Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories

Name’: Literary Ancestry as Presence

13 Name’ Literary Ancestry as Presence heid e. erdriCh Mewenzha Anishnaabeg megwa babamiiaayaawaad Long ago the Anishinaabeg while they were moving around gii babaname’wag e-wii enji daapinamaagozig they were leaving a presence while transporting things gii babamiiayaawag niswaak ge kwa naanwaak ge minik miinwaa they were travelling for up to [a] three to five year period of time and neyap ji ge gii azhegiiwewaad gaa ge pii aayaawaad ji nagadanendamowaad da giimiiwaad. returned (that) was where they went home when they were keeping in mind where they deserted. —rOger rOuLette “NOONGWA E-ANISHINAABEMJIG: PeOPLe WhO sPeAK AnshinAAbemOWin tOdAY” in joining this conversation centering Anishinaabeg studies , i want to position my comments to be understood as a writerly response—the response of an Anishinaabe poet-critic. i assert that when we read, we read from where we are and from who we are. if we are from Anishinaabe people and places, we read from there. Our experiences as Anishinaabe people are vastly varied, but still we read others like us with 14| Heid E. Erdrich a distinct understanding of our shared place, particularly our place in land and language. As a poet and playwright, i believe we are not alone in our reading, and so not alone in our writing. We write into and out of a great telling that brings us stories and songs, that teaches us to look and listen. this is not some mystic tradition; it is simply how it is to be aware of where you are, who you are, and who your people are when they create with words. in awareness of who we are, and as we follow the path of early Ojibwe writers,1 i choose to be guided by a metaphor that involves a play between the notion of landmark literary works and the pictographic marks/signs/ presence that Anishinaabe people left/leave/find on rock and elsewhere.this metaphor arises from an Anishinaabe-centered epistemology that relates writing with landmark, and marking with ongoing presence in place. the Anishinaabe word name’ is a verb transitive animate and means to “find/ leave signs of somebody’s presence.”2 While engaging in research in order to recover an Ojibwe tradition of writing in english, i find landmarks of literature, signs of presence, and draw them toward my understanding of the Anishinaabe word name’.3 it seems apt: What helps us know a place? Landmarks. What helps us know a people? the marks/signs they leave, that we find. these marks and landmarks help us follow their path across a landscape of time. Further, as roulette suggests above, the verb name’ implies presence. When we find what another leaves, we are connected across time. name’ is the perfect metaphor for the Anishinaabe poet-critic to employ in a search for literary ancestry. We follow our literary ancestors—not with a destination in mind, not with intent to claim territory, but because we want to know who has gone before us, who now guides us. We take comfort in their signs of presence along our way. name’ speaks beyond the usual sense of landmark and the geographical and political notions of mapping—which is ideal, because not only are maps hard to fold up, we’d rather stop to ask directions. You get a lot of good stories that way. OJibWe LiterArY AnCestOrs For native American creative writers, writing into a specific cultural, tribal, or national tradition is an assertion of literary sovereignty. but in order to write in or out of our literary tradition in english, we have to first recover that tradition. robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions marked the path both into the past and toward the future of native American literature. born in 1963, i became a reader of Literary Ancestry as Presence| 15 native American literature in the late 1970s. in the late 1980s i became a writer. in Tribal Secrets, Warrior notes the 1960s–1990s as an important time for the rise of native American literature. however, in the 1970s, becoming a reader of native American literature was no small act. What i now think of as my literary history—native American in general and Ojibwe literary history in particular—was buried or was just being written. i can remember a time when i was aware of only a very few books written by American indians, and one of those, a brief...