Our Bearings: Poems by Molly McGlennen (review)

let's begin by unpacking the title of Molly McGlennen's compelling collection of poems, Our Bearings. McGlennen's writing helps us get our bearings straight about Native experiences, histories, and landscapes. Anytime I hear "bearing" in a piece of writing by a Native writer I suspect I am also hearing "Bering," as in the strait over which the "original inhabitants" of the Americas hypothetically arrived. McGlennen ignores that Bering, even while implying it, in order to reorient our sense of place. Focusing on Minneapolis, Minnesota, McGlennen's poems claim her hometown as a Native place.

Though we are on unceded Dakota territory here in Minneapolis, there are Anishinaabe names like Nokomis and Keywadin placed on local lakes and streets not to acknowledge Anishinaabe peoples but to honor characters from Longfellow's Hiawatha. Settler maps erase Indigenous presences even when "honoring" them. McGlennen seeks to rectify this disjuncture. In her preface, she says she aims to "foil … Western knowledge systems that rely on progressivist tellings of history and amnestic cartographies of disengagement and partition" (xiv).

"Amnestic" pertains to the amnesia of the settler society. One beautiful piece in McGlennen's collection is "Keeping Tabs," a found poem that builds to the way that amnestic settler cartographies constrain places through erasure and proscription. The entire piece is composed of phrases found on signs at Fort Snelling State Park (I'm guessing based on the poems that bookend it). Fort Snelling is where the U.S. government put sixteen hundred Dakota people in a concentration camp following the 1862 war. While other poems will reflect on this fact, "Keeping Tabs," relying as it does on the park's words, doesn't. Except it does, through the incisive irony that McGlennen deploys to foil (her word, remember) this amnesia. Composed of the rules McGlennen encountered on her visit to the park, we learn that "permits are required for all motor vehicles" and that "pets must be leashed." We also learn that "the use of firearms … / is prohibited" and that we should "not scavenge dead wood." We learn, too, how settler bureaucracy ignores the depth of history in this place and so misshapes it, a distortion that McGlennen underscores in the poem's last line: "The map of the park is not to scale" (23).

McGlennen's poems offer another scale to this place, one informed by her Anishinaabe relatives who've made Minneapolis home for generations. In his thoughtful foreword to the book, Anishinaabe scholar Ben Burgess writes about how cities are homelands for Native people, but only if Native people claim them as sacred. He resists the notion that cities ruin homelands. He points out that in giving birth, mothers are often injured and bear the scars of their labor for years. The Earth Mother, he says, can have the same experience, and cities may be those scars. "The map is not to scale," as McGlennen writes, because it fails to recognize forts as scars.

McGlennen resets this map to Indigenous spacetime, pointing out that "494 and its cousin freeways / loop the whole city" (25). This concrete testimony to settler progress is a distortion, but the loop also creates a circle within which her Anishinaabe family make their lives. McGlennen implies that this loop is akin to a medicine wheel. Just as a medicine wheel comprises the four sacred directions, Our Bearings is presented in four parts, "Earth," "Air," "Water," and "Fire." Nested within each part are poems that come in series of fours (and one five), reinforcing the significance of sacred numbers in this remapping project. The poems walk us through loops of family origins, both mundane (where McGlennen's father and mother met) and mythic ("when we were water / we turned into ourselves" [17]), as well as heartbreaking pieces concerning disjuncture and discrimination, relayed in both those familiar and mythic voices. McGlennen gives us more, too: nineties R&B, Native hip hop, and NBA basketball as touchstones of Anishinaabe Minneapolis experience. "She wants to write about" these things, she claims in...