Teacher / Poet #8
Lines Written at Castle Island, Lake Superior / Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Lines Written at Castle Island, Lake Superior / Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
translated from the Anishinaabemowin
Here in my native inland sea
From pain and sickness would I flee
And from its shores and island bright
Gather a store of sweet delight.
Lone island of the saltless sea!
How wide, how sweet, how fresh and free
How all transporting—is the view
Of rocks and skies and waters blue
Uniting, as a song’s sweet strains
To tell, here nature only reigns.
Ah, nature! here forever sway
Far from the haunts of men away
For here, there are no sordid fears,
No crimes, no misery, no tears
No pride of wealth; the heart to fill,
No laws to treat my people ill.
I encourage students struggling to enter into a poem to name one line they resonate with. To begin there.
This beautiful poem by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft is most certainly not one I’m struggling to enter, but there is one line in particular that shines for me: “...here nature only reigns.”
There is much beautiful poetry written around the same time as this poem that celebrates the natural world in the ecstatic manner that the poet does here. And many poems too that seek to ‘flee’ as this speaker does, from ‘pain and sickness.’ But in so many other poems from this era, the poet goes alone to meditate. In contrast, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft contemplates the beauty of Castle Island and Lake Superior surrounding it fully conscious of her people. And of the power Nature has over “men and their laws.”
The wisdom of her poem is ancient: nature will nourish you if you sit still and pay attention. But at the same time, it acknowledges modern oppression and colonization, and the specific oppression and colonization of Native American peoples. (I note that powerful closing line: “no laws to treat my people ill.”)
A few issues ago in “Teacher / Poet,” I wrote on Phillis Wheatley’s poem, “On Being Brought From Africa to America.” In part because Wheatley published that poem in a book during her lifetime, there is much scholarship on that poem and Wheatley is rightly studied as one of the first African-American poets. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, an equally powerful poet, did not publish much poetry in her lifetime, and so is only recently being recognized by readers and scholars.
So: a big shout out to the research of Robert Dale Parker who edited the anthology Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, which alerted me to this poem. He also has edited The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, an entire book compiling her writings.
And shout out too to historian and curator Barbara Bair, whose fantastic blog post on Jane Johnston Schoolcraft at the Library of Congress’ website gives us a sense for the background of this poem and so many others. (In addition to photographs of the actual manuscripts the poet composed, which for poetry nerds like myself are treasures in and of themselves.)
Among the many quotable insights in the post, Bair teases out the significance of the poet’s given Ojibwe name, Bamewawagezhikaquay (woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky):
Schoolcraft in her short, bright, meteoric life span and writing career was like a rush of falling stars streaking through the sky. But she was equally akin to the astronomical night sky that remains visible for us in seasons and continues to tell ancestral stories.
What more to say beside these words, this poem, and this poet, but Amen? And Amen. And Amen.
Text-to-Text Connections
-Bair’s blog post lists a number of contemporary Anishinaabe poets who have Jane Johnston Schoolcraft as their “foremother.” The one whose work I am most familiar, and admire greatly, is Kimberly Blaeser. This poem, “About Standing (In Kinship)” is one a number of students in my classes have memorized. With its reverence for the body and for human solidarity it definitely seems in conversation with Schoolcraft’s poem. And Blaeser has even been kind enough to correspond with these students!
-Another contemporary living poet who is not afraid, in the same breath, to ecstatically praise nature AND speak truth to death-dealing powers-that-be, is Wendell Berry. His wonderful short poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” could be a lovely companion to this poem.
-What about you? What poems, songs, or other ‘texts’ (however you conceive them) seem to be in conversation with this work?