"Curse to the war that drinks their harmless blood.’’
After mentioning how the Indians no longer have any animals to hunt, the narrator mentions how many Indians went on the fields to hunt the soldiers who ruined their lives. The Indians are portrayed her as wanting to get revenge against those who wronged them but the narrator transmits a different idea. The narrator condones the violence from both sides and calls the people killed "harmless blood’’. The soldiers as well as the Indians are presented like this and while it would be expected from her to refer to the Indians as being harmless, it is surprising to see how she mentions the soldiers as being harmless as well. Through this, she transmits the idea that the soldiers sent to fight are not the ones responsible for what happened. The ones who are responsible, the politicians and business men, remain safe in their homes while the innocent have to suffer.
"And in their zigzag tottering have reeled
In drunken efforts to enclose the field,’’
In the poem "Joe’’, the narrator focuses on the way the technological advancements affected the environment and the way of life of many Indian tribes. The Indian tribes fought against the building of the railroads through their territory because wherever railroads were being built, white settlements appeared as well and their natural environment was being destroyed. The railroads "closed the fields’’ in the sense the Indians were trapped as a result and forced to live in closed reservations.
"Her people, that to-day unheeded lie,
Like the dead husks that rustle through her hands.’’
In the poem "The Corn Husker’’, the narrator presents an old Indian woman, gathering corn for herself. As she returns home, the old woman husks the corn and leaves the husks on the ground to rot. The woman has no need for the corn husks and thus she treats it as garbage. The poem ends with the narrator comparing the corn husks with the lives taken by the white soldiers. The bodies of the Indian men and women killed by the soldiers were not buried as they should have and more than often were left to rot in the open air. This showed just how little the white soldiers cared about the lives they took and how little respect they had for the Indian traditions.
