Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 (review)

Abstract

Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 122 MICHAEL P. TAYLOR Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 edited by Robert Dale Parker University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 Once savored this poetry may brush away the years and tell you more about the Indian’s travels in historical experience than all the books written and lectures given. — VINE DELORIA JR., FOREWORD TO NEW AND OLD VOICES OF WAH’KON-TAH: CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY ROBERT DALE PARKER’S TITLE, Changing Is Not Vanishing, borrowed from Carlos Montezuma’s (Yavapai) 1916 poem, captures the tension of pre-1930 Native American identity and identity making while simultaneously announcing the importance of this book; it recovers a deep and diverse poetic history of Native American literary adaptation rather than absence. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, editors of literary magazines and anthologies have repeatedly represented ethnographic and anthropological poetry by non-Native poets as “Native” poetry, pushing out, as Parker argues, “actual poetry by actual Indians.” As a result, literary scholars of American and Native American literatures continue to focus on early Native nonfiction or contemporary novels rather than poetry or other forms and periods of literary production, upholding—albeit inadvertently—what Parker describes as “the myth of Indian people as illiterate or marginally literate.” With this book, Parker “sets out to change” that myth and the surrounding scholarship (8). If Native poetry is as vital to telling history as Vine Deloria Jr. maintains, Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 is an invaluable resource in that it recovers an array of otherwise forgotten poetry while simultaneously recovering an essential narrative of Native American history. This book begins to address an enormous oversight in the Native literary record and presents a compelling argument for the importance of poetry to the future of Native literary criticism and Native studies. Whereas early Native nonfiction and contemporary fiction are most often addressed to a non-Indigenous audience, Parker argues that early Native poetry provides a critical lens to reconsider the literature of early Native writers because their poetry consciously addresses Indigenous readers. The depth and breadth of Parker’s archival research is astounding, and the NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 123 book’s presentation and prose style is accessible to a wide audience. Parker begins by introducing the sociopolitical and literary contexts of pre-1930 Native American literature, arguing that American Indian poetry—written in English—has coexisted with Euro-American poetry from the very beginning . Parker then presents more than three hundred poems by eighty-two individual poets, beginning with Eleazar, a Harvard student whose poem was published in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). The poets are then organized chronologically ending on Cherokee/Chickasaw poet Elise Seaton’s 1930 poems. Parker interrupts the book’s chronology momentarily with a section dedicated exclusively to “Boarding School Poems.” Here, Parker features fourteen poets to emphasize the unique and, at times, clandestine authorial agency exhibited by poets writing and publishing under the supervision of government agents. He also encourages readers to reconsider the boarding schools as spaces of Native literary production and intertribal collaboration. Though fascinating, the “Boarding School Poems” are limited almost exclusively to Carlisle Indian School and the Cherokee Male and Female Seminaries. This book offers poems by well-known poets—at least within Indigenous literary circles—such as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), Alexander Posey (Muskogee Creek), and Lynn Riggs (Cherokee). It also reminds readers of the oft-forgotten poetry by writers known primarily for their prose, such as Arthur Caswell Parker (Seneca), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish, Kootenai). The majority of the poems, however , are by otherwise forgotten Native poets. Most impressively, Parker provides the names, tribal affiliations, and brief personal contexts for all but five of the represented poets. Beyond the recovered poetry, Parker completes this monumental work with an explanation of “Notable False Attributions” and a comprehensive “Bibliography of Poems by American Indians to 1930.” Parker questions, and corrects when possible, a number of non-Native poems misattributed to Native poets, songs that have been mislabeled as poems, and Native poems that have been falsely attributed...