Orsamus Charles Dake: Nebraska’s First Published Poet

Abstract

Orsamus Charles DakeNebraska’s First Published Poet Stephen C. Behrendt (bio) Key Words American literature, Native American literature, Pawnee, poetic rhetoric Nebraskan Orsamus Charles Dake (1832–1875) is sometimes regarded as Nebraska’s “first poet” (Fig. 1). However, this is an inexact designation that should be qualified by calling Dake what Emily Jane Uzendoski terms a “non-native writer”1 to preserve historical, critical, and cultural respect for the considerable body of Native materials representative of the state’s national and tribal oral traditions. As Nebraska celebrates the sesquicentennial of its statehood in 2017, the state contemplates a century and a half of not only agricultural, industrial, and sociopolitical growth but also literary and cultural development. Given its comparatively small population, Nebraska has produced a remarkable number of writers in prose and poetry alike whose numbers include the likes of John G. Neihardt, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, Weldon Kees, Loren Eiseley, and more recently, Theodore Sorensen and Ted Kooser. Sesquicentennials, bicentennials, and comparable date-specific celebrations, however, imply definitive starting-points, like the passage of statehood. But this method of “counting” inevitably neglects chronological expanses whose terminal dates are indistinct at best and which often long predate the official “beginning” of a period in question or the designation of some historical, cultural, or literary “first.” Assessing the literary heritage of Nebraska, as is true with that of other midwestern states, involves complications both with dates and with media or modes of literary-cultural production and transmission. The existence of a rich and enduring Nebraska Native literary tradition is evident, for instance, from the work of the Omaha ethnographer Francis LaFlesche (1857–1932), who documented (and recorded in the 1890s) many Omaha tribal oral songs and legends. Better known, perhaps, is John G. Neihardt’s 1932 [End Page 15] Black Elk Speaks, in which Neihardt adopted and adapted his transcriptions of the Oglala Lakota medicine man’s conversations. These oral materials differ in both nature and medium from what the western European literary tradition typically regards as poetry. Not only their oral nature but also their shared communal “ownership” and their unusual mode (which variously incorporates tales, gossip, prayers, and chants2) differentiate them dramatically from the single-authored printed book to which western readers are accustomed. Craig Womack locates the dilemma in the faulty perspective of colonialist literary nationalism: “tribal literatures,” he writes, are “not some branch waiting to be grafted onto the main trunk” of American literature but are in reality “the tree, the oldest literatures in the Americas, the most American of American literatures.”3 The “tribal view of the world” (as Louise Erdrich calls it) that informs the oral tradition reflects the fact that “where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history.”4 The European-American literary milieu and literary tradition (which involves its own literary laws of enclosure and possession), conversely, has long privileged individual authorship and “publications” that can be pinned definitively to particular chronological moments and geographical places. From the perspective of the traditional print-oriented literary scholar schooled in European and mainstream American literary studies, Dake’s foundational contributions appear to be substantial. Even so, and notwithstanding a number of extensive surveys of Nebraska (and Great Plains) literature, Dake’s name and work are barely visible, despite both his considerable literary production over the course of a comparatively brief writing career and his notable treatment of Native peoples and subjects.5 The occasional cultural insensitivity of his ostensibly sympathetic presentation of those peoples and subjects reflects the colonialist cultural and rhetorical “baggage” that was the largely inescapable inheritance of his times. So in reconsidering his poetry today, then, we recover a historically neglected voice while also revisiting, a century and half later, some of these cultural dissonances. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. A studio portrait of Orsamus Charles Dake, an Episcopal minister, educator, and poet in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, circa 1880. Catalog No. rg0830.ph0–000001. Courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society. Less than a decade after his arrival in Nebraska Dake published Nebraska Legends and Poems, a 165-page collection that...