What the Sachem's Son Told Me

by Brett Rutherford

"Westward, the packed

wagons, the loaded guns,

the sleep-soft watchfulness,

the hoarded-in dreams

of the White Man, west,

west from sea to great river,

from plain to mountain,

then to the final sea

at world's end.

"They took it all:

the redwood groves,

pan-gold streams,

bottomless wells,

peat-soft soil,

the promised land of

no-questions equality.

For them.

"Sometimes we managed

to curtail their dreams,

cutting them off

at the root of a scalp.

Our arrows vectored down,

our carnage a vortex

of vulture-spin and blood.

The earth drank them;

the sky

consumed their bones.

We kept the iron pots,

the buttons and pretty beads.

Their guns became ours.

"In spite of that,

a thousand nations

became but one. They spoke

no other language but their own.

Our people are penned

in all the waste-places,

roach-motel reservations.

No arrow can stop

the six-wheeled megatrucks;

train track and highway vein

the former wilderness.

"But as for you, poet:
Thank you for coming.

Know that our knives are drawn

and could take you out

in a minute, if so we chose.

But since you greeted us

with words you took

from our own language,

and since you are, like us

of those who walk the dreams

and make them into magic,

we will walk in peace together.

"Walk with me now,

away from the sage-smoke.

I will tell you

that our power is returning,

if we learn to wield it

without the white man's poison

forever weakening.

"I have found something,

a survivor of totem days,

I have a manitou,

cousin of Wendigo, Hudson Bay's

wind-walker, elemental.

Cloud-lurker, he evens

the score. Look up!"

The poet sees, in night sky, but lit

from underneath by earth-light,

an airplane departing

from the nearby airport.

“Watch!” the young Iroquois says.

A dark cloud envelops the DC-10 above.

One wing snaps off, and then

the other. It is all the more

horrible that the screams cannot be heard.

"Hunh!" is all the sachem's son utters.

"It gives me no pleasure.

I would rather the earth swallow them

of its own accord, and spare The People.
Our People, I mean."

"Do work on that," the poet urges.

"The outraged planet listens, I am sure."

A smile creases the cracked corners

of the wizard’s otherwise humorless mouth.

"We will still keep their pots and pans,

the motor-bikes and the pretty beads.

"Come to the pow-wow now

and we'll get plenty drunk, poet!"

— Oct. 1982, rev. 2020.

In the Forest of the Wendigo

Barbara A. Holland and I both wrote poems about The Wendigo, the terrifying wind elemental known to all the Native Americans from Canada all the way down through Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Holland's notebooks, amid sketches for her Wendigo poems, I found three short poems in which expressed her profound fear of the American woods. I revised them slightly and combined them into this little suite.

IN THE FOREST OF THE WENDIGO

by Barbara A. Holland

1. LOST

The long-house has wandered off
somewhere and I am left behind
to find it. The stars stick in the branches
of the highest trees that have no green
save at the top of the naked trunks.

Beneath the slip-slide footing
of pine needles, something way down
rumbles and shakes the ground
with muttering scarce-heard. I feel it
in my bones. I wonder
if on some far-off island
they are dying, or shouts
of warning rise to the clouds.

The web of a spider
burns my face. Whiskers
of fog feel out for me.

2. THE SECRET

A glade. An opening in the woods
where anything might happen.
Now the forest wakes. The grasses
cease to move. The bushes liberate
their hoarded twittering. The bull frogs
stop their vocalise, but yet
the moss invites me a lie down,
while the trees part in anticipation
of I know not what.
                                     I run and run
until I am exhausted. The forest
can keep its secret.
I shall not intrude on what
it may or may not foster.

3. IN THE DEEP WOODS

When I hear the ground
crunching followed by the sound
of bells, I know that he
is nor far off, that monstrous, tall
hunter in whose ear Hiawatha
rode; that behind a clump of trees
his laughter wobbles the juniper
and soars to a mighty screech,

that I had best be going home.
I do not care to have him
swing downward with his tomahawk.

These woods are treacherous
with spirits. I must not look
nor to the right or left but keep on going.
He is laughing
at the death that fouls our waters,
above the earth that is poisoned
     by the same stuff,
giving bad breath to his laughter,
our self-inflicted hatchet-thrust
the destruction of our woods.

Hearing the Wendigo

All the Native Americans from Appalachia to the Hudson Bay in Canada share a common dread of an elemental creature comprised entirely of wind. Algernon Blackwood documented the myth in in horror tale, "The Wendigo." Wendigo stories have been campfire horror tales for generations, embellished with each telling. I first wrote about the Wendigo in 1989, and I have mentioned it in several other poems. Here is the original in a new revision, suitable considering all the tornadoes we have had lately.

HEARING THE WENDIGO

There is a place

     where the winds meet howling

cold nights in frozen forest

     snapping the tree trunks

     in haste for their reunion.

Gone is the summer they brooded in,

     gone the autumn of their awakening.

Now at last they slide off glaciers,

     sail the spreading ice floes,

     hitch a ride with winter.

Great bears retreat and slumber,

     owls flee

          and whippoorwills shudder.

Whole herds of caribou

     stampede on the tundra

     in the madness of hunger,

     the terror of thunder-winds..

The snow-piled Huron packs tight
     the animal skins around his doorway,
hopes his small fire and its thin smoke
escape the notice of boreal eyes.
He will not look out at the night sky,
     for fear of what might look back.

Only brave Orion witnesses

     as icy vectors collide in air.

Trees break like tent poles,

     earth sunders to craters

     beneath the giant foot-stamps.

Birds rise to whirlwind updraft

     and come down bones and feathers.

I have not seen the Wendigo —
     (I scarcely dare to name it!) —

     the wind’s collective consciousness,

     id proud and hammer-hard.

To see is to be plucked

     into the very eye of madness.

Yet time and again as I walked here,
     alone in the snow
     by this solitary and abandoned lake,
I have felt its upward urge

     like hands beneath my shoulders,

     lifting and beckoning.

It says, You dream of flying?

     Then fly with me!

I answer No,

not with your hungry eye above me,

not with those teeth like roaring chain saws,

not with those pile-driving footsteps —

Like the wise Huron sachem,
     the long-gone Erie, the Mingo,
     the Seneca, the Onondaga,
like all Hodenosaunee-born,

     I too avert my eyes

     against the thing that summons me.

Screaming, the airborne smiter

     rips off the tops of conifers,

crushes a row of power-line towers,

peppers the hillside with saurian tracks,

then leaps straight up at the Dog Star,

as though its anger could crack the cosmos,

as though the sky bowl were not infinite,

and wind alone could touch the stars

     and eat them.

Op. 525, 1989
Rev 2011 as Op. 856