Reflection on "green girl dreams Mountains" by Marilyn Dumont

Camping on the prairie by Paul Kane
Scene shows the artist with a Metis guide en route to the Buffalo Hunt

I read the unseen. Her eyes are the milk of a hollow cow, branding the misjudged beauty of a new and timely pride in the human self in all its fascinating breadth. Her words are a first kiss, and the smile afterwords, even if the kiss was a little sour.

This is my first read into Marilyn Dumont's work. A Cree/Metis poet, who is widely celebrated as a must-read in contemporary Canadian literature. Her words are bittersweet, and do not say too much. She uses language for its brevity and with singular pausing, announces the mystic inclination to wonder with a sad grace. One can easily and cathartically empty their mind of doubt when reading page after page of brilliant humility. Her self-knowledge is evident as she prints words into the mind of a page with the delicate necessity of breath.

I read this book from cover to cover in one sitting as welcomingly as opening my door to a new friend. Now, I'm looking forward to welcoming, "that tongued belonging" her latest work.

I heard of Marilyn Dumont through Black Coffee Poet, who interviewed her for Indigenous Sovereignty Week

_________

Entering the distant cottage, there is tranquility. Mindful, the air is welcoming. It is a refuge for Aboriginal intellectuals. A group of women converse softly over tea as I wander the grounds. In the backyard, a lively, well-kept garden is lush with Canadian summer vegetables and medicinal herbs. The light hangs slowly from the deep, curling cloudscapes in the wide, Midwestern expanse. 

Battle of Duck Lake

Overlooking the property hill, a bustling cruelty unearths the dry heave crime of migratory blindness, as settler compunction fills the writhing horizon with a crooked smile. Endless houses, misshapen and identical, curve along the wasted prairie hills, and there is only a dim emanation of life. As I stare into the perfectly reflecting window of the cottage, an aural wisdom speaks in silence, carrying my body to the comfort of our Mother’s home: land.

________

Holy Rope

Holy rope glean
           Setting off the executioner’s raffle
                     In a dream state, turning the mind
                                To a pentatonic, indigenous scale
                                To the antique buzz in our lonely natural surroundings
                                             That prepares a decadent life

Amidst the misty hilltop laughter

                                       That echoes in the contemplative breath on high

Dreams from the Ethnosphere

Plains Cree Man from "The Plains Cree: an ethnographic, historical and comparative study" by David G. Mandelbaum

"And in the end then it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?

Margaret Meade, the great anthropologist said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted to this blandly amorphous, generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow and more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities.

And it's humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600,000 years, the neolithic revolution, which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy, specialization, surplus is only ten thousand years ago, the modern industrial world as we know it is barely three hundred years old. Now that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millenia.

When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it is within that song that we all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples in all gardens find a way to flourish."

from Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures, a TED talk ( http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html#.Tswyaa16evc.facebook )