Another Poem

Don't worry I haven't entirely crossed over to the brain's right side but whilst looking for a recipe for kosher dill pickles, I came across a badly mis-filed piece of intentional doggerel that I'd churned out during my now fondly-remembered Bella Coola years.

I wrote this poem to recite it at a town hall gathering we had about community survival. Interfor and the Ministry of Forests had quite recently shut down their main offices in the valley leaving a skeleton staff and thereby taking away a very large number of employed positions and the families that went with them. Even a few multi-generational settler clans were having to give some hard thought to looking elsewhere as the local economy slid towards the drain hole.

That was also about the time of the 50th anniversary of finishing the road that linked the hitherto isolated outside world to Bella Coola. The story of that feat was one to inspire local initiative, for in that case it was their parents and grand-parents who'd had the pluck to just do it. The Province did not think the road could be constructed at all or, at least at a cost worthy of the public purse. So locals just got together, surveyed the route, and used their own literally backroad know-how, equipment and dollars to punch the "Freedom Road" up the steep valleys through to Anahim. The BC Government eventually was shamed into partial funding but it remains a major testament to those folks, that beloved place, and the power that can arise anywhere when everyday people put their minds and shoulders to the wheel.

So pardon the cornball but I meant every word of it:

Leaving Bella Coola

The truck is packed, the kids are crying.
The alders down the lane are sighing
To think of nothing's what I'm trying,
Leaving Bella Coola.

I'll smoke another pipe and ponder
What it is forced us to wander
Off into the unknown yonder,
Leaving Bella Coola.

Time was when all the settlers' children
Knew this place would be their long-run
Home. Now empty homesteads watch 'em,
Leaving Bella Coola.

For way too long the logging went on
Like the good times could not end on
Somber off-key dying swan songs,
Leaving Bella Coola.

We let the profits from these rich lands
flow to distant sons-of-bitch hands
Just like water running through sands
Leaving Bella Coola.

Now Gordon Campbell tolls the bell
To send this Valley straight to hell
And with no timber left to fell,
I'm leaving Bella Coola.

But wait! remember 'fifty-three?
Did our forefathers build the Free-
-dom Road so now their kids could be
All leaving Bella Coola?

No, it was built for coming back
Right down "the Hill" on their rough track
What did they have that now I lack,
Leaving Bella Coola?

My pipe's gone out, but now there's flame,
Inside my settler soul again
No one can force this Valley man
to leaving Bella Coola.

C'mon, unpack! We're gonna stay
If dad could build that road, that way
It won't be 'til my dying day,
I'm leaving Bella Coola.

Operatic Challenge - Singing Anna Mae

As both an avid opera fan and contest-enterer, I was tickled to hear Bill Richardson on Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, announce a new competition, with the winner getting flown to Lotusland for the premier of Vancouver Opera's Lillian Alling. This is the true story of a homesick Estonian woman in New York who, in 1927 and being too poor for the ocean voyage, traversed North America all the way to Nome, Alaska. It is a production which, I am sure, would more than compensate for the nauseating experience of visiting that narcissistic traffic-swollen metropolis.

It took me only a few seconds to know exactly which "Canadian" I would see immortalized in opera and my choice quite soon altered my mood from contestive exuberance to quieter reverence, sadness, even remorse. I had known about the murdered Native activist Anna Mae Pictou Maloney Aquash for many years, following the travesty of pseudo-attempts to solve the mystery of who killed her and why in South Dakota in late 1975. From the time that her partially decomposed body was found two months later, fingers have pointed in all directions with some trying to exonerate them,selves by saying Anna Mae was a traitor to the American Indian Movement (AIM), an informer. This made zero sense in terms of this woman's lifelong passionate commitment to her people and their full recovery from the battering of colonialism.


I dug out Johanna Brand's biography of Anna Mae and re-read several chapters to re-acquaint myself with this noble, short, and tragic life. I'd commend reading it as well as the several commentaries that can be found online by her daughter, Denise Pictou Maloney (here, here). I should also mention a book that I have ordered and looked at with online previews that honours Anna Mae - Who Would Unbraid Her Hair?

Somewhat ploddingly I prepared a brief rationale for operatically telling Anna Mae's story and submitted it and then heard Bill Richardson elaborate on the instructions to contestants, suggesting that innovative ways of nominating would be especially welcome. Thus did I set out to write the following poem and, as I did, white guilt, or some kind of remorse washed over me: the act of making poetry moved me more deeply than I had ever felt -- but should have -- about Anna Mae. It brought back vague recollections from the 1970s when news of her death made it onto the back pages of Canadian newspapers. The item then seemed so minor, so predictable: another dead activist, just one more murdered Indian. Yes, part of what Stannard aptly called the American Holocaust. Here's what I submitted:


POEM TO PROPOSE THE OPERA, THE ASCENSION OF ANNA MAE

“Died of exposure” said the Coroner.
But the wind, furious, accepts no blame.
so all that winter day
drove clumps of buffalo grass
shrieking “murder!” across the plains

They cannot just hide your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

Little Shubenacadie Indian girl who went to Pictou
School - they feared all five feet of you
and fearless facing down white bullies
becomes your recurring libretto.

From sweat-shop blueberry fields of Maine,
picked over by your people for chickenfeed,
up to Boston’s Combat Zone where,
they arrest your friend,
for the crime of being stabbed,
and you, petite avenging angel,
swoop from the cop car-top
and knock ‘em all, ass over kettle

They cannot just tell your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

And later you’re a mother, seamstress, teacher,
helper to needle-armed, paper-bag-hiding Indians
strung out along Beantown’s filth-encrusted alleys
Then, leading the charge
against vacant Thanksgiving amnesiac ceremonies,
you board the Mayflower II
and down to DC too, you march the Trail of Broken Treaties
right into the Indian Bureau.
Then westward, ho!

They cannot just cheer your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

You steal into Wounded Knee, seen only by the murdered ghosts
from 80 years before;
You marry Aquash there, but soon,
within the bloodied barricade of AIM,
fingers point, rats inform
Who ? Who ? Who?
Does the owl call your name too,
Anna Mae ?
Or is it some lower predator, already in flight?

They cannot just mourn your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.

February ’76: human remains found on a South Dakota back-road
And the coroner still goes on about “exposure”
no heed to that laughing hole in the skull
you could not take with you
on your final ascension.

The decades and blame will pass;
The FBI exonerates itself and moves on,
pausing indifferently to jail old suspect friends.

Doubt still falls like a February badlands snow
on everything - but your soul’s beauty.

They cannot just praise your story, Anna Mae: it must be sung.