Fourth Cherokee Indian Poem Summary

American politics and juridical laws have deemed the many vast Native American nations of our country as “Indians”. In a sense, this term has come to be synonymous with “Other”. If someone is called an Indian in America, the connotations of that word usually indicate that they’re just an Indian: not an American, not a true citizen, not a person. From the perspective of preserving hegemony, if someone is given this label, it means they should try to prove themselves to be worthy of human dignity, which is not being given to them. They must prove themselves by speaking as little like an Indian as possible, looking as little like an Indian as possible, and behaving as little like an Indian as possible. This notion is called assimilation, and it

It is the narrator’s mother language which is being birthed in this section because they write, “This birth could split me / I nudge each syllable into movement / … They shriek with hunger and loss / I hold them to my chest…” (7). On the next and final page of the poem, the words have been born. They speak to the narrator as a collective. They whisper to the narrator, “We found you / We made a promise”. Personifying the words also reiterates the idea that the words parallel the ancestors in the poem. The narrator avows that “... we’ll be more careful / Not lose each other in / the chaos of slaughter” (7). The poem closes with the lines: “from dust we sprout love and poetry / We are home / Greeting our ancestors …”. The poem comes full circle from the narrator hoping to learn the Cherokee translations of words that they miss such as “love”, “dust”, and “poetry” (1) to sprouting love and poetry from the dust of the earth. They greet their ancestors without fear that the ancestors won’t