Chrystos, “I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government,” UA 304

Reader: Susanne Brooks

Biographical Information:

Chrystos
(1946 - living) U.S.A.

Poet, activist

Chrystos was born in 1946 in San Francisco. She is of mixed-blood ancestry but identifies with her father, who was of Menominee ancestry. Instead of growing up on the reservation, she was reared in the city around African American, Latino, Asian, and white people and identifies herself as an Urban Indian.

Chrystos is a self-educated writer and artist. Her work as a Native American land and treaty rights activist has been widely recognized as an essential part of her writing.  She is the author of Not Vanishing (1988), Dream On (1991), In Her I Am (1933), Fugitive Colors (1995), and Fire Power (1995). Her work has also appeared in several anthologies.

Literary Objectives:

      5a.  help “others” hear the minority voice and vicariously share the

                minority experience

          Chrystos is a fighter and she effectively wages battle in her poetry.  You can hear the battle when the poem is read aloud.  There is a defiant tone of defiance and resistance.  “Nightmare”, “lousy food”, “ugly clothes”, “bad meat” are like arrows shot at the dominate culture. 

      1a. Involuntary participation-the American Nightmare

          Native Americans did not choose America.  America came to them.

The line “We signed no treaty” directly reflects the lack of choice and therefore the refusal to assimilate.

A student wrote in a past semester, “Just as a nightmare works as a sequence of images you can’t escape from until you wake up, it feels that the speaker can’t escape all the images of US.  Nightmares creep up on you just as the US is a ghost in the wrong place and time.  It offers a plot line that is haunting.    It is a spell.  It is the color of (nowhere gray). (desolate and dreary a hopeless color). LG

Questions:

1.  What do you make of the lack of punctuation and the use of or non-use of capitalization?  What message does this form convey to the reader?

2.  Do you think the poem is effective?

     “Go so far away”  Isn’t that what the U.S. did to the Native Americans?