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Spiralic Time and Cultural Continuity for Indigenous Sovereignty: Idle No More and The Marrow Thieves
No full textBy virtue of the way the young people in Idle No More were experiencing time through round dancing, we can understand how they were able to counteract or respond to the underlying assumptions of a Canadian national temporality of reconciliation that is linear and progressive, and which thinks of historical redress through the process of reconciliation as in and of itself an end rather than a continuing spiral. Not only is Idle No More’s focus on the spiralic (cyclical, but transformed for the moment rather than mere repetition) resurgence of cultural traditions and ancestral knowledges exemplary of a new generation’s experience of spiralic time, this experience of time is also better able to intervene in the national temporality of reconciliation. I argue that Cherie Dimaline’s post-apocalyptic YA novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) does similar consciousness raising work on radical relationality and Indigenous youth’s power to build their futures in the now. Through the novel's organizing principle of spiralic time which puts Indigenous youth at the center, it reveals this temporal aspect central to the Idle No More movement which otherwise might go unnoticed. Similarly to round dancing, which is about bringing a future into reality in the present through a connection with the past, and which in this way pushes back against the temporality of a progress narrative that the Canadian nation is aiming to push onto Indigenous people, The Marrow Thieves offers a counter reality to that of Canadian settler “progress” and “reconciliation”. Writing directly to Indigenous youth to invite them to see themselves as part of a continuing spiral of Indigenous presence going back to when time began and continuing into a time when they themselves will be ancestors, the novel emphasizes Indigenous youth’s central role in resurgence, within and beyond Idle No More.
 
Hoktiwe (for L. Rain Prud’homme-Cranford)
Get PDFThis is a cento composed using extracted sentences from both the 1932 and 2019 published dictionaries of Ishakkoy, also known as Atakapan, a dormant Indigenous language from Louisiana and Texas. The corpus of texts in the language is small, however the published materials have hundreds of example sentences. These were extracted and used to make new compositions, presenting a model for corpus expansion and creative composition in an Indigenous language
Electronic Computer and Stub Pencil: Poetry and the Writing-in of Ralph Salisbury
Get PDFThe merest glance at Ralph Salisbury’s So Far, So Good (2013) would leave little margin of doubt as to a life of striking eventfulness. His rural Iowa upbringing had him raised at the edge of poverty within an Irish-Cherokee heritage. Food, shelter, survival would come to feature on the barest of terms. World War II service in the US air force exposed him to the ravages of gun and bomb in Germany. An adulthood in peace activism has further put him on the line time and again. His move into authorship after teacher training and during a university teaching life clearly has signified far more than passing career move. Time and again, in his poetry and autobiography, he quite explicitly averts to the figure of the writer as necessary voice through which to take possession of a deeply contrary life. This has not been some mere exercise in self-reflexivity, thought there is a seam of self-reflexivity involved. Rather it is Salisbury’s mode of “authoring” the circumstances, time and place, that have so authored him. The process is to be met with in the very first page of So Far, So Good: Bullet-shattered glass clattering onto my baby bed. I awake and cry, into darkness, for help.Do I remember this? Or do I remember being told? I will feel it, whichever ever it is. I will feel it, chill bomb-bay wind buffeting my eighteen-year-old body, a mile above an old volcano’s jagged debris; feel it, seeing photos of Jewish concentration camp children. huddled together for warmth, photos of Korean orphans, huddled together, homeless in blizzard after American bombing – bombing in which, twenty-five, I had refused an order to join. If the self-interrogations given here point to the author creating the voice of his own measure, the same -- if anything more so – holds for his poetry. It is to be met in verse like “For Years and Years,” “Slitting the Tongue, So That Crow Should be Parrot,” “Caring for The Soon to be Born,” and “Words Concerned with Words.” These and like compositions invite careful scrutiny for how they reflect Salisbury’s imaginative taking possession of the life he has led. This essay explores the figura of Salisbury as the writer behind, and within, his own body of texts.
Authorized Agents: Publication and Diplomacy in the Era of Indian Removal (Frank Kelderman)
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