Survival's Song: Beth Brant and the Power of the Word

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? --Audre Lorde Sometimes joyous, sometimes painful, it is a song of honesty and hope; a song of surviving. --Joseph Bruchac The Melting Pot is all America where God wipes away history's tears. --Israel Zangwill One of the most eloquent testimonies being made in contemporary Native American literature is to the power of our words and of the stories we can create with them. Unlike texts rooted in the classical tradition of debate, a model predicated on the agonistic principle that words are to be used to persuade and conquer, Native discourse has far different origins. Its tradition is of continuity and strength in the face of suppression and threatened extinction, a legacy that has enabled its speakers and writers to have a double vision: one that allows for the awareness of the power of words to control and distort but that leads them through this awareness to their own, far more respectful and celebratory relationship with language. In this way, words become, as N. Scott Momaday puts it, "powerful beyond our knowledge ... intrinsically powerful.... And there is magic in that. Words ... are created in the imagination and given life on the human voice" (183). As Momaday's words affirm, as a people so often threatened with extermination, Native rhetors reveal a deep understanding of the connection between language and life, since both have been repeatedly stolen away (Bruchac xiii). Never distanced from or a plaything of the speaker-writer, words are seen as inextricably linked to the continuance and renewal both of the individual spirit and of the Indian people, and the stories fashioned from these words become the key to one's connection with the world, one's heritage, and one's very being. Because of this, it is crucial that these stories be remembered and given voice, as Leslie Marmon Silko explains in "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective": ... with the story we know who we are.... The stories are always bringing us together, keeping this whole together.... These occasions of storytelling are continuous; they are a way of life.... Whatever ... we received at school (which was damn little), at home the storytelling, the special regard for telling and bringing together through the telling, was going on constantly.... As the old people say, `If you can remember the stories, you will be all right. Just remember the stories.' (57, 59, 67-68) While the "telling" of one's story is always privileged in Native culture, so too is the "teller," for each person brings his or her own inevitable uniqueness of vision to the story being told, a vision that is dependent on, and the product of, one's unique ancestry, traditions, and relationships. Far from subscribing to the Euro-American myth of the "self-made man," who can create and re-create himself independently at will, Native discourse conveys an abiding reverence for the interrelatedness of the human community--past, present and future--and its connection with the natural world. As such, every story and storyteller must be accorded full attention and a deep respect, for they remind us that "many parts make up the integration of a community.... Each part is distinct, yet each part acts in accordance with the whole" (Brant "Grandmothers of a New World" 43). While the Native community of contemporary writers is filled with those who model this vision of respect for the power and capabilities of language, one of the freshest and most compelling of these voices is that of Beth Brant (Degonwadonti), a Bay of Quinte Mohawk poet, short story writer, and essayist. Brant has described herself as "uneducated, a half-breed, a light-skinned half-breed, a lesbian, a feminist, an economically poor woman" (Gathering of Spirit 10), and understands all too well what it means to be silenced by the dominant culture. …