Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 ed. by Robert Dale Parker (review)

In the acknowledgments for Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, Robert Dale Parker credits a colleague with the provocative claim that recovering (and editing) forgotten or little-known texts ultimately may be more valuable than publishing yet another book of literary criticism. Without declaring a moratorium on creative scholarship, scholars in Indigenous studies and American literature should be grateful that Parker took up the challenge. Changing Is Not Vanishing breaks important ground for the study of American Indian literature and calls for similarly thorough efforts to recover early Indigenous writing across genres. The volume's focus on poetry adds much-needed dimension to a literary history often focused too narrowly on early nonfiction texts or contemporary novels. As a companion to Parker's 2009 compilation of Jane Johnson Schoolcraft's work, entitled The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky, the current collection offers valuable new materials for research and teaching and also raises critical questions for the field as a whole, from the history of Indian boarding schools as sites of literary production to the relationship of early poetry to intertribal, transnational, and global networks of exchange.

The collection is organized chronologically, beginning with an elegy in Latin and Greek by a Harvard student named Eleazar in 1678. Little information is known about Eleazar, but his poem's incorporation in Cotton Mather's 1702 Magnalia Christi Americana, for decades considered to be the urtext of early American literature, speaks to the omissions and peculiarities of the historical record as well as the tangled associations of the Christian missionary project and academic institutions with early Native writing in non-Native languages. From the archival tease of such texts hiding in plain sight, the collection leaps forward to the 1820s and 1830s, with additional poems from the mid and late nineteenth century. A full two-thirds of the volume focuses on the early twentieth century, a period that saw an explosion of Native writing as a result of assimilation policies that included English-only education in Indian boarding schools.

Parker notes that he encountered the work of 150 early poets in his research, far more than the 82 represented in the final volume. His broad introduction offers useful (though hardly exhaustive) frameworks for grouping texts, such as "poems about colonialism," "poems about land," and "poems about love and war." Parker's commitment to multiple audiences for the collection is evident in his lucid prose style and his discussion of complex historical contexts as well as literary form. In contrast to the extensive commentary for each entry in The Sound Things Make Rushing through the Sky (notes that at times threaten to overwhelm the poems and stories), the editorial materials for each poet (or poem) in the current volume are rich and informative but brief.

Parker makes a strong case for excluding what he terms "anthropological poems" in translation (8) as mediated in troubling ways and importantly distinct from texts composed by Indigenous writers for circulation in print. From sonnets and ballads to lullabies, the resulting poems vary widely in form and register. Several writers critique the discourse of civilization as in "The Red Man's Burden" by J. C. Duncan (Cherokee) or the titular "Changing Is Not Vanishing" by Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai); others hail Indigenous cultural traditions as in "A Delaware Indian Legend" by Richard C. Adams (Delaware/Lenape) or "The Green Corn Dance" by James Roane Gregory (Euchee/Muskogee). A number of poems speak to the mobile lives of various writers, as when Molly Spotted Elk (or Molly Alice Nelson, Penobscot) recalls "the dreamy Rio Grande" (2) in "Down in the land of roses" or pays lighthearted tribute to vaudeville performers in "We're in the Chorus Now." As a whole, the poems tend to reflect the popular styles and formal structural elements of American and European poetics...