In The Summer After “Issue Year” Winter (1873)

By Roberta Hill Whiteman b. 1947

I scratch earth around timpsila

on this hill, while below me,

hanging in still air, a hawk

searches the creekbed for my brothers.

Squat leaves, I’ll braid your roots

into such long ropes, they’ll cover

the rump of my stallion.

Withered flower, feed us now

buffalo rot in the waist-high grass.

Hear my sisters laugh?

They dream of feasts, of warriors

to owl dance with them

when this war is over. They don’t see

our children eating treebark, cornstalks,

these roots. Their eyes gleam

in shallow cheeks. The wagon people

do not think relationship is wealth.

Sisters, last night the wind

returned my prayer, allowing me to hear

Dog Soldiers singing at Ash Hollow.

I threw away my blanket

stained with lies.

Above the wings of my tipi,

I heard the old woman in Maka Sica

sigh for us. Then I knew

the distance of High Back Bone’s death-

fire from another world away. Even they

may never stop its motion.

Yesterday at noon, I heard

my Cheyenne sister moan as she waded

through deep snow before soldiers

cut up her corpse to sell

as souvenirs. Are my brothers

here? Ghosts bring all my joy.

I walk this good road between rock

and sky. They dare not threaten with death

one already dead.

FOOTNOTES: Timpsila is the Lakota word for wild turnip. Maka Sica is the Lakota word for the badlands in South Dakota. In the poem, I allude to several confrontations which were detailed in Baptiste’s Winter Count. He mentioned the Dog Soldiers who died fighting the cavalry at Ash Hollow and the death of High Back Bone who was one of the first to be shot with a bullet from a long distance. To kill an enemy from a distance was cowardly. This death showed the differences between the code of honor among Plains Indian warriors and the cavalry’s code of extermination.

Source: Philadelphia Flowers (Holy Cow! Press, 1996)

Biography

Roberta Hill Whiteman, a poet of Wisconsin Oneida heritage, is the author of Star Quilt, a poetry collection which integrates her ancestral culture with European-based approaches to verse. Whiteman grew up in Wisconsin among the Oneida community and also in Green Bay; the family moved between the two locales several times. In previous centuries the Oneida were forced to make a series of moves that displaced them from their . . .

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