Surviving the War by Singing the Blues: The Contemporary Ethos of American Indian Political Poetry

INTRODUCTION On December 29, 1986, exactly 96 years after the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, I sat in a dark nightclub on L.A.’s Sunset Strip and heard a performance by the Grafitti Band that made me realize just how well Indian people had survived. My mind kept returning to Wounded Knee, the photos of the murdered Sioux people, frozen in contorted agony. Black Elk had described that bitter day for John Neihardt, the butchered corpses of women and children “heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch.” According to Neihardt, Black Elk felt that ”Something else died there in the bloody mud . . . A people’s dream . . . It was a beautiful dream.” Nineteenth century Indian resistance to the destructive waves of white settlers had manifested itself in the philosophical core of the “Ghost Dance” vision. But that vision met with more than symbolic death at Wounded Knee, and from the depths of disease, starvation and death, many Indian people agreed with Black Elk that the ”nation’s hoop” had been “broken and scattered.” Black Elk’s recollections through Neihardt ended on a final, bitter note: ”There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” Yet the two American Indian men who had formed the Grafitti Band proved the opposite to Black Elk’s fatal vision. In the smoke and wine smell of the nightclub, beneath hazy, purple-red disco lights, John Trudell, a Sioux poet, and Jesse Ed Davis, a Kiowa-Comanche guitarist, played a series of songs that were living testament to a People’s dream that will not die, to a cultural endurance, powerful and lasting. That dream is the spiritual resistance of Indian people to the genocidal wars-both physical and ideological-of more than four centuries of continuous conflict with European peoples. Cultural pride and resistance have changed to meet the times, as have the Indian people themselves; however, in its purpose and effect, the ”Dream” remains integral, whole and alive