life and her poetry because she was also a storyteller. She and my mother would sit at the dining table in Ada after Sunday lunch and write rhyming verses. Most of my mother’s poetry is lost or destroyed. But we have my grandmother’s.
Grandfather Lonnie Valentine also wrote poetry in the margins of books, and in small notebooks. He included detailed recipes for curing horse colic and curing kidney disease in horses. I have them. He was my grandmother’s second husband and he played the fiddle, sang songs, cured horse colic, and wrote poetry. He never talked of writing poetry and the only reason I know he did is because I found them among his things after he died, along with his deputy sheriff’s badge and a pistol. Maybe he thought it wasn’t manly to write poetry and patrol the west side streets of Ada known as “the bucket of blood.” At that time there were many shootings in the two-story gambling houses in west Ada. Yet my grandfather’s poems were about love. In 1914, he was writing about an “orange-haired girl from Kentucky.” He was seventeen years old; she was fifteen. He kept their letters. Lonnie Valentine also wrote about his love for a roan horse. In his youth, before crop failures and poverty took his family’s farm, he and his brothers raised quarter horses.
I still can recall the long drive out into the country to my great-uncle’s house. Today I realize it was only five miles outside of Stonewall, but it seemed much farther in those days. Once there I would lie on a quilt in the yard forgetting about the heat and mosquitoes and listen to the Indians sing and play guitars while my grandfather played the fiddle.
Lonnie Valentine was born in 1897, the same year that Queen Lili‘uokalani finished translating the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian Creation chant. Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation opens the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Pacific Islands section in our anthology:
At the time that turned the heat of the earth,
At the time when the heavens turned and changed,
At the time when the light of the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth,
At the time of the night of Makalii (winter)
Then began the slime which established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness.
Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness,
Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night,
It is night,
So was night born
I respond with a Choctaw chant to Queen Lili‘uokalani’s chant.
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Issa hal-a-li haa- toko Ik-sa illok isha shkee
Because you are holding on to me I am not dead yet.
In working on our volume of two centuries of Native Nations poetry, I’ve come to believe that Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation of the Creation chant of the Kumulipo was heard all the way across the big blue waters, and all across the lands, even in the lands of the people of Indian Territory where my grandmother and grandfather were born. Maybe all peoples everywhere still respond to Queen Lili‘uokalani’s beautiful call.
We are not finished yet.