Cheryl Savageau
Cheryl Savageau Poems
thanks for bringing that
to our attention
she said the first time
...
they find what looks like
a grave
what looks like a grave
...
It is the fish that bring them first.
Cod in such numbers as to seem endless.
Cod to fill the nets and bellies of hungry
Europeans with the tender white flesh.
Cod, it seems to them, without end.
They fill the ships,
salting the fish
down in barrels,
til the hull is full,
and head back home. This wet
cod-fishing goes on for
years, far out in the Banks,
with only an occasional stop on land.
We dry our fish in the sun
cure it in smoke-houses
and sure enough, the
foreigners hear
about it.
Soon they need
a land base
to dry the cod
which weighs less
than when wet
tastes better, too
it is these dreams
of cod that
first bring
the French
to land
dreams
of cod
the gold
of the sea
that will
fill their bellies
and their
pockets
...
Les Filles du Roi (1668)
French men are marrying Indian women. It will have to be stopped. Wives will have to be found. French wives for French men. And so the call goes out to all the unfortunates in France. Women without homes, without family, poor women, women alone. Women with no dowries to buy a husband. Becomes a Fille du Roi, a Daughter of the King. Each woman considers her options. The hardships she doesn't know are preferable to the ones she knows too well. As a Daughter of the King, she will have a dowry, payable to her husband at the time of marriage. She will have a home, the possibility of children, a place in the community. Women come from Ile de France, from Normandy, 800 women in ten years. Les Filles du Roi.
Une Fille du Roi, 1668
Marie Mazol is thirty three years old when she becomes a Daughter of the King. She will bring 300 livres to her marriage to Antoine Roy-Desjardins. She will have money for her own use as well, for expenses, they promise her. She thought it would go further, but what she takes with her are a coffer, a cap, a taffeta handkerchief, a shoe ribbon, a hundred needles, a comb, a pair of stockings, a pair of gloves, a pair of scissors, two knives, a thousand pins, a bonnet, and four laces. Thus prepared, she faces marriage to a man she doesn't know, in a country she's never seen.
Les Filles du Roi—Afterwards
The Daughters of the King become wives. But French and Indian keep marrying. Their descendants will say, "Scratch a Frenchman, find an Indian."
...
plantain makes a
good tea. its seeds are
crushed and used as a
laxative. it is found in
every english garden. now
its leaves are pushing up
everywhere. you can find it
outside every english
settlement, its long leaves
with parallel veins,
its central stocks of tiny
flowers. wherever
the english go
plantain
grows in their footsteps.
when you see it
you'll know that they're
near. that english boy
found his way home
following those
footsteps. when
you see it
go the other way
...
Cheryl Savageau Biography
Cheryl Savageau (born April 14, 1950) is a poet of Abenaki descent. She writes often about Native American people and places in New England, where she has lived much of her life, as well as about working-class people, and feminist and queer issues. Savageau was born in central Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Clark University and a facilitator at University of Massachusetts, Boston. Savageau's awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her second book, Dirt Road Home. Her work appeared in AGNI. Also a visual artist, she has exhibited her quilts, paintings and other works at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, the University of New Hampshire, and elsewhere.)
The Best Poem Of Cheryl Savageau
Graduate School First Semester: So Here I Am Writing About Indians Again
Thanks for bringing that
to our attention
she said the first time
to my response to a history text
about a famous painting
of the Battle of Quebec
that never mentioned the French
and only mentioned Indians twice,
once as nuisances, once
as the noble savage
kneeling by the dying
English general
this was during
the French and Indian war
I said, soon thousands
of French and Indian people
would be displaced, sold
into indentured servitude
my own family among them
there would be bounties
on the heads of Abenaki people
in Maine, and the English
would sow the fields of the Mohawks
with salt
thanks for bringing that up,
she said
the next book mentioned
cannibals in the Caribbean,
Indians who believed the Spanish were
gods, Indians killing themselves, Indian
women in love with Spanish pricks, Indians
whose names, even when known, were
passed over in favor of the ones
given them by the Spanish
stop writing about
Indians
she told me
you're making everyone
feel guilty
but the next book
was back in Maine
home territory
the diary of a midwife
right after that same
French and Indian war
and she was using herbs
not found in English herbals
and wrote that a "young
squaw" visited her
over a period of
three weeks, but
the famous historian
said only that
there may have been
Indians in the area,
while she wrote
at length about
white men dressing up
as Indians
to protest against the rich
stealing their lands
stop writing about Indians
she told me again
only louder as if
I was hard of hearing
you have to allow authors
their subjects, she said
stop writing about
what isn't in the text
which is just our entire history
this week, she said
I'm really upset
you're telling the same story
three times
because there's only
one story about Indians
and we all know what it is
so I asked her if there are an
infinite number of stories about
white people
and she told me to
stop being racist
so I stayed away from class for a week
because they were reading a book
about a mystery in the Everglades
and I knew there had to be
Indians in that swamp
and I didn't want to have to
write about Indians
again
it was on to the next book
written, she said by
a Cherokee writer,
which Leslie Silko, who is Laguna,
will be interested to find out
because the book was Ceremony
but that is a small mistake
sort of like saying that
Dante is Chinese, so
I overlooked it
now, she told me
write about Indians
and I might have done that
except she went on
about Indians putting on
a mask of whiteness
like white people put on
black face, and some of the students
wrote it down in their notebooks
and everyone started talking about
minstrel shows
then she wanted me to tell her
if there is such a thing as
an Indian world view
and I said, well, yes and no,
which I figured was safe
since I would be at least
half-right whichever answer
she wanted, but when I mentioned
the European world view,
she said there isn't any such thing
which was quite a relief to me,
I hate to think there were a
whole lot of people thinking in
hierarchies and as if the
earth is a dead object and
animals and plants and some people
not having spirit
then she said I'd better stick
to what I know, that is,
Indians, which is what
I was trying to do in the first place,
and that maybe European philosophy
was too much for my primitive
brain in spite of its being my
undergraduate major
and I pointed out that the
oppressed always know more
about the oppressor than vice
versa, so she just glared at me
and told me that I look
Scandinavian
which was a surprise to me
and I wondered why I never was a
prom queen since it was always the
Scandinavian girls who got that
honor, maybe they never
noticed I was one of them. Exactly
how much Indian are you anyway?
she asked. I told her I guessed
I was pretty much Indian. I
suppose she wondered
why I wouldn't accept that mask of
whiteness she kept talking about
as myself
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4/26/2024 2:02:38 PM # 1.0.0.1119
