Indianland
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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.
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