Cross-post: Ms. Muse: Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller's Lost Poems

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From First Americans (Group).

https://www.democraticunderground.com/11912191
Ms. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance—brought to you by Ms. digital columnist Chivas Sandage.

Her name means leader or warrior who guards the village. Before she became the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and the first woman to be chief of a major tribe, Wilma Mankiller published a poem about “the edges of / something called freedom.” In another poem about listening to the seasons, wolves and a raven, she asks if there are others who can still hear. She writes about remembering “that the sound of a million / colored televisions / has drowned out almost all / echoes of our being.” Longing for freedom—juxtaposed with a dystopian perspective of the modern world and the consequences of living in it—emerge as core subjects in the posthumously published Mankiller Poems: The Lost Poetry of Wilma Mankiller, just out from Pulley Press.

Thanks so much to niyad for posting.




I'd like to add here that Native Americans and especially Native women have been and still are seriously oppressed. In spite of three amendments to the Constitution some states (the last was Utah) kept laws in force against their ability to vote until 1957. Even after that states allowed Native Americans to vote but weren't very diligent about having poling places available on reservation land. As recently as a case filed in 2016, 90 or more voting rights cases have been filed on behalf of Native Americans in various states going back 51 years to 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act passed.

As an example of the pervasive culture of victimization, a 1982 video game had as its goal raping a Native American woman.


The U.S, has always pursued a war against Indigenous cultures. To this day there are failures in prosecuting sexual assault and rape on Native lands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_victimization_of_Native_American_women

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/murdered-and-missing-native-american-women-challenge-police-and-courts/
More than half of Native American women have been sexually assaulted, including over a third who have been raped during their lifetime — a rate of rape nearly 2.5 times higher than for white women, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

I have a wife and two daughters. I can't imagine what it would feel like if one of them was raped and nothing was done because no one cared.


If you don't yet have a cause to work for or vote for or help spread news about, work for this one because Wilma Mankiller is an inspiration and an example of what can be accomplished when people work together.