Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser Poems

Kimberly Blaeser Biography

Poet, critic, essayist, and fiction writer Kimberly Blaeser was raised on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota by parents of Anishinaabe and German descent. She is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe. Blaeser worked as a journalist before earning her PhD at the University of Notre Dame. Blaeser’s poems offer intimate glimpses into the lives of her subjects through loose, conversational portraits of Native American life and culture. Her collections of poetry include Apprenticed to Justice (2007), Absentee Indians and Other Poems (2002), and Trailing You (1994), which won the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award. She is also the author of a critical study on fellow White Earth writer Gerald Vizenor, titled Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996). Blaeser edited the anthologies Traces in Blood, Bone & Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry (2006), and Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose (1999). Her own writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (2009, edited by Frances Payne Adler, Debra Busman, and Diane Garcia), Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework (2005, edited by Pamela Gemin), and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism (1993, edited by Arnold Krupat). Blaeser’s work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the University of Wisconsin Institute on Race and Ethnology and the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. She has served on the editorial boards of Michigan State University’s American Indian Studies Series and the University of Nebraska Press’s Indian Lives Series. She has also served as the vice president of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 1991, as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Blaeser co-founded the multicultural writers’ organization Word Warriors. She lives with her family in rural Wisconsin.)

The Best Poem Of Kimberly Blaeser

Goodbye to All That

i.
He could have taken you prisoner, of course
when our two tribes were at war
over whitefish and beaver territory
and the Anishinaabeg chased your Indian ancestors
from the woodlands he now brings you home to.
Or your Dakota relatives might have waged a war party
on their swift plains' ponies to avenge your taking
and bring you back from those uncivilized
they named in disgust the rabbit-chokers.
But those histories of dog-eaters and Chippewa crows
are just a backdrop now for other stories
told together by descendants of smallpox survivors
and French fur traders,
clan members of Wolf and of Water Spirit.
And now you gather,
trackers and scouts in new bloodless legal battles,
still watch for mark and sign—
for the flight of waterbirds.


ii.
Old histories that name us enemies
don't own us; nor do our politics
grown so pow-wow liberal you seldom
point out the follies of White Earth tribal leaders.
(Except of course for the time our elected chair
mistakenly and under the influence of civilization
drove his pickup down the railroad tracks
and made the tri-state ten o'clock news.)
And Sundays behind the Tribune
he seldom even mentions the rabid casino bucks
or gets out his calculator and with lodge-pole eyebrows
methodically measures beaded distances,
results of territorial lines drawn in your homeland.
And even though I have seen him sniff, glance over
he really almost never checks the meat in your pot,
nor reconnoiters the place of your rendezvous
just to be sure.

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