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    Indianland
    Indianland
    Indianland
    Ebook134 pages53 minutes

    Indianland

    By Lesley Belleau

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    About this ebook

    Written from a female and Indigenous perspective, the poems in Indianland incorporate Anishinaabemowin throughout. Lesley Belleau explores rich themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing, as well as touchstone issues in Indigenous politics including Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, and Kanesatake with immediacy and intimacy. This multiform collection moves from present day to first contact and back to the present, immersing us in images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs, and grounding the book in the beloved land of which it speaks.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArbeiter Ring Publishing
    Release dateOct 15, 2017
    ISBN9781927886021
    Indianland
    Author

    Lesley Belleau

    Indianland is a rich and varied poetry collection. The poems are written from a female and Indigenous point of view and incorporate Anishinaabemowin throughout. Time is cyclical in this collection, moving from present day back to first contact and forward again. Themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing are explored. Images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs recur, and touchstone issues in Indigenous politics are addressed, including Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, and Kanesatake.

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      Book preview

      Indianland - Lesley Belleau

      body

      This is Indian Land

      a bridge in the middle of

      garden river reserve

      summoning history

      the same as an old brown finger would

      to a child

      we walk across it

      trying to beat the train

      old birds fly by

      slowing

      a trail left by raccoons

      disappear somewhere under my

      tattooed toes

      not so brown but for the dirt

      between them

      when I was a child I would watch the bridge

      and wonder what people thought of us here

      in G.R.

      in the middle of nowhere

      with the loudest bridge in the world

      a screaming bridge

      wailing from one end to the other

      THIS IS INDIAN LAND

      but now I know why our bridge needs to

      howl

      why the birds slow over the bridge

      why the eagles protect the small black statue

      why the paint never fades or dulls or

      disappears

      because we are not in the middle of nowhere

      after all

      this is the war zone picket sign

      the biggest picket sign

      our bridge is

      the middle of the war

      every reserve is the middle of it

      every brown face is howling

      and those who are tired

      I don’t want to fight because nobody listens

      it gets too hard and too long and too quiet

      and nobody hears us anyway

      and I am getting old and my body is dying

      and so the bridge

      speaks for us

      here in wartime

      when warriors are dying

      and birthing

      and working

      when dinner needs to be made

      the warrior words scream out

      the howl of Indian Land

      each lost voice

      dead baby

      stolen child

      each woman lost to the streets

      every man

      who doesn’t see the

      thunder of our histories

      THIS IS INDIAN LAND

      Cornhusk Dolls

      and we gathered.

      baskets swelled into sunrise, and we gathered.

      yarrow coloured our fingers, inhaled our sweat onto its spine.

      a damp heat had started. Our men were still sleeping.

      and we gathered

      dawn pressing us closer to home. Your woman breath next to mine.

      sister fingers scraped new root, drank hawthorn with our flesh

      delivered summer buds and stems to the bitten bark. Baskets

      swelled into sunrise, edged over the foothills, where our men

      slept like the dead beside our babies wrapped in tanned deerskins

      beside their cornhusk dolls that wore hanging pelts over their fading bodies.

      sunrise, and we gathered.

      yarrow greened our nails, seeped into our flesh

      our footpads broke the earth into trial.

      branches brushed over our cheeks, hands led us back.

      our men waited for us.

      raised their hands, hot with the sweat of bone, to pull the flap for us.

      to pull us between fur and thigh, our baskets emptied by the doorflaps.

      fur and thigh to break the dawn.

      we gathered.

      their breathbuds soft as sumac, their hands damp heat

      our bodies lit between brown flesh and cedar boughs.

      us women picked.

      foxglove.

      scarlet sage.

      waterlilies.

      juniper.

      goldenrod.

      trillium.

      white gaura.

      until we greened our nails.

      smudged their fleshes on our palm-skins.

      rubbed milkweed round and round and round our hands

      necks, arms,

      thick as the side-swell of moon

      until we were whitened

      gauzed over beside the lush hue of noon.

      our babies were squashed against us

      flattening our breasts under our bearclaw necklaces

      scraping blood. ochre red.

      washing our hands, we see a new boat on our shore

      wide prints leading outward toward the slant of our hills.

      we picked, waiting for the break of grass, to crouch and wait

      pointed bone-ready for battle.

      bone behind wrist, we picked.

      and waited.

      picked and waited

      our babies chewing roots on our shoulders, until they slept.

      we discovered them eating on smushed lakegrass

      their necks as white as dead cattail tips

      lips tipped red with chokecherry blood —

      hushhushhushhushhushhushhushhushhushhush —

      and pulled our babies closer, their cheeks as warm as the long, flat

      rocks of agawa,

      lined in red, ochred red.

      we discovered them.

      dead cattail tips.

      red with chokecherry blood.

      red, ochred red.

      hush. Hush.

      crouched and waited.

      bone point hovered behind wrist

      the wail of chejauk in our minds

      the taste of an old song lined our throats.

      and the grass split

      tip division

      vision shone

      their faces edged in cedar fringes.

      new people

      pale hair hanging

      skins reddened by the sun.

      sagegrass.

      Contact.

      grass, sweetgrass stompled under

      salmon stilled under northbound streams

      new-sprung bluejays stitched to their branches

      made quiet here by their arrival.

      contact.

      new trails stomped open

      the buds of our healing bursting over shoreline muds

      stems scattered into crooked patterns.

      long black hair braiding fern

      our breaths parting the open space of their footpaths

      cheek against the earth

      a caribou scent from somewhere near

      feeding a mushroom edge in the mouths of our babies to silence them.

      and quiescent grass grew scorched inside the cusp of summer

      as they

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