Maurice
Kenny. Monahsetah, Resistance, and Other Markings on Turtle's Back: A Lyric History in
Poems and Essays. Norman, OK: Mongrel Island Press, 2017. Print.
Rachel
Bryant. The Homing Place: Indigenous and
Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier,
2017. Print.
When asked to consider reviewing
Maurice Kenny's Monahsetah
and Rachel Bryant's The Homing Place for
Transmotion, I took the opportunity
to consider together these two seemingly disparate books—one a famous
Indigenous poet's last lyric collection, the other a young settler scholar's
first academic analysis. They turn out to have quite a bit in common. Both toy
with the lines between the creative and the scholarly, the Indigenous and the
European. Both contribute thoughtfully to our field's ongoing conversations
about sovereignty and survivance, territoriality and land. And both are firmly
grounded in, and determined to (re)indigenize,
northeastern North America, known to many of its first peoples as the Dawnland.
If transmotion
defies statist, territorial definitions of sovereignty, Indigenous people in
this region have exceedingly long histories of transmobility.
According to some of their oldest stories, people have always been inclined to
travel across boundaries—geological boundaries, boundaries between kin
groups and clans, boundaries between human and other-than-human. To this day,
the violence of settler colonialism denies formal "recognition" to many
northeastern tribal nations, while segregating them in the remote past, on
fixed territories. Yet Indigenous people have continued to protect their lands,
cultures and kin, here--as elsewhere--through story. Writing in this journal's
first issue, Deborah Madsen defined transmotion as "the practice of transmitting
cultural practices across time as well as spaces of travel and trade (24).
Kenny and Bryant are two traveling, trading intellects who devote considerable
thought to precisely how Indigenous people have moved, exchanged, and endured.
The first and longest part of this
book, "Monahsetah," is a little more uneven. Kenny's
relationship to this figure is a little more vexed and ambiguous, though he
spent decades writing about her, too. She first came to the poet's attention in
Mari Sandoz's 1953 bestseller Cheyenne
Autumn, which reported that this daughter of a Cheyenne chief was captured
in the 1868 Battle of Washita River, and later gave birth to a son by George Armstrong
Custer. Historians disagree about this last part: Adrian Jawort
(Northern Cheyenne) accepts written Cheyenne oral histories reporting that Monasetah had Custer's son and even that she was devoted to
him; others believe that Custer was likely sterile from gonorrhea (Agonito 96). Monahsetah's story
has been written, indeed overwritten;
since Sandoz's book, google N-gram tells me, she has been
periodically and enthusiastically taken up by settler historians captivated by
that old trope of a complicit Indian princess (most recently and
horrifyingly in a romance by Custer's great-great-granddaughter).
Other writers, including Charlotte DeClue (Osage) have represented Monahsetah
as a resistant, unwilling captive. Kenny certainly paints her that way, at
least at first:
You
ask why
did
I not take my knife and rush it
into
his belly allowing his enemy blood
to
river into my people's Oklahoma earth.
He
called me to his bed.
.
. . I was his war treasure,
his
hunk of gold, a pot of flesh. There was no escape. (2)
If Kenny found in Molly Brant a mother,
he seems to have looked to Monahsetah for some kind
of sister or twin. "In 1966," he says, "I began looking for her, and somewhere
along the way, I found myself" (15). His method of recounting this search is to
alternate prose poems dated to the 1860s, imagining Monahsetah's
story, with pieces dated to the 1960s, charting his own political, aesthetic
and sexual awakening. Kenny recalls reading Sandoz as he was returning home
from a long stay in Mexico, and witnessing the violence of Vietnam, and
suddenly grasping the global and temporal continuities of Indigenous people:
"up and down two continents. . .a program of extermination of Indians": "It
took courage to truly observe the land of my birth where part of my blood was
hated and the other part imported into a land knee-deep in genocide and bloody
with racism, sexism and homophobia, blockades to liberty and happiness let
alone sexual fulfillment" (4).
These pieces, then, evoke a sense of
mixed-blood ambivalence and alienation perhaps more common to Native American
literature and criticism of the late twentieth century than we tend to see in
the present, more tribal-centric literary moment. Sometimes the parallels to Monahsetah's story in this vein are quite powerful; for
instance, Kenny endows her with a political awakening of her own when she
watches male Cheyenne leaders capitulate to plans to remove the tribe to Sand
Creek: "When Monahsetah asked her father who the
soldiers were protecting the people from, he could only shake his head that he
did not know" (35).
