Indigenous Poetics in Canada

24. Indigenous Poetry and the Oral

24 Indigenous Poetry and the Oral Lee Maracle Despite the fact that assimilation and integration have witnessed a movement away from old social structures and old cultural forms of governance and leadership toward hierarchy, patriarchy, and coercion in recent history, the artistic expression in both the written and oral arts retains its nonhierarchical and non-coercive character. This chapter examines traditional poetry from inside the culture of the examiner from this perspective. When we died we sang, we sang xway xway, we sang the poetic voice of rebuilding, of coming together, of reaching out, of touching one another, of really barrelling down and moving against the tide. That’s what we call it—moving against the tide. And you can do that only in poetry. You can do that only in the poetic voice. When we sing, the bones of our ancestors hear our songs and they work their way to the surface of the land, singing themselves up. The oldest songs come from the oldest bones. Our youth every now and then hear these old songs and they sing it and we are reminded of the thousands of years of history that the bones of our ancestors hold for us. All we need to do is create children who can hear them sing. Oral poems formed an integral part of voluntary self-governance, community spirit, and influenced conduct when people had fallen from the path. They are remembered both for their beauty and because the community came to cherish the reframing of law, philosophy, or social governance contained in the poetry. Through the process of consensus between themselves and between the living and the dead, these poems became songs that preceded ceremony. Even love songs were committed to memory because the nation accepted the posited attitude of the singer as accurately reflecting the attitude of the community toward love and the women or men to be loved. Random love between two individuals could not be conceived of outside the love of community, so in our love stories, 305 306 L E E M A R A C L E the path to community, the foundational means of building community, are remembered. The dilemma of any oral culture (naturally, there is no word for “oral culture” any more than there is a word in French meaning “french fries”) is who we are and what we do. The only reason we refer to it as oral culture is because we now have a written cultural experience; under scholarly examination , only the consensus languaged art is remembered. The value of written expression is that the artistic expression of artists who are opposed to the status quo is also remembered because it has been published despite the general rejection by segments of society. Examination is limited to what is remembered. (There is no word for memory; there is a word for word power [ha’weles stwoxwiyam], direction marker [ha’weles shxwi woxwt], thoughts and feelings [ha’weles sqwa:lewel:], and to remember [ha’weles]). So we can remember the words that govern us (the first one); we can remember the words that directed or guided us (the second); we can remember our thoughts and feelings about something that happened (the third one); and we can remember, but we cannot make an object of memory (the fourth one) and treasured or agreed upon, rather than as a survey of art, which expresses dissenting points of view. The value of oral remembered word art (sti’lem) is that each song, each poem, builds upon the original song, the original poem, and serves to deepen and strengthen the values of the people until it becomes sxwoxwiyam—a forever story or transformer story. Because Native societies do not have institutions that are alienated from the family and social life of the community, oral language art became a powerful way to maintain governance of social and personal conduct without the use of force. Oral language art was foundational to the education process in Native societies. Children were given stories rather than instructions to guide their conduct . I came to realize that one of the things in our sensibility of language in the poetic voice, the business of strengthening the voice, is that we are endangering ourselves by not promoting the poetic in our children. Further, because force was never used to maintain internal discipline, choice, co-operation, and individual obligations became sacred. This condition led to the development of poetry and stories whose language refused to direct the...