Winning the Dust Bowl by Carter Revard (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2 7 5 Winning the D ust Bowl. By Carter Revard. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. 212 pages, $40.00/$ 17.95. Reviewed by Ellen L. Arnold East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina American Indian scholar and poet Carter Revard’s new book is a funny, poignant, and sometimes stinging account of growing up on the Osage Reservation during Oklahoma Dust Bowl times among an extended family of Osage, Ponca, and Irish/Scotchdrish farmers, bootleggers, bank robbers, political activists, and stronghearted women. But above all, Winning the Dust Bowl is the autobiography of a poet. Akin to Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, this multigenre memoir layers selected poems from Revard’s previous poetry collec­ tions— Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), and An Eagle Nation (1993)— with new poems, history, family stories, and photographs. As Revard puts it in his introduction, the book provides a “home” for the poems of “transformation and awakening” that mark the stages of his development as a poet, each short chapter placing a poem or two in a “meadow” of historical and autobiographical context (xiii). Arranged not chronologically but associatively, the chapters are “angled mirrors” that reflect the shifting, multidimensional relationships between life and language (xiii). Like his earlier collection of autobiographical and critical essays, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs (1998), Winning the Dust Bowl limns scenes from a remarkable life in the intersections of the complex histories and identities of the American West. Revard’s up-by-the-bootstraps story takes him from the Buck Creek Valley— where he worked as a janitor in a one-room schoolhouse to help support his struggling family— to the Universities of Tulsa, Oxford, and Yale— forging a career as a widely respected scholar of medieval English liter­ ature. In a parallel journey, he was named Nompehwahthe, relative of Thunder, in an Osage naming ceremony when he was twenty-one, participated in American Indian resistance during the American Indian Movement years, became a Gourd Dancer and community organizer in St. Louis, where he has lived and taught for many years. Revard’s narrative chronicles his struggle to “locate a self” within these mixed traditions and to “stay alive in song” from the time when he first finds his poetic voice in “Coyote Tells Why He Sings” (19, 25). Revard mourns his losses and celebrates the muses— coyote, thunder and rain, honeybees and humming­ birds— that enable him to make the forms of English verse his own. “Walking with Friends Down Lorigill and Dibadal, on the Isle of Skye” describes his tran­ sition from blank verse to free verse, reflecting “a change in [his] way of seeing the world” that enters his poems in the rhythms of home, the stories and songs and dances that speak of “how Indian people survive as Indians” (29, 184). The book’s title poem, “Winning the Dust Bowl,” is a tribute to Revard’s cousin Roy, who left the Dust Bowl for years of migrant labor and “made a way / to put good 2 7 6 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMM ER 2 0 0 2 food on many tables” (74). Addressed to “certain governors and presidents” who have forgotten that the wealth of the nation was built on the labor of Native people as well as immigrants, the poem is a reminder of“what we owed/ the peo­ ple we had used to kill” (71, 73). By the final chapter, “Indian Survival, Seven: After Sand Creek,” Revard’s poetic voice has become a communal one; the book closes with “A Song That We Still Sing,” a Ponca “Victory Song” sung at the Sand Creek Massacre, in the face of death. Hearing it in the mins of an old fort, Revard’s Ponca cousins “. . . recognized, that song. It’s one / that