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14. Cowboy Songs, Indian Speeches and the Language of Poetry
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14 Cowboy Songs, Indian Speeches and the Language of Poetry J. Edward Chamberlin Cowboys are not particularly popular these days, at least among postcolonial academics. Indians are. In both cases, the reasons are not entirely plausible, though plausibility has never interfered with fashion. So I thought it might be interesting to look a little more closely at cowboys and Indians. They come to most of us through our imaginations, rather than through our experiences. Up until quite recently, Indians were best known from the speeches of their leaders, chiefs like Joseph and Tecumseh and Seattle; and more recently, from the writings of their poets and novelists. With cowboys, it has been their songs that hold us, not so much the current ones about cheating hearts and honky-tonk angels but those nineteenth - and early-twentieth-century songs like ‘‘Home on the Range,’’ ‘‘Red River Valley’’ and ‘‘Goodbye, Old Paint.’’ One of the first attempts to collect them was also one of the first collections of folk songs in the Americas: John Lomax’s 1910 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. The texts of Indian speeches were usually written down at the time they were delivered, and although this process was complicated—and to a considerable degree compromised—by translation and the change from speech to writing, they have become set pieces of poetic power and political rhetoric. They are quoted time and again in defence of Notes to chapter 14 are on p. 206. 189 Native American rights; and, from the 1800s, encyclopedia definitions of poetry in Great Britain and Europe as well as in Canada and the United States would almost always quote an Indian speech as an example of the purest form of language. I grew up with these speeches. I knew all about Chief Seattle saying, when the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. . . . The dead are not powerless. Dead—I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds. (Vanderwerth 1971:121-22) Or Sitting Bull asking, what treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the whites ever made with us red men have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set in their lands. They sent 10,000 horsemen to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say that I ever stole his lands or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. (Moquin and Van Doren 1973:262) But it was cowboy songs that held me first as a young child in Calgary in the 1940s, listening to Stu Davis on the radio and trying to yodel like Jimmie Rodgers, and then later in the dry valleys and benchlands of the interior of British Columbia where I lived for part of each year. I had some cowboys in the family too. My grandfather had run the Cochrane ranch around the turn of the century—though in the language of the day that made him a cowman rather than a cowboy— ranging cattle from north of Calgary all the way down to the American border. His life on the southern Alberta prairies bound him to those uneasy borderlands between the Blackfoot confederacy and the new bureaucracy of Royal Northwest Mounted Police and Indian agents; and because I grew up with his stories (mostly told me by my mother) I seemed strangely bound to this world as well. It was a time when hunters were being replaced by herders, wooded coulees were becoming cattle wallows, cowboys and Indians were being fenced in, the Métis leader Louis Riel was hanged for treason and the Nez Perce, just across the border, were trying to protect themselves against the brutal encroachments of settlers and the bloody enterprise of soldiers. Given the traditions of the Nez Perce, it is not surprising that horses were at the centre of this great scene. In one of the most famous 190 Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture [18.191.174.168] Project MUSE (2024...