On Young Bear

’s Cultural Politics Essay, Research Paper


Robin Riley Fast


For many Native American writers, issues of audience and community are vexed by the


question of "What is ethical to tell?" Can tradition be offered as a means to


commonality with an eclectic audience? These writers might, for example, honor tradition


by acknowledging in their writing the stories that are their sources, and in so doing


continue the oral tradition that is the ground of Indian cultural survival. On the other


hand, cognizant of the opportunities for misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and


appropriation offered by every translation and sharing of tradition, they might honor


tradition by protecting the old stories and alluding to sacred or otherwise culturally


vital materials cryptically, indirectly, partially, or not at all. Out of such tensions,


many Native poets have created careful balances between protective reticence and


imaginative re-vision.


Young Bear describes the sources of his poetry as including myth, history, and


especially dreams; he illuminates the. places where dreams and other realities meet and


the delicate negotiations involved in evoking those meetings within contested spaces, when


he discusses his writing process. His comments on the constraints he knows, as a Mesquakie


writing in English, recall the question engendered by the gaps between traditional


communities and outside audiences: "What is ethical to tell?" We have already


seen how this question might complicate his allusive appeals to Algonquin relatives and


representatives of non-Native culture, "Emily Dickinson, Bismarck and the


Roadrunner’s Inquiry." His afterword to Black Eagle Child is similarly


suggestive about what might be involved in exploring the interpenetrations of waking and


dreamed experience, a central impulse of the narrative poems I discuss below.


"In the delicate ritual of weighing what can and cannot be shared," Young


Bear tells us in the afterword, a "greater portion of my work is not based on


spontaneity." Declining spontaneity in favor of "an exercise in creative


detachment," his colloquially grounded and cryptically allusive narrative poems


heighten: the disjunction between the esoteric and the public, even as they enact the


potent continuity of dreamed and waking experience, and "the artistic interlacing of


ethereality, past and present." As he says, "the divisions between dream and


myth are never clear cut" (254). For a tribal person like Young Bear the divisions


between myth and contemporary actuality are always potentially permeable.


By Young Bear’s account his Mesquakie community offers compel- ling disincentives to


revealing privileged knowledge: this is strikingly evident in his grandmother’s cautionary


reference to William Jones, a Mesquakie prot?g? of Franz Boas. After collecting and


publishing a considerable body of myth and other materials from the Mesquakie, Jones was


killed in the Philippines, as he attempted to pursue further anthropological studies. The


poet reminds himself of another reason for reticence, the respect intrinsically due to


relations, as to the spiritual, in "The Reason Why I Am Afraid Even Though I Am a


Fisherman"; further, this poem tells us, "answers have nothing / to do with


cause and occurrence" (Invisible Musician 9). Dreams by their nature defeat


illusions of possession, even as they invite interpretation; they seem to offer Young Bear


an oblique, protective way of approaching traditional material. Dream is thus a way of


both telling and not telling. And Young Bear’s cultural location and commitm

ents thus


create the conditions for a rich, distinctively nuanced heteroglossia. By evoking dreams,


the poet inevitably tells about his culture, for self, culture, and dream are inextricably


connected. Doing so cryptically, suggestively mixing the apparently traditional (and note


that an outsider must say "apparently") with the contemporary, the poet may both


keep the traditional alive and protect its integrity, by refusing to concede to the


desires or impositions of outsiders. Thus he is able to deal with the question of ethical


telling in a way that is both creative and respectful of his community.


He illuminates his approach when he likens himself to "an artist who didn’t


believe in endings," whose "sweeping visions . . . were constant and forever


changing"; thus his "essential" commitment "to keep these enigmatic


stories afloat in the dark until dust-filled veils of light inadvertently reveal . . .


their luminescent shapes" (Black Eagle Child 255). The fluid suggestiveness of


his narrative poems is evoked here, as are both their resistance to closure and their


sense of expectancy, of creative waiting, for something like an illuminating veil that may


allow a kind of access to both poet/speaker and reader/audience without offering to either


the illusion of possession or complete resolution.


Toward the end of his afterword Young Bear suggests a link between his awareness of


borderland conditions and his poetry’s combination of openness and guardedness in words


that recall Owens’s "exquisite balancing act" (Other Destinies 15). As a


writer, he says,


I have attempted to maintain a delicate equilibrium with my tribal homeland’s history


and geographic surroundings and the world that changes its face along the borders.


Represented in the whirlwind of mystical themes and modern symbols . . . the


word-collecting process is an admixture of time present and past, of direction found and


then lost, of actuality and dream. (260)


"The Handcuff Symbol," "Always Is He Criticized," and "The


Black Antelope Tine" (all in The Invisible Musician) interweave dreamed and


waking realities in contexts at least partially defined by cultural dislocation. Rather


than providing clear resolutions to either contemporary narratives or elusive threads of


dream, they offer experiences that reverberate within each poem and suggest continuities


within and beyond the poems’ confines. Reading and rereading, we become aware of the


proliferating possibilities of internal cross-references and communal, perhaps mythic,


continuities. And the poems’ subtly offered possibilities seem to clarify, if not the


"meanings" of their allusions, then the dynamics of each poem’s structure and


its spiritual sensibility. At the same time, the layered possibilities contribute to the


poems’ opacity: we see, when we do, through "dust-filled veils of light." This


effect is intensified by Young Bear’s reliance on associative connections; even when he


seems to explain, he does so in a context pervaded by the juxtapositions and fluidity of


dream, vision, and memory. And yet the liberating paradox is that we can see. Though it is


easy to be aware of Young Bear’s "veils," if we are receptive to the


"light" it may, he tells us, "inadvertently reveal" the stories’


"luminescent shapes," and the poems may bring us closer to the world of dream


and myth than we expect or can grasp.


from The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry.


Copyright ? 1999 by the University of Michigan.

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