Less comfortable are the poet's
attempts to represent this Cheyenne woman as chafing against ostensibly
restrictive traditional gender roles: for instance, she deplores "the life of a
common woman, the drudgery and slavery to lodge and husband" (10). One senses,
perhaps, the queer poet's own desire to depict and imagine tribal life outside
of heteronormative patriarchy, but it's hard to separate a passage like this
from garden-variety stereotypes of Plains Indian women as "drudges." It's
equally uncomfortable to read the intimate scenes with Custer, and the rape
passages when Monahsetah is temporarily married to a
Cheyenne husband against her wishes.
Monahsetah and Other Markings is
edited by Chad Sweeney, Kenny's student, friend and collaborator, and it would
be fascinating to know exactly what his role was in editing and arranging these
various pieces. He says that he worked with Kenny for over a year on this
project, and that Kenny died while still working on those Custer sections. He
was in too much physical pain to keep writing, and understandably "reluctant to
guess at Monahsetah's level of complicity" (v). Some
parts of the Cheyenne sections do indeed feel rushed, like Kenny was hastening
to make sense of everything he had read, written, thought and felt. The
strongest sections—vintage Maurice Kenny, empathetically imaginative when
it comes to depicting Indigenous women, history, and space—remind us that
the subaltern does speak, but that we can never know whether heard her
correctly:
Monahsetah
went into story
long
tales and short talks
probably
imagined
perhaps
a handful true
to
a few facts of her breath (16, 125)
Indigenous writers from Craig Womack to
Cheryl Savageau and countless others have paid
Maurice Kenny due homage for his support of Indigenous literature, and for the
gathering places he created at his Strawberry Press and the magazine Contact/II, as well as at his own home
in Saranac Lake, New York. But where "the gathering place" is conceptualized as
a place where Indigenous people have traditionally and continually regrouped,
shared and exchanged, the "homing place" is Rachel Bryant's way of trying to
understand how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have struggled to live
together and to communicate across cultural, political and epistemological
divides.
Bryant is a settler Canadian scholar,
currently at Dalhousie University as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council postdoctoral. Her book takes seriously sovereign treaty relationships
between First Nations and Settler Canadians on every level—political,
epistemological, cultural and literary. Writing is (or should be) an attempt to
communicate across these many divides, but Bryant finds an invisible and too often
impenetrable wall between Western imaginaries and Indigenous knowledge systems.
In her reading, Anglo-Atlantic writing has built a "system of self-protection"
that has sought to contain Indigenous geographies and indeed Indigenous agency.
Indigenous writings, she argues, have challenged and chipped away at those
Western imaginaries, though Western readers have nevertheless managed to absorb
those challenges, often remaining stubbornly unchanged by them.
Because Bryant reads regionally, with a
focus on English-language writing on both sides of the US/Canadian border, she
is able to unpack settler exceptionalisms in new ways. The homing place
(continuous present) is a process, Bryant's revision of an influential theory
of "home place" proposed by Gwendolyn Davies to apply to Maritime writing, one
that will be familiar to scholars in American Studies as a gambit connecting
place and identity. Where Davies theorized the "home place" as a trope that
allowed settler writers to become Maritimers, feeling
that they owned places as intellectual property, Bryant proposes homing places:
In
the non-human world, homing is the process through which beings such as
pigeons, lobsters, salmon, sea turtles, and butterflies navigate unfamiliar
locales as they work to return to a state of familiarity. It is a process that
only works in cooperation with all other forms of life; intrusive human-made
elements, like pesticides and commercial ships, adversely affect the ability of
insects and sea animals to receive crucial navigational cues from their
surroundings. Of central importance to the process of homing, then, is the
constant struggle to receive essential
information across the various barriers and interruptions that have been
systematically built into the everyday workings of the Western world's industrio-scientific culture. (27)
This lively construction suggests the
broad interest of Bryant's study, touching on concerns common to Canadian,
American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to Ecocriticism and the
Environmental Humanities. Indeed, in one of her most innovative, transmobile
chapters, she reads across Passamaquoddy territory, bisected today by the
US/Canadian border, yet enduring in Indigenous people's lives and knowledge as
a hom(ing) place, Peskotomuhkatik. Settlers on both sides of this border, she
shows, have used maps, diplomatic and legislative documents, and histories to
control access to Indigenous resources. At the same time, Indigenous people and
the land itself have maintained their own opposing narratives of continuity--in
oral traditions, wampum belts, and rock formations. For Bryant, understanding
these conflicting positions is an ethical stance with ongoing urgency; as she
writes in a later chapter, it "challenges Settlers, the direct beneficiaries of
North American colonization, to consider for a moment that ours is not the only
world and that the ground beneath our feet has a history and an identity that
we have actively and anxiously hidden from ourselves" (181).
