be
cause
when I
sweat over
diction James
Welch guides me
his angle a marginal
slope corner arrange
ment:
This is not a collection of standardized poems in the structural sense. In other words, the look of this collection is nothing at all like the look of something like, for instances, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is a dazzling visual display every bit as much has it is a dazzling literary experience. Even within a single poem can be found experimentation of form and structure. For instance, this poem, “Diction” features not only this unusual arrangement, but just before it a section in which the verse is written as a prose paragraph with certain sections struck-through as if edited out so as to create two different poems within one. The opening section concludes with another interesting structural choice: “noitciD Diction”
Keep in mind, I am not a historian.
So I will recount facts as best as I can, given limited resources and understanding.
Before Minnesota was a state, the Minnesota region, generally speaking, was the
traditional homeland for Dakota, Anishinaabeg, and Ho-Chunk people.
During the 1800s, when the US expanded territory, they “purchased” land from the
Dakota people as well as the other tribes.
But another way to understand that sort of “purchase” is: Dakota leaders ceded
land to the US government in exchange for money or goods, but most importantly,
the safety of their people.
The author is a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe of the Lakota Nation. Native American themes therefore permeate throughout the text, arriving sometimes in an explicit way and sometimes as more allusive element of a broader thematic concern. The title of the collection is explicitly political and historical and this mindset is explored in various individual poems such this one. The title specifically refers to the “Dakota 38” and the poem itself is a historical overview of one of the darkest moments of the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln; one that—as the author expressly points out—did not get included in Steven Spielberg’s film. The speaker’s advisory about not being a historian is almost certainly intended to be an allusive knock against the filmmaker who film presents an image of Lincoln steeped in a positive and admiring glow whereas this poem is able to do the exact opposite while being just as historically accurate.
Whereas in the infancy of the United States, the founders of the
Republic expressed their desire for a just relationship with the Indian
tribes, as evidenced by the Northwest Ordinance enacted by Con-
gress in 1787, which begins with the phrase, “The utmost good faith
shall always be observed toward the Indians”
The title of this collection as well as the section from which this quote has been extracted reference the language of Congressional legislation. The specific stimulus for the work is the one President Barack Obama signed in 2009 under the informal title Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Notably, this apology was not announced with any great fanfare: not only was it not publicly read aloud, but no tribal leaders were even invited to the signing ceremony. The actual legislation contains the word “Whereas” at the beginning of at least twenty different lines and it is, as this reference to a 1787 government document illustrates, just one of many over the years go contain this specific use of language.
The continual referencing to this legalese in statements by the speaker of the poems in his collection become an ironic consideration of the definition of the word whereas itself, which is a conditional qualifier. The bitter history of relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes has been one in which even with qualifying conditions put into writing have basically had no standing in courtroom disputes. “Whereas” is thus a word that is little more than sick joke for Native Americans; a word institutionally utilized for the purpose of compromise that proved itself to be fully open to a legal rejection of the compromise itself.
