Poetic Guides through Cultural Devastation

Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation

Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation

Last week my Restorative Justice Faculty Reading Group discussed Jonathan Lear’s fascinating book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. I get to write about it here because Lear makes a reference to the role that poetry can play in keeping hope alive.

We discussed chapter 1 in which Lear sets up a puzzle. Plenty Coups, the chief of the Crow Nation from 1876-1932, told trapper Frank Linderman in 1928 that, after the Crow were confined to a reservation, nothing happened. This in spite of the fact that he himself would go on to live a fairly rich life in the following years, including immersing himself in farming and lobbying fairly successfully for Crow rights. Here’s Linderman’s report:

Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. “I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,” he said, when urged to go on. “I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides,” he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.”

Lear, who describes himself as a philosophical anthropologist, goes into an elaborate exploration of what Plenty Coups means by “nothing happened.” Part of that explanation involves the particular way that the nomadic Crow warriors engaged in battle, which was either planting their coup-sticks in the ground and refusing to retreat from them, no matter what the consequences, or first touching an enemy with the coup-stick before fighting with him.

Lear concludes that these coup-stick practices, while not always making military sense, were a way of forcing enemy tribes (the Lakota, the Sioux, the Blackfeet, and the Cheyenne) to acknowledge Crow reality. Having no established boundaries themselves, the Crow used coup-sticks to create mental boundaries. Therefore, when they moved to a reservation, the coup-stick means of defining reality ceased to exist, meaning that a certain kind of reality ceased to exist. Nothing more happened.

Lear says that Plenty Coups didn’t see this entirely negatively, however:

Plenty Coups was a witness to the collapse of the Crows’ future: he witnessed a time in which “nothing happened.” Such a witness manifests a new and intensified form of Crow subjectivity: he takes on the responsibility of declaring whether the ideas around which he has shaped his life are any longer livable. That is, he is willing to speak for the health and viability of the old ways of constituting oneself as a subject. But this can be done in the hope of clearing the ground for the creation of new forms of Crow subjectivity. There is reason to think that Plenty Coups told his story to preserve it; and he did so in the hope of a future in which things—Crow things—might start to happen again.

This act of the imagining a new reality, Lear says, is the responsibility of poets. I haven’t read the entire book and will report back on what more he says on this subject. For the moment, here’s what he is saying:

What would be required…would be a new Crow poet: one who could take up the Crow past and—rather than use it for nostalgia or ersatz mimesis—project it into vibrtant new ways for the Crow to live and to be. Here by “Poet” I mean the broadest sense of a creative maker of meaningful space. The possibility for such a poet is precisely the possibility for the creation of a new field of possibilities. No one is in a position to rule out that possibility.

I am currently teaching the novel Ceremony by the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko who is functioning as a poet for her people in just this way. In her case, she figures out how to meld traditional with the new forms and new realities made possible by white civilization. The result is a hybrid novel.

Ceremony opens with acts of remembering. The “they” in the following poem refers to the forces of cultural devastation:

I will tell you something about stories,

[he said]

They aren’t just for entertainment.

Don’t be fooled.

They are all we have, you see,

all we have to fight off

illness and death.

You don’t have anything

if you don’t have the stories.

Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would de defenseless then.

He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it
See, it is moving.
There is life here
for the people.

And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.

The important point about the last stanza is that “the rituals and the ceremony are still growing.” They are not a museum but a living organism. The wise medicine man Betonie makes this point at one point in Ceremony, and what he says to the protagonist Tayo may be a description of how Silko herself is transforming the old stories:

“There are some things I have to tell you,” Betonie began softly. “The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can ber done, great power unleashed.” He was quiet for a while, looking up at the sky through the smoke hole. “That much can be true also. But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants. You see, in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing…

“At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.

“She [his mother] taught me this above all else: things which don’t shift and grow are dead things…That’s what the witchery is counting on; that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will trimph and the people will be no more.”

Through her novel, Silko is charting new ways for the Laguna to keep their center in a mostly white world. She is imagining new ways for them to interact with whites without losing their identity and signaling to whites how they themselves must change if they are to save themselves and the world.

I’m eager to see how Crow poets, as described by Lear, have engaged in their own imagining.

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