Native regard for nature inspires poet Norma C. Wilson
‘Art of collaboration’ underpins recent bookBy Talli Nauman
Native Sun News Today
Health & Environment Editor
nativesunnews.today
DEADWOOD – In Rivers, Wings & Sky, showcased here at the 2017 South Dakota Festival of Books, poet Norma C. Wilson and artist Nancy Losacker reveal a shared passion for protecting the natural heritage of the Northern Great Plains.
Poems and photos of glass mosaics that the two former University of South Dakota faculty colleagues showed in exhibits over the past four years are now collected between book covers, affording a tour de force in what they call “art of collaboration.”
In the chapter “Our Collaboration”, Wilson writes, “Collaborating with another person is a complex. Sometimes it is easy. Other times it is, as Nancy says, ‘like pulling teeth’.”
Wilson and Losack complement each other with their works, meanwhile drawing inspiration from Native American culture and poetry.
Wilson recalls a story in a literary magazine published by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s Sinte Gleske University. It was a narrative by Charlotte Black Elk, relating how Miniconjou people designated their leader Big Foot as a peacekeeper with a white trumpeter swan wing.
He carried the wing with him up to the time of the U.S. 7th Cavalry’s massacre of his tribal members at Wounded Knee on Dec. 29, 1890, a story retold in the first three stanzas of Wilson’s poem “The White Wing”:
The Keeper of the White Wing
rode ill with pneumonia
to save his people.
Bearing a white flag
he sought peace.
But others would fight.
At Wounded Knee
the soldiers’ guns
killed for hours.
That December day
two hundred fifty Lakotas
and twenty-five soldiers died.
After the slaughter
a blizzard flew
from the North.
As an elder shouted,
“The wing, the wing!
the gravedigger threw
the blood-stained white wing
into the burial trench.
white-winged birds
ride the North winds
soaring over the curving river
glistening with sunlight,
the checkered fields
of green and brown,
the river banks
with umbrella-like shade
that once
belonged to all.
Even birds sharing seeds
seem to know
that Earth’s abundance
is the white wing of peace,
falling to earth
as flakes of snow. Wilson spoke to the Native Sun News Today during the 2017 South Dakota Festival of Books. Turns out her southern accent is due to the fact that her home near Vermillion is the furthest north she’s ever lived. A Tennessean originally, she derived a sense of relationship to the land from her grandparents, who grew their own food and lived without electricity or running water. She remembers singing to her grandfather while he milked cows and stored the milk on blocks of ice, gathering blackberries, and watching her grandmother make pie on a woodstove, kill chickens, and make dresses out of flour sacks. “I loved being in the country with nature. Sitting on the grass under pine trees, playing in the creek and things like that are what I enjoyed in my childhood,” she said. She went to the University of Oklahoma to major in English. Her dissertation ended up being on “The Spirit of Place in Contemporary Native American Poetry.” In Oklahoma she had the opportunity to meet the poets and study their work. They enhanced her appreciation of nature and fueled a desire to encourage her own readers to honor the earth,” she said. For example, Pulitzer Prize-winning Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday helped her understand the idea of reciprocity, or recognizing that “if you receive all these gifts from Mother Nature, you should give something back,” Wilson said.
