February 2006

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Decolonizing our Minds and Hearts

Wendy Sanford is currently serving as presiding clerk of Friends Meeting at Cambridge in Massachusetts. Vision Lines: Native American Decolonizing Literature, poems and prose pieces by Deidra Suwanee Dees. Available for $12.95 + $2 s&h from TA Publications, PO Box 22583, Minneapolis, MN 55422.

As a blond, blue-eyed, slender woman of Protestant European descent, I have worried little about assimilation in my life. I belong to a group in US society to which others struggle to assimilate -- or struggle not to.

And yet… One afternoon a few years ago my lover Polly walked down our Cambridge sidewalk beside me in her recently cropped hair, her jean jacket and jaunty, boyish cap. Suddenly, she looked more butch than I felt I could bear. Before I knew it, I had recoiled, pulling at least a foot from her side, nearly stepping out into the street to get away. Even I, then, have known the pull of assimilation, how internalized self-hatred makes you recoil from yourself or from someone you love.

In the poetry and prose of a Native American woman who knows this territory well, I have found both a telling critique of the dynamics of assimilation, as well as resources for healing.

Deidra Suwanee Dees. Photo: Sherri Martin

The cover photograph of Vision Lines: Native American Decolonizing Literature shows Muscogee writer Deidra Suwanee Dees dressed in a Euro-American suit, white oxford shirt, and tie -- all connoting assimilation to the nth degree. Yet she also wears a beaded necklace and earrings she crafted from hand-carved buffalo bone and horn to represent "the enduring power and strength of indigenous peoples." Daughter of a white mother and Poarch Muscogee (Creek) father, Ms. Suwanee Dees bridges two worlds in person and in word. The poems and prose pieces in this chapbook lift up the beauty and pain of her biracial family and Muscogee heritage; they probe issues of assimilation, and give eloquent voice to the "decolonizing" mind and heart.

Dees feels the pull of assimilation from outside herself, as in "Waters of Assimilation": "assimilation flows over/ my soul carrying/ shiny attractive things/ … appealing pieces of/ glitter --/ european clothing /religion /language/ capitalism/currency…should i go with it/ or should i fight against it?" In "Labeled," she evokes the origins of the internalized oppression that can move a person to try to fit in:

i was
not
born

biologically
savage

until you
taught
me

i was

Assimilation also threatens from within, as she expresses in this excerpt from the poem "Inferior Epistemologies:" [We]

look wrong
act wrong
  talk wrong
worship wrong
smell wrong
   think wrong

trying our damnedest
  to be like you

In "Adopting the Weapons of the Oppressor," she shows that a whole people can take in the poison:

… our enemy no longer white --
Muscogee
battles Muscogee

we learn
to destroy ourselves

Finally, in "Assssimilation," Dees names a dilemma she wrestles with as an academic:

… just finished writing
a kick-ass article exposing
   the evils of
   assimilation,

oak trees reverberated,
   'if your people had not
   learned to
   assimilate,
   you would not exist,'

   troubled
   wondering
did assimilation save us?

   rewriting
   the article

Resources for survival abound in this short chapbook. Expressing righteous anger is one. This excerpt from "Brownskin Babies of Manifest Destiny" is sharp with her anger:
"… You killed my grandmother/ to stop future brownskin babies/ from being born… You drink in a cup of jesus/ on Sunday/…How fat you have grown/ on juices of jesus,/ manifest destiny,/ and brownskin babies."

Incisive social critique is another resource for survival, as in this excerpt from "Find another earth": "… nasa space ships --/ rich white boys' toys;/ if they find/ another earth,/ they'll do to them what/ they did to us"

In the long poem "I want to ride a fast horse: Theoretical Reconstruction of American History," Dees's social critique is bracing, dazzling. Here is a section that feels especially relevant post-Katrina:

… I want to ride a fast horse
to Gulf Shores, collecting rent
from tower dwellers living on my real estate;
I want to ride a fast horse
to the Library of Congress, burning worthless
whiteman words in treaties that were never honored;
I want to ride a fast horse
into your history of archeology before you plowed up
my grandmothers and built a golf course….

The wisdom of the Muscogee elders is another resource to which Dees turns for survival. Here, Mrs. Roberta McGee Sells lifts up Muscogee values that stand in stark contrast to those of the dominant culture: "When a white family put someone out, then they would come to the Indians and Indians wouldn't turn them out. The Indians would always take them and treat them like good people… I know several whites that our people took care of… You're going have to face all of that one day -- how you treat people" (from the prose piece "The Colonized Helps the Colonizer").

A final resource, and one that Dees sinks back into for sustenance when she returns home from years spent acquiring a Masters degree and (in 2006) a Doctorate in Education, is the beauty of the natural world: "…I watched the gods of nature dance before the stars just like they danced before my grandmothers a thousand years before."

Suwanee Dees has returned to her home and her nation, bringing tools she has gathered in academia. She is preparing for leadership if called. I recommend her chapbook to all.

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