In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 READING THE WAMPUM William Faulkner, the Mississippi novelist, once wrote that we must be violated by life. The Lakota Holy Man black Elk once said that we human beings must celebrate the greening of the day. I have celebrated that green spring and flowery summer, that russet autumn and snowy January. I have also been violated, and in turn violated life. The violation and the celebration have produced hundreds of poems and stories and made me acquainted with the night, the day, and more human beings than I can possibly remember.1 Taking the excruciating pain of boyhood assaults and attacks, Kenny later reformulates them into a brutal sensuality and foreboding sexuality that pervade Isaac Jogues, Molly Brant, and Connotations. This view into the darker side of human nature adds a depth to Kenny’s portrayal of colonialism that leaves the reader without question of its cruelty and lack of humanity. These early years also were characterized by Kenny’s strong desire for fame as exemplified by the fortune teller who once told his mother that he would be tremendously famous and that she saw him surrounded by books . . . or stones. She claimed he might not see fame in his own lifetime, but that he would surely be famous. This prediction inspired Kenny and determined the direction of much of his early efforts, leading to wild days skipping school and riding the subway into Manhattan to collect signatures from movie stars like Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. At eighteen, three years after his parents’ separation and one year after an ill-fated trip to the deep South, during which he would be abducted , bound, and sexually assaulted by a stranger in the Mississippi swamp, Kenny began attending Butler University in Indianapolis, where he was mentored by poet Ray Marz and Werner Beyer. Kenny so adored his years at Butler that when his graduation approached and he was faced with returning to upstate New York, he suffered a nervous breakdown, necessitating his sister and brother-in-law driving across the United States to bring him home. In these years, Kenny published his first collections of poetry, The Hopeless Kill (1956), Dead Letters Sent and Other Poems (1958), With Love to Lesbia (1959), and And Grieve, Lesbia (1960); these books were impressed by Kenny’s traditional training at Butler and did not reflect his burgeoning Mohawk identity in any overt way. During this time he lived in New York City, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, and Chicago alternately until his move to Brooklyn in the late 1960s. Kenny now turned more seriously to his craft, beginning a master’s program at the City University with Louise Bogan and rejecting the free tuition his father offered him to attend Columbia. With Bogan’s guidance and the American Indian Community House artistic milieu, Kenny’s writing turned to Indigenous New York themes. His most 4 PENELOPE MYRTLE KELSEY dramatic moment of awakening, however, occurred during the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973, when Kenny was immobilized on bedrest as a result of a heart condition. Kenny recounts his tremendous sense of frustration at not being able to join Pine Ridge community members and American Indian Movement activists or support them through working with Jerry Campbell and other Mohawks at Akwesasne Notes. Kenny says, “I was sick. There’s no two ways about it . . . because of the traveling [to give readings] and going to reservations and meeting people. What I had in my mind [when composing I Am the Sun] was what I know about my land and my people, I can take out to other lands, and what I have learned from those people [other Native Americans] I can bring back” (Interview 2/8/2003). As a direct response to being confined to bedrest at such a pivotal political juncture, Kenny published I Am the Sun (1976), a poetic revision of the Lakota Sundance. This collection was soon followed by a rapid succession of chapbooks: North: Poems of Home (1977), Dancing Back Strong the Nation (1979), Only as Far as Brooklyn (1981), Kneading the Blood (1981), Boston Tea Party (1982), The Smell of Slaughter (1982), and Blackrobe (1982). Both Blackrobe and Between Two Rivers (1987) were nominated for Pulitzer Prizes, and in 1984, Kenny was awarded the prestigious American Book Award for The Mama Poems, a memoir about his mother, who died in a housefire in 1982. The succession of poetry collections continues with Is Summer This Bear (1985), Greyhounding This America (1988), Humors And...

Share