Three other chapters also examine the
work of settler writers: John Gyles, a New England
Puritan who wrote a captivity narrative about his years with the Maliseet
people during King William's War; Anna Brownell Jameson, an English settler and
nineteenth century feminist essayist; and Douglas Glover, whose 2003 novel Elle re-imagined the popular story of
Marguerite de la Rocque, a sixteenth-century French
noblewoman who was abandoned on an island during Jacques Cartier's final voyage
to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Bryant shows how such writers, especially Gyles and Jameson, install their identities in settler
space, disrupting Indigenous communities and "divest[ing]
land of any pre-existing (or pre-contact) meanings or agency" (21). In Glover
she finds a little more willingness to un-settle a sense of unitary imperial
identity. She calls this "cartographic dissonance," as Glover's protagonist
gradually comes to apprehend, to see competing
cultures and epistemologies located in the same geographic space.
The remaining two chapters turn to two
Indigenous poets. Bryant reclaims the more famous of the two, Rita Joe (Mi'gmaw), from a tradition of literary criticism that has
tended to frame her as a cultural mediator. This older way of reading
Indigenous women was not uncommon in Native American and Indigenous literary
criticism, especially during the 1990s, and Bryant's insistence that Joe challenges settler violence and settler
refusal to listen is refreshing and persuasive. Her chapter on Josephine Bacon
(Innu), who is perhaps better known among Canadian/First Nations scholars than
among Indigenous Studies scholars elsewhere, similarly shows how Indigenous
writing counters colonial violence. This chapter situates Bacon's poems
squarely within Innu cultural history and tradition, reading them as alphabetic
tshissinuatshitakana, or message sticks that
reconnect Innu people with their unceded land.
The
Homing Place is published by Wilfrid Laurier Press,
which is producing intellectually groundbreaking, materially gorgeous books in
Indigenous Studies. Their series, under the dynamic editorship of Deanna Reder (Cree-Metis), includes the excellent collections Read, Listen, Tell and Learn, Teach, Challenge; as well as
Daniel Heath Justice's much-anticipated Why
Indigenous Literatures Matter. The generous, professional production given
to The Homing Place is a wonder to
behold: the typography and cover alone are stunners, but the book also gets a
good number of plates to show off significant images like wampum belts. The
real glory is the treatment given to a 1939 address
written by Chief William Polchies: four full-page,
full-color plates that reveal in extraordinary detail the birchbark
on which Polchies wrote, the leather binding at the
spine and the edges, and the fully legible text, first in English, then in
Maliseet. These images powerfully underscore Bryant's persuasive argument that
the birchbark book is a "distinct Indigenous material
form," one that "evokes and engages the 'place-world' from whence [Polchies's] diplomacy emerges, subsuming Settler Canadian
relations, traditions and ruling structures under the necessarily higher
authority of laws and practices that, for centuries, allowed the Maliseet
people to use and care for their land" (15). At the level of scholarly content
and visual production, this book could not be more beautifully done.
Siobhan
Senier, University of New Hampshire
Agonito, Joseph. Brave
Hearts: Indian Women of the Plains. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2016.
DeClue, Charlotte. "To the
Spirit of Monahsetah." In Beth Brant, ed., A Gathering of Spirit. New York:
Firebrand Books, 1988. pp. 52-54.
Jawort, Adrian. "Did Custer
Have a Cheyenne Mistress and Son? Native Oral History Says Yes." Indian
Country Media Network, 1 Feb. 2017, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/events/did-custer-have-a-cheyenne-mistress-and-son-native-oral-history-says-yes/.
Kelly-Custer,
Gail. Princess Monahsetah: The Concealed Wife of
General Custer. Bloomington: Trafford Publishing, 2007.
Madsen,
Deborah. "The Sovereignty of Transmotion in a State of Exception:
Lessons
from the Internment of 'Praying Indians' on Deer Island, Massachusetts Bay Colony,
1675-1676." Transmotion vol 1, no 1
(2015): 23-47.
Savageau, Cheryl. "Letter
from the Editor [special issue memorializing Maurice Kenny]." Dawnland Voices Issue 4 (May 18, 2017).
https://dawnlandvoices.org/letter-from-the-editor/
Womack,
Craig. "The Spirit of Independence: Maurice Kenny's Tekonwatonti/Molly Brant." In Penelope M. Kelsey, ed., Maurice Kenny: Celebrations of a Mohawk Writer. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011. pp. 75-96.