Beautiful Survival Native American Women Use The Enemy’s Language To Convey Their Experiences And Relate Messages Of Love And Joy For All People

The idea was born around a kitchen table.

Ten years ago, a group of Native American women crowded into a room where they cooked, read poems and shared the intimate details of their lives.

As children ran around the table and an occasional dog wandered into the room, they began to wonder about other American Indian women in kitchens and on streets across the country: “What were they singing, speaking, writing?” they asked. “Are they just like us?”

Their reflections blossomed into “Reinventing the Enemy’s Language,” an anthology of stories, poems and prayers written by 87 women from 50 North American tribes.

The book was essentially the brainchild of two women at the table - Joy Harjo, a Muscogee Indian, and Gloria Bird of the Spokane Tribe. Together, they edited the first definitive collection of prose and poetry written solely by contemporary American Indian women.

“It’s a groundbreaking book,” Harjo said during a phone interview from Seattle last month. “For the first time in history, native women are able to speak about what they’re doing and what’s important in their lives.”

The anthology deals with community, children, economic survival - their experiences and emotions as native women expressing their politics and art.

It also reflects pain, joy, anger, love - universal themes shared by Indians and non-Indians alike, Bird said.

Published last month by W.W. Norton ($27.50), “Reinventing the Enemy’s Language” includes the work of famous authors such as Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko as well as lesser-known local writers, including Ramona Wilson, a Colville Indian; Janet Campbell Hale of the Coeur d’Alenes and Jeanette Armstrong, an Okanogan.

A common theme in many of their stories is survival - “beautiful survival” the kind that Harjo refers to as “finding a way to reinvent in a society that was meant to destroy us.”

English, the enemy’s language, eventually diminished Salish, Lakota and other Indian tongues. Now, some of the contributors to this anthology hardly speak their tribal languages.

But these women have “reinvented the colonizer’s language,” Bird wrote, by eliminating words of domination, expressions that “capture” them and make them a “minority” in contrast to the “dominant” culture.

“We’ve come through incredible devastation,” said Harjo, who now lives in Albuquerque, N.M. “We’ve been demolished by this strange beast called colonization. … But we survived.”

Harjo and Bird, both 46, met in the late ‘60s at the American Indian School of Arts, an Indian boarding school in Santa Fe. Mutual admiration started in high school, but it wasn’t until after they graduated that they started talking and sharing ideas.

The two ended up living on the same street in Santa Fe. Eventually they became friends and were present during the birth of each other’s children.

Now an award-winning poet who has published three books, Harjo is also a saxophone player for Poetic Justice, an all-Indian rock band that just released “Letter from the End of the 20th Century.”

Harjo’s writing is a response to her surroundings, she explained. Her stories reply to images on TV, to stereotypes, to life experiences.

“In this country, there’s not an awareness of the differences in tribal people,” she said. “We’re all just lumped into one and these things trouble me.”

Bird, the author of the novel “Full Moon on the Reservation,” couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t writing stories that she forced her younger sister to read.

She grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit. When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Nespelem on the Colville Indian Reservation, where she still lives today.

“I really thought the reservation was the world,” said Bird, who can find inspiration in flowers growing through cracks in the pavement. “I knew where Chewelah was and where Spokane was, but they didn’t seem real to me.”

She was pregnant when she decided to take her writing seriously. At the time, she was living on the reservation and saw few people besides her own family. Eight months pregnant in the dead of winter, Bird chopped wood to heat the house.

“Out of that isolation came some of the first poems that mark, for me, a beginning,” she wrote. “I knew there had to be another Indian woman somewhere who was living like I was, who might hear me and identify.”

“Reinventing the Enemy’s Language” follows the cycle of creation: genesis, struggle, transformation and return.

In the first part, for example, the women focus on childbirth and identity.

Harjo included a short story she wrote called “Warrior Road.” It is a tale of pain and hope - the experience of pregnancy, the birth of her two children, “the sharp tug of my own birth cord, still connected to my mother.”

Other prose and poetry are sated with just as much suffering: sexual abuse, poverty, the tears shed at an Indian boarding school.

Mary Brave Bird, a Lakota Indian, recalled the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee in her personal narrative. “Bleeding Always Stops If You Press Down” was the sign tacked to the wall of a homemade hospital, she described. The words took on a whole new meaning for her.

“Indian women are always pressing down hard to stop the bleeding of their hearts,” she wrote. “It is not easy to be a native woman.”

It took a decade to compile and edit “Reinventing the Enemy’s Language.”

After leaving the kitchen table, Gloria Bird, Harjo and other native women sent fliers around the country to share the idea with other American Indians.

They weren’t blessed with the luxury of time. There never was a time when they didn’t have children to comfort, grandchildren to babysit, books, rock bands, a personal life to attend to.

There also wasn’t a lot of money.

But their work survived in the same way the stories and spirits of their mothers, grandmothers and ancestors endured.

They continued to write and solicit contributions amid the chaos of everyday life. They endured.

“Life goes on,” Harjo said. “It’s flourishing. Yes, there’s difficulty, but it doesn’t mean beauty can’t exist.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Molly Quinn