Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education by Diane Glancy, and : Report to the Department of the Interior: Poems by Diane Glancy (review)

Diane Glancy is a writer peculiarly marked with obsessions. Her always experimental work may flit from historical reconstruction to presentday midwestern monotony, from the aftermath of the btk killings to the Trail of Tears, from a novel set in a very real hell to a film set partly in Fritz Scholder’s imaginarium, but certain themes emerge again and again. Seldom have they come together with such skill and control as they do in her latest diptych, part of an outpouring that has seen her publish no fewer than five books in the past year.

There is her descent from Cherokee ancestors and the way that, as she puts it in her autobiographical essay “Two Dresses,” this “leavened the whole lump.” Raised outside Cherokee culture, neither a citizen of the Cherokee Nation nor a speaker of Tsalagi, nonetheless she has an inescapable fascination with reclaiming her heritage, which has driven the vast majority of her prose and poetry. Speaking of driving, she repeatedly returns to the image of a lone driver traversing a vast plain, simultaneously still and in motion. This in turn speaks to a postmodern sense of deep time as something that can be understood in myriad complex ways, each history like a car journey that finds just one line of many, each narrator providing just one limited perspective on events that it is not possible to “fully” understand. This in turn is supplemented with a deeply felt and deeply considered Christian faith, the main subject of perhaps a third of her works, which creates a fragmented, tenuous sense of community even among the chaos of evil actions. Topping this all off is a compulsive drive to animate unconsidered lives and unheard voices, often those of people known as someone’s wife, someone’s victim, someone’s survivor.

Reading these latest works brings another obsession into particular focus, a preoccupation with education in all its forms. Reclamation of heritage, after all, requires self-education, and Glancy clearly allies her formidable intellect with an extraordinary work ethic. Previous forays into the past, notably her stories of Sacajawea (Stone Heart) and Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (The Reason for Crows), have required extensive archival work. Glancy has also explicitly talked on numerous occasions of an almost psychogeographical element to her work, wherein she travels, armed with her research, to important sites in her narratives, opening herself up to hearing voices from the earth. As she puts it in Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, “Historical memory, if there is such a thing, is an interior landscape of tribal voices and events that come over the lanes of traffic as I drive the highways and back roads on various journeys. As I re-drive their space” (60). Yet education is no unalloyed pleasure in her writing. She has written many times of the struggle she has felt, both as student and educator, even to speak in the classroom. The title character of her novel Flutie (later filmed as The Dome of Heaven), a novel that contains many autobiographical elements, is struck almost dumb with the need to express something that feels inexpressible, a narrative that Glancy pairs with the story of tongueless Philomela.

So it is very easy to understand why the prisoners of the title should be of interest to Glancy. Following the Southern Plains Indian Wars, “seventy-two of the worst prisoners” (1) were taken from the allied Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo tribes and shipped as far from Indian Country as possible, to Fort Marion in Florida. There their hair was forcibly cut, their clothes were exchanged for army uniforms, and they were handed into the charge of Captain Richard Henry Pratt...