Charles Trimble: Just because you wannabee / A Lakota just like me

Opinion

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Back in the early 1970s, my friend and super journalist, the late Richard LaCourse, Yakama, unearthed and brought to public attention a racist, anti-Indian editorial by South Dakota’s own L. Frank Baum, author of the book The Wizard of Oz. The editorial was written soon after the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, which Baum hailed as a great victory, and called for extermination as the answer to the “Indian problem.” It was ironic to find the author of such a wonderful children story with such a vicious, racist attitude.

We find attitudes of white superiority and condescension in other famous literary figures as well, such as the poem “The White Man’s Burden” amid Rudyard Kipling’s otherwise beautiful, powerful, and heroic works.

Recently a good friend sent me another such discovery in the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson. This was from Stevenson's poem; "Foreign Children" in his book A Child's Garden of Verses. It sounds innocent enough, and undoubtedly has delighted thousands of children down through the years. But it is still troubling in that it tends to instill in the Caucasian child an attitude of racial superiority. Here it is:

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanese.
O! Don’t you wish that you were me?

This stirred up my creative juices, and I immediately penned the following little poem in response, not out of racism, meanness or anger, but in keeping with the lineage of us great authors and poets for traces of bigotry lurking in our sanctimonious hearts:

Little White guy, WASP or Kraut,
There’s no need to mope and pout,
Just because you wannabee
A Lakota just like me.

Now, you’ve got to admit, dear readers, that while this poem doesn’t put me in the Pantheon of Poets Laureate, it’s at least good as that of Mr. Stevenson’s. And it does give you some enjoyment – especially if you are Lakota. If you’re not so blessed with Lakota lineage or if you’re white, please don’t be offended, keeping in mind that a majority of Lakotas carry a smidgen or more of WASP blood or Kraut juice.

Ever since my school days at Holy Rosary Mission school back in the 1940s and 50s, I have had a special fondness and some talent for verse. Having grown up listening to spit-kicking music (not exactly what we called it, but close) transmitted from blowtorch 50-thousand-watt radio stations out of Mexico, I can still sing most songs done by any of the legendary Hanks – Williams, Snow, Thompson, Locklin, and others. That’s because Country music – which we used to call Hillbilly music back then – carried such great rhyme and meter that they were easy to memorize.

Also, Jesuit schools like Holy Rosary Mission emphasized literature, especially poetry. Punishment often consisted of having to write a 500-word composition or having to memorize and recite a poem to classmates. That wasn’t bad if you were assigned something out of Robert W. Service like “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” or “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

But it was most embarrassing to any young wannabee warrior if the assigned poem was a mushy ode to some fair maiden. To this day, I can still recite most of Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen.” But I remember it so well because as punishment for some infraction, I had to recite it to my giggling, snorting classmates:

“Helen, thy beauty is to me,
Like those Nicaean barks of yore,
That gently o’er a perfumed sea
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore….”

But I got to love poetry. Poetry offers enjoyment and solace, and frequently I read it to relax. Recently, an angered and churlish journalist colleague sent me an e-mail in which he called me an “insignificant nobody,” and threatened to knock me on my gluteus maximus.

My good friend Sam Deloria consoled me by telling me that he had always considered me a “very significant nobody.” But the seething, scurrilous slur (how’s that for alliteration?) immediately brought to mind a short little poem by Emily Dickinson I had learned many years ago:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us, don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To sing your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

The poem gave me comfort and perspective – particularly the last verse, because the frog is a perfect metaphor for my fellow tribesman and journalist nemesis. Especially the lines about singing his name the livelong day to some admiring bog. As to the threat to knock me on my butt, we can settle that if he shows up at the Holy Rosary/Red Cloud Indian School reunion in a couple of weeks. I would not want to risk a heart attack on the part of either of us old geezers, however, so I would offer a less violent alternative and challenge him to a debate on journalistic ethics; or better yet, a poetry shoot-out. Stay tuned.

I will close here with another of my works for you to enjoy and leave to your posterity to give them joy when you go the way of George Custer. It is one that I wrote several years ago to commemorate Custer Day – June 25th. I will repeat it here, for with June 25th only a month away, it is timely, and you may want to memorize it for your celebration:

A colonel by the name of George Custer,
With all the troops he could muster,
Rode down on the Sioux
And got himself slew.
Said Crazy Horse,
“Serves you right, Buster.”

I regret that the strict rules of the Limerick genre, which I chose for this great poem, requires the first, second, and last sentences to rhyme; otherwise, I would have had Crazy Horse using much more colorful language for his epithet, instead of “Buster.”

Enjoy. Have fun. Don’t take things so seriously. Compose some poetry, and send it to me at my e-mail address below.

Charles “Chuck” Trimble, Oglala Lakota, was principal founder of the American Indian Press Association in 1970, and served as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1972-78. He may be reached at cchuktrim@aol.com. His website is iktomisweb.com.