Cheryl Savageau

“The conquest is not sustainable . . .” —Winona LaDuke 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

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

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.”

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

. . . for Donna and John they find what looks like a grave what looks like a grave a grave and they dig it up they find a grave it looks like a grave and they dig it up they dig it up the grave it looks like they dig it up and they dig it up and it looks like a grave and they dig it up