Reader: Steven Lombardo

Respondent: Tara Orr

“Portrait of Assimilation”

Chrystos

UA 258

Biographical Information:

Chrystos is a self-described Native American lesbian poet, artist, activist and speaker. She was raised in San Francisco by her mother and Menominee Indian father prompting her to also call herself an “Urban Indian.” As a child she was abused by her parents and subsequently identifies with victims of oppression in her poetry, and champions their causes in her activism.  The editors of Unsettling America point out that her primary inspirations include a desire to “understand how issues of colonialism, genocide, class, and gender affect the lives of women and Native people.”

Literary Objectives:

4a. To identify the “new American” who crosses, combines, or confuses ethnic or gender identities.

4b. To distinguish the ideology of American racialism – which sees race as pure, separate, and permanent identities – from American practice, which always involves hybridity (or mixing) and change.

Literary Term:
Imagery: Image is language that evokes one or all of the five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching.

Interpretation:

In her 2002 presentation of this poem, Andrea Dodd notes that in her poem “He Saw,” Chrystos writes that she longs for her father to not discard his past but share it with her and embrace it himself.

Although Chrystos’ father abused her as a child, he is also the parent that she derives her Native American ancestry and identity from. This knowledge sets the tone for the poem by illustrating Chrystos’ conflicted feelings about both her father and assimilation. Her father left the reservation before she was born and now in his old age seems to be completely assimilated into a “new American” who crosses, combines, or confuses his ethnic identity. Chrystos paints a picture of her father and his environment in a way that makes clear she resents his assimilation into the dominant American culture. The only Native American artifact in his room is a carved tusk made to look like a fish, but even that sits on a table with a box of Kleenex and a store-bought vase. In the poem’s conclusion, however, Chrystos seems to find comfort in the fact that she can see the Indian within her father by the way he has wrapped himself “old style” in his blanket to stay warm in the cold, artificial white man’s world he lives in. 

Questions:

1. Does having the background knowledge about Chrystos’ and her father’s strained relationship help add meaning or clarity to the poem?
2. Do you think that writing poems like this are more therapy for Chrystos than they are artistic expression?