All 18 entries tagged North America
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June 05, 2008
Ghost Dancer
Ghost Dancer (3.XXXI.iii).
A term that originated in the 1890s amongst colonized Indian tribes in North America. A prophecy was made by Indian men that all those who danced the Ghost Dance at the appointed times would be suspended in the air at springtime, whilst the new earth buried all the white men (Bib:24).
Amanda Hopkins
05 Jun 2008 14:14
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Tags: Colonisalism Context Dispossession Ghost Dancer North America Peoples Sioux Usa
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May 21, 2008
white waggons
I saw the white waggons […] interstate (4.XXXIV.i).
The wagon train was the only option for white American pilgrims hoping to settle on the Great Plains in the mid-1800s. The development of railroads as a faster, safer mode of transport accelerated westward expansion (cf. Union Pacific, 4.XXXIV.ii) and threatened the Native American way of life (Bib:22). Walcott’s reference to the Interstate Highway System currently used in the USA perhaps emphasises the fact that there can be no return to a traditional, nomadic Native American way of life on America’s Great Plains.
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 14:52
| Tags: Cherokee Choctaw Colonisalism Context Crow Dispossession North America Peoples Sioux Usa White Waggons
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Crow horseman
The Crow horseman pointed his lance at the contrail (4.XXXIV.i).
A member of the Native American Crow tribe notices the vapour trail left by a passing aircraft, a sign of the change that is to be enforced on the traditional Native American way of life as a result of westward expansion and modernisation.
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 14:24
| Tags: Colonisalism Context Crow Crow Horseman Dispossession North America Peoples Usa
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epic to epigram
a lost love narrowed from epic to epigram (4.XXXIV.i).
Perhaps a reference to the Great Plains and the Native Americans who populated them. The mid-nineteenth century acceleration of American expansion has effectively destroyed the epic landscape and Native American way of life – all that is left is a verse on a tombstone. Ironically, an epigram is typically witty, and is therefore an unsuitable legacy of the genocide of the Native American race.
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 14:16
| Tags: Cherokee Choctaw Colonisalism Context Dispossession Epic To Epigram Epic Tradition North America Peoples Poetics Sioux Usa
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contracts treaties indians
Our contracts […] like treaties with the Indians (4.XXXIV.i).
During the nineteenth century, the US government’s desire for territorial expansion resulted in treaties that thinly veiled the government’s desire to subjugate the Native American tribes occupying the American Plains. The treaties were often intentionally broken, betraying the tribes and often allowing the US government to claim Native American land with little resistance (Bib:21).
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 14:10
| Tags: Cherokee Choctaw Colonisalism Context Contracts Treaties Indians Dispossession North America Peoples Sioux Usa
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Catherine Weldon biography
Catherine Weldon (4.XXXIV.iii).
A nineteenth century artist from New York, who grew committed to the cause of Native Americans during American expansion. As a member of the National Indian Defence Association she spent time with the Lakota Sioux and became private secretary to Sitting Bull, a Lakota holy man, during the conflict caused between Native Americans and the US military by the ghost dance movement (mentioned in 4.XXXV.iii, cf. 5.XLII.iii, 5.XLIII.i) that spread across the Plains in the late 1800s (Bib:20).
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 13:46
| Tags: Catherine Weldon Catherine Weldon Biography Characters Colonisalism Context Dispossessin North America Peoples Sioux Usa
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Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny [… ] American dream (4.XXXIV.i).
Manifest Destiny is the ideology, popularised by American politicians and press in the mid-nineteenth century, that inspired white Americans to travel east to the unsettled Plains of America, in the name of territorial expansion, prosperity and a better quality of life. The ‘American dream’ – the dream white Americans possessed of fulfilling their Manifest Destiny – was nothing less than a nightmare for the Native Americans living nomadically on the Great Plains that had been previously ignored by the United States. White settlement on the Plains threatened traditional Native American ways of hunting and living and led to the subjugation and marginalisation of their race (Bib:18; Bib:19). Thus Walcott’s reference to Manifest Destiny can only be seen as condemnatory: this desire to expand the American continent draws parallels to Britain’s imperial and colonial ambitions that denied the island of St. Lucia its independence for centuries.
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 13:12
| Tags: American Dream Catherine Weldon Characters Cherokee Choctaw Colonisalism Context Dispossession Manifest Destiny North America Peoples Sioux Usa
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sioux spike union pacific
as the Sioux looked on./ The spike for the Union Pacific had entered // my heart (4.XXXIV.ii).
The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads, built to link the eastern states of America with the newly settled west, were famously completed in 1869 when workers drove a golden spike into the final section of track that linked the two lines, making it the first transcontinental railroad. This accelerated the emigration of white Americans onto the Great Plains, together with the American government’s campaign to clear the Plains of their nomadic Native American populace (Bib:15b; Bib:17). Significantly, in photographs documenting the ceremony, Native Americans can be seen hopelessly looking on. The metaphorical piercing of the heart of the Sioux country – as well as the narrator’s heart – with this railroad spike evokes pathos as it represents the end of Native American freedom in North America.
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 11:19
| Tags: Catherine Weldon Characters Colonisalism Context Dispossession North America Peoples Sioux Sioux Spike Union Pacific Usa
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sioux in the snow
Sioux in the snow (4.XXXIV.i).
During the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, in which US troops massacred an encampment of Native Americans, the chief of the Sioux tribe was left dead and frozen in the snow. Both the event and the imagery Walcott describes are now highly symbolic: the Massacre of Wounded Knee was the last great armed conflict between the United States government and the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the indiscriminate shooting of men, women and children by US troops is generally seen as having been unprovoked, or the product of a misunderstanding. Walcott may be alluding to a photograph of Big Foot, a Lakota Sioux chief, grotesquely frozen in the snow where he had fallen during the massacre: the pathetic image can be said to represent the death of freedom and tradition for Native Americans, now forced to live in reservations that denied them their nomadic way of life. (Bib:15a; Bib:16)
Amanda Hopkins
21 May 2008 10:42
| Tags: Catherine Weldon Characters Colonisalism Context Dispossession North America Peoples Sioux Sioux In The Snow Usa
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July 09, 2007
Choctaw
Choctaw (7.LXIII.i).
A Muskogean North American Indian people, originally living in Mississippi and Alabama (Bib:OED). Like the Cherokee and Sioux, the Choctaw tribe was evicted from their homeland by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Amanda Hopkins
09 Jul 2007 15:57
| Tags: Cherokee Choctaw Colonialism Context Dispossession Glossary History North America Peoples Sioux Usa
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