American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the ancient bardic tradition the bards sang only of love and death. Certainly these twin themes encompass the whole of human experience. Loving, celebrating, and joining are the source of life, but they necessarily occur against a background of potential extinction. Thus, these themes become the spindle and loom of the poets' weavings, for our most significant understandings of ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our tradition, our past, come from the interplay of connection and disconnection. The American Indian women who write poetry write in that ancient tradition; for like the bards, we are tribal singers. And because our tribal present is inextricably bound to our continuing awareness of imminent genocide, our approach to these themes, love and death, takes on a pervasive sense of sorrow and anger that is not easily reconciled with the equally powerful tradition of celebrating with the past and affirming the future that is the essence of the oral tradition. We are the dead and the witnesses to death of hundreds of thousands of our people, of the water, the air, the animals and forests and grassy lands that sustained them and us not so very long ago. We are the people who have no shape or form, whose invisibility is not visual only but of the voice as well; we can speak, but we are not heard. As Laguna poet and writer Leslie Marmon Silko writes in Ceremony, "(We) can't talk to you. (We are) invisible. (Our) words are formed with an invisible tongue, they have no sound." "Blessed are they who listen when no one is left to speak Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan writes in her poem "Blessing." The impact of genocide in the minds of American Indian poets and writers cannot be exaggerated. It is an all-pervasive feature of the consciousness of every American Indian in the United States, and the poets are never unaware of it. Even poems that are meant to be humorous get much of their humor directly from this awareness. American Indians take the fact of probable extinction for granted in every thought, in every conversation. We have become so accustomed to the immediate likelihood of racial extinction in the centuries since Anglo-European invasion, that it can be alluded to in many indirect ways; it's pervasive presence creates a sense of sorrow in even the funniest of tales.