CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A few years ago, Robert Dale Parker was in a basement library reading microfilm he had ordered from the Library of Congress when he found a trove of poems written by an Ojibwe Indian. The fact that the poems were literate and lyrical pleased Parker, a literary critic, but the fact that they were from 1815 made him ecstatic.
“I was shaking and tingling, and I wanted to scream out to all these people around me: ‘Look at this! This is major! This is really something!’ ” Parker recalls. “I knew that I had found something special, and as time went on, I found much more.”
What Parker – the Benson professor in English at University of Illinois – eventually found was an abundance of evidence that American Indians had been writing prose and poetry at an advanced level “as long as the British have, in what’s now the United States,” he said. “It feels completely counter-intuitive to people, but it’s a great story.”
As a result of his research, Parker has gathered the work of 82 poets for “Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Parker offers a history and context of the poems in an extensive introduction, and includes a brief biography of each poet.
The title of the book echoes a poem by Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapai Indian who graduated from the U. of I. in 1884 with a degree in chemistry and became a physician. In addition to maintaining a medical practice in Chicago, Montezuma published a political newspaper, and included some of his own poetry in it.
Although Montezuma consistently used his paper to attack the Office of Indian Affairs (now called the Bureau of Indian Affairs), he also argued against the popular myth that Native Americans were disappearing. “The feathers, paint and moccasin will vanish, but the Indians, – never!” Montezuma wrote in a poem titled “Changing is Not Vanishing.”
By borrowing Montezuma’s title for his book, Parker is reminding readers that Indians are among the smart, literate people all around us every day. “Indians are not going to pop out in a feathered headdress,” Parker said. “That’s what many non-Indians expect – so if they don’t see that, they assume there are no Indians. But Indians are everywhere.”
The book’s contents puncture another myth – that of the grunting savages stereotyped in John Wayne movies. “I get frustrated with the assumption that Indian literacy is a relatively minor and new phenomenon,” Parker said. “I was confident that it had a long history, and I thought that I could show that by bringing this history of the relatively high literacy that poetry entails to public audience. This book goes exactly counter to all the clichés about Indian people.”
Through years of research, Parker identified nearly 150 Indian poets whose work predated 1930. He included 82 of those poets in his book, and about half of their poems, choosing, he said, only poems that he thought people would like to read.
He found about half of these poems through the work of Daniel F. Littlefield and James Parins, two University of Arkansas professors who produced a bibliography of all the Indian writing they could find. Parker found many others by scanning microfilm reels of old newspapers, looking for blocks of type set in a way that looked like a poem.
Most of those blocks of type turned out to be advertisements. Of the ones that were poems, most were written by Anglos. And among the poetry supposedly written by Indians, Parker determined that a few were written by “fake Indians” – white writers who pretended to be Indian, sometimes to make fun of them. Parker’s book includes an appendix of “notable false attributions.”
He did virtually all of this tedious work himself, because he couldn’t imagine finding the poems any other way. “Even if it were more efficient to have students do it, which I don’t think it would’ve been, I would miss the fun,” Parker said. “And why would you do it if you don’t love doing it?”
He found many of the poets to be interesting characters: John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), whom Parker describes as a “remarkable lyric talent, arguably at least among the several most powerful American poets before Whitman”; Wa Wa Chaw, a Payomkowishum Indian raised by a wealthy white New Yorker who dressed her in buckskins and beads; and Alex Posey – “a great poet with completely mature and crafted language” – who drowned in the river that was the topic of much of his work.
Parker, who has no Indian heritage, says he came to concentrate on Native American writing purely as a literary critic and teacher.
“Some years ago, I was thinking how little I knew about American Indian literature, and I was a scholar of American literature and American studies,” he said. He received a grant to develop a course on the topic, and his interest grew from there. “I had no idea when I started to read what fascination I would find, but these are great writers.”
Parker’s previous books include “How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies” (Oxford University Press, 2008); “The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and “The Invention of Native American Literature” (Cornell University Press, 2003).
Michael A. Elliott, Winship distinguished professor of English at Emory University, calls “Changing is Not Vanishing” “a truly significant publication.” Carter Revard, a distinguished Osage writer and emeritus professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, has deemed it “an excellent book, uniquely recovering materials of great importance.”
