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River in Alaska

Gagaan X’usyee / Below the Foot of the Sun: Poems

Reviewed by Heather Swan

 
Gagaan X’usyee / Below the Foot of the Sun: Poems
X’unei Lance Twitchell
University of Alaska Press | 2024 | 118 pages
 

Stillness,” commands X’unei Lance Twitchell, in his poem “Ode to Tlingit”:

You are rocks now within the river’s churn,
that is what you must become,
what we call Raven’s luggage,
let nothing move so you can absorb
that open-mouthed roar containing
secrets I cannot tell you.

Gagaan X'Uysee / Below the Foot of the Sun“Ode to Tlingit” encapsulates the driving mission of Twitchell’s new book Gagaan X’usyee / Below the Foot of the Sun, the directive to learn from the Earth through a nearly forgotten language. This volume of poetry by an indigenous Alaskan poet weaves two languages and two epistemologies, successfully revivifying and archiving tradition, as well as offering a healing potential for a community that has suffered from colonial violence and attempted erasure. He is a writer keenly aware “that sacred words are dying, that songs are drifting / from meaning and connection to mere sounds,” but believes “the jackhammer and worldwideweb / cannot rattle on and entice this camp / where every meal is ceremony, where art is / perfected through imitation, living as / a minority in a nation of bear and salmon.” The readers of these poems are invited to witness this camp, this group of people intentionally healing and recognizing their connection with their land and the animals who live there, where the humans are, in fact, the minority. He writes the empowerment of his community into his poems, manifesting a new reality.

X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, a citizen of the Tlingit and Haida tribes and associate professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska Southeast as well as an interdisciplinary artist, poet, partner, and father, is an activist in the project to save his native tongue from extinction.

Gagaan X’usyee / Below the Foot of the Sun is a book of poems dancing between languages: English and Tlingit. “Gunalchéesh for engaging” the author writes, at the opening of the book, which is a thank-you to those who are translanguaging. In the tradition of Gloria Anzaldua, Twitchell stands in the borderland of two languages, two cultures, and many economic realities. Anzaldua explained in her introduction to her book Borderlands / La Frontera: “In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.” Anzaldua wrote in several languages. In Twitchell’s case, Tlingit is a language and a culture that has struggled to survive within a destructive colonial history and English language hegemony. This book is a beautiful effort to resurrect Tlingit, to resurrect the wisdom of his ancestors who are indigenous to western Alaska, to empower his community, and to invite English speakers into a way of thinking that promotes a healing relationship with the natural world—a wisdom, I would argue, that is desperately needed right now.

In the opening of Joy Harjo’s When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, she writes, “We begin with the land. We emerge from the earth of our mother and our bodies will be returned to earth. We are the land…. It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation.” Harjo reminds her readers that the colonial forces in the Americas robbed Indigenous nations of their customs and their oral languages. “When the first colonizers from the European continent stepped into our tribal territories, we were assumed illiterate because we did not communicate primarily with written languages…. The equating of written languages to literacy came with an oppositional world view, a belief set in place as a tool for genocide.”

Poetry was an essential part of oral traditions, the metaphor and sound patterning being crucial to the form. Harjo points out the complicated nature of writing in English for those from Native Nations. “We were forced to forsake our languages for English in the civilizing genocidal process. We are aware of the irony, for many of us, of our writing in English. But we also believe English can be another avenue through which to create poetry and poetry in English and other languages can live alongside texts created and performed within our respective indigenous languages. It is the nature of the divided world in which we live.”

Tlingit was an oral language that was not written down until Western contact. Twitchell uses Tlingit words throughout the collection and offers an introduction, a glossary, and a section of translations of poems that appear fully in Tlingit. This reader learned many new words such as “woolnáx wooshkák,” the Tlingit name for a wren, which translates to “landed through a hole,” and “shukalxúxs,” which can alternatively mean “calling the end back to the beginning,” “singing a clan love song,” or “Raven creating, making things happen,” depending on the context.

The book is carefully built in four sections named after aspects of the sun. The four distinctions of specific qualities of sunlight reveal a unique attentiveness and reverence for the nuances of being alive on our planet, moment to moment. Gagaan x’oos is the “sun’s foot” or a sun beam, Gagaan x‘usyee, a ray of sunlight that bursts through the clouds, Gagaan x’us.eetí, a patch of sunlight on the ground or floor, and Gagaan xanyádi, the “child next to the sun” or sun dog. The chapter names alone give us an indication of the level and scope of the awareness Tlingit holds. Each section includes series poems about the trickster coyote, poems written while the poet inhabited Navajo territory in the Southwest, poems written to his family in Tlingit, earthquake poems, and poems about language. Twitchell is clearly fluent in the Western tradition of poetic form as he includes a sonnet and a near-villanelle, but he also creates his own form. The format of the book itself creates a cyclical message that seems to be at the root of Twitchell’s philosophy: we and the Earth’s creatures are a part of a continuum, a cycle humans and nonhumans are both a part of that should be honored. The importance of community seems to be well illustrated in a seabird metaphor in “Woolnáx Wooshkák:”

An Unangan man once talked about watching
seabirds: a mass of thousands moving
impossible fast yet never colliding.

…He said those seabirds are a combined organism,
constant motion that relies on instinct,
watching them is meditation: bird cloud.

In “Killer Whale Like a Person Sewing ” the communities are clearly interconnected, human and non, and through language:

They say the old people could see way out into the future
through our language…

These lines, my child, they are etched into the earth,
connecting us to place, time, each other.

