Dragonfly Dance

Introduction

xv Introduction If healing is partly the resurrection and acknowledgement of pain, then Denise Lajimodiere is a healer through her poetry. If healing is partly laughter, then Denise’s poetry can laugh through tears. If healing is a mysterious process, Denise shows that it also begins in everyday kindness. The poems in Dragonfly Dance are raw, funny, honest, and also acutely sensitive to a child’s point of view. A little girl ignores her brown skinned Barbie and tells her mother she wants to grow up white. We feel the bewilderment and terror of a child praying for her drunken father not to make it home, and later, the visceral sorrow of a woman at her father’s deathbed, unable to mourn him. The poem “Drunkard’s Mass” is both hilarious and sad. The hypocrisy and insult of the Catholic Church’s treatment of Native children is woven through the entire book and contrasts with the difficult gathering of wisdom. The trajectory of the book brings us to the healing of ancient traumas through dance, through vision, and especially through the kindness of elders and spiritual connections with animals associated with the Turtle Mountains. The poems are fierce in their personal invocation of history. A Turtle Mountain grandmother presses her wrist to a starving infant’s lips to try and save its life during the winter of 1888. That was the time shortly after the reservation was reduced from 20 townships in North Dakota to only 2 townships. There were no animals to hunt on a range so tiny. There were no crops. The United States government forgot to send the supplies it had promised. There was mass starvation on the reservation in those years, while on the land surrounding, homesteaded by white settlers, cattle fattened and were sold. The terrible truths of history still live on in the generations since, and Denise’s poems are about the working out of history through the heart. xvi The dragonfly is a lightness of spirit, warrior spirit, water spirit. The dragonfly was sacred to Crazy Horse, and he painted it on his shield as his protector. In the final section of the book, Denise writes of her own connection “we dance, we dance, we dance / to wipe away the tears.” She also explores the connection between dancers and the spirit of the dragonfly. One friend tells of surviving a car accident, and of dragonflies gathering around her. A brother says, “they are our ancestors healing you.” I first knew Denise Lajimodiere as a traditional jingle dress dancer. The jingle dress dance was revealed to an Ojibwe elder in a dream—his granddaughter was terribly ill, and he saw in a dream that she would be healed by women from each direction dancing through the sky. In his dream, the sky women wore dresses with small cones of silver that made music in time with their steps. At any powwow today, these beautiful dresses and their dances embody the vision of that dream. The jingle dance is exciting, moving, and quietly comforting. When the music of the dresses rings through the air the vibrations set up a sense of well being and of hope in everyone in the circle of their remarkable sound. All of her life these poems have been danced out by Denise, and only now that she has the time to reflect and feel has she allowed them to move through her dancing into this writing. This is a book of pain and power that also makes you laugh out loud. If you listen to the dancing as you read, don’t be surprised if you are also healed. Louise Erdrich, 2010 Out Steppin’ ...