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War By Lee Maracle

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Though it may be difficult to accept one’s identity, one must learn to accept themselves in order to heal. Lee Maracle’s poem “War” illustrates the internal conflict between her opposing cultures and her journey of healing her intergenerational scars. In this tercet poem, the battles of her Salish/Cree heritage and colonial standing are portrayed through varied poetic devices. In stanzas one to four, Maracle personifies her body as the Salish and Cree territories, along with the invasion of the colonizers. Her blood is personified as “Gallic/ Bastille stormers” (1-2) since Maracle co-exists with the colonizers. The Europeans cause her to question her heritage. This identity is the polar opposite of her “soft, gentle/ ways of Salish/Cree womanhood” (2-3), which marks the initiation of her internal conflict. She then illustrates the rage she burns inside herself and the mistreatment Indigenous individuals had to face while under control. She focuses on the treatment of Indigenous women and how they are programmed to work in a “sweatshop” (11). Lee Maracle then opens up about how she would utilize “Tiny grapes/ of wine [to] console [her]” (14-15). Though she is no longer as oppressed as her ancestors, the impacts of colonialism still affect her today, hinting that this may be due to intergenerational trauma. …show more content…

She asks: “Can I deny a heritage blackened by/ the toil of billions, conceived in/ rape, plunder and butchery?” (16-18). She is not absent from what the colonizers did to her people; she recognizes the lasting impacts of colonialism. The European heritage “[fights] to root themselves” (20) into the territory of her people. She uses the veins of a root as a metaphor for colonizers to emphasize the parasitic relationship colonialism applied to the Indigenous communities, as the roots drain the nutrients from the

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