These strings of land, island, peninsula, water
they are places where Eternal Ones found homes for us,
we care for future generations by weaving
a cedar bark mat that waits
for the next occupant

…the killer whales, when they travel in a pod
—kéet xáa yaa nagwéin—have one at the front,
rushing and falling, creating its own tide,
like a person sewing
black and white piercing the water.

Like the killer whale, the poet leads the pod, his community, sewing Tlingit and English languages together, making way for others in order to begin to see into the future again, to remember the connection of Earth and all beings. As he writes in one poem, “I have learned to see no enemies / only the path of love.”

The tide created by the poet is not simple for the uninitiated to swim in, which feels important and intentional. The translations are not side-by-side for the reader of English, like myself. I am asked to do the work of turning to the back of the book to discover the treasures of Tlingit knowledge. The reader of Tlingit is rewarded by having the Tlingit poems honored, center stage. I am the outsider as a non-Tlingit speaker, and I applaud Twitchell’s choice. It is a choice that privileges his language, reinstates its importance, and reminds his Native Alaskan readers that this is how the world can become balanced again, even in borderlands.

The poet does not steer away from the trauma of being indigenous in Alaska, where statistics say that addiction levels are higher for them than any other ethnic or racial group. Several of the poems in the book allude to alcohol and drug abuse. The poems are aware of issues that arise from being a colonized people, and they seem to believe they can be overcome by strengthening identity and tradition. The character of the trickster, sometimes Coyote, sometimes Raven, figures several times in poems where issues of historical trauma are explored. In “Definition: Trickster,” the poet begins,

A man asked me today: what is a trickster anyway?
What is Raven? A god? An angel? A prophet?

Later in the poem the poet answers his own question, alluding to the aftermath of colonialism and racial violence:

The definition thickens like years old
oil, black with use and littered with metallic flakes that tell of
a coming breakdown, of wear and war and waste. The river
is an odd mixture of silt and salt, blood and bourbon, scars
and laughter…

A young man shoots the top of his own clan marker,
his face is a riddle of pockmarks where we trade smallpox for influenza,
tuberculosis for meth, a ceremony for distance.

In the aftermath of colonialism, Indigenous communities historically suffered from smallpox and tuberculosis, and years later, the poet suggests, that trauma is still deeply affecting individuals. The “distance” or numbness addiction offers is perhaps, for some, preferable to being aware of the painful realities of a culture nearly destroyed, a climate suffering from greed, their sacred land and animals suffering from abuse.

In a world where all that was sacred is now being destroyed, and the culture to which you belong has been eroded, X’unei Lance Twitchell offers these poems, which become a ritual of healing.

…I toil through the pages in hopes that the answer is there––

why could Raven release fresh water, salmon, stars, and daylight and

then seemingly leave us to our own disastrous methods.

Twitchell then answers his own question:

It is never too late, I tell him, to start our own definition.

Ritual and poetry will aid in creating this new definition.

“Kéet Goosh Áwé, Haa Daa Yéi Yatee” is one of the poems that appears entirely in Tlingit. I learned through the translation that appears at the end of the book that this title means, “That is a Killer Whale Fin Around Us.” In the poem a ritual is explained to a child (in translation):

Killer Whale Dorsal Fin.

One time your mother and I were boating to Hoonah,
aboard a big boat, with the oldest sister of yours and your paternal uncle.
It was very sunny upon us.

Suddenly we saw a pod of killer whales
That is how our culture is; whenever a killer whale is seen
people put tobacco down upon them.

Send us something to eat!

I was asking people for tobacco.
I sprinkled it onto the water.
I sang killer whale songs to them.

The third one we saw, maybe a killer whale mother and a killer whale father,
they were teaching their child to be
a Killer Whale Person.

In this moment of climate crisis, environmental injustice, and social unevenness, the world needs to listen to voices that have been silenced or forgotten. Part of this new listening means to recover languages themselves that understood a different relationship with the Earth. Twitchell is doing this work. Here he calls all readers to be still and listen, to learn from the Earth:  

Onion Bay–Kodiak, Alaska

explore the territory of other creatures
where energy exists thousands of years
unshaven, untroubled, unbroken.

Everything becomes visible in stillness,
power invades the senses in a spectacle—
soft patches of moss and mud,
distant bird whistle and squirrel chirp,
all pushed by a nudging breeze.

Wide imprints dent the cool
slick edges of a riverbank,
accompanied by those of a small child
still learning the inherited territory,
practicing tactics of survival in
a homeland mother calls her own.

The child in these poems is the hope; Twitchell also writes often to his own children. In “Coyote Song IV” he sings a future into being:

Walk in beauty              my child
Walk in beauty              my love
It has become                beauty again
We have made it           We have made it.
We have made it           home.

“Yaa kanagwátl yá lingít’aaní…the world is spinning,” suggest Twitchell’s powerful poems. “Yee gu.aa yáxx’wán…! Have strength and courage, all of you!”

Gunalchéesh, X’unei Lance Twitchell, for your important work.

   

 

Heather SwanHeather Swan is the author of Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection. Her previous book, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in About Place, Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Sun. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cold Mountain, The Hopper, One Art,  Poet Lore, Phoebe, and The Raleigh Review. Her book of poems, A Kinship with Ash, published in 2020, was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection, Dandelion, was published in 2023. She is also a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinshenk Award, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, the John Tigges Poetry Award, a Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Award, an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award, and a Nelson Institute for Environmental CHE Alumni Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Read three poems by Heather Swan appearing in Terrain.org.

Header photo by Alain GENERAL, courtesy Pixabay.