Annie Ned's Blues

A few notes about this effort--I was struck by the format Julie Cruikshank used in Life Lived Like a Story to approximate the poetic voice in Yukon Native Annie Ned’s oral narrative of her life. I hadn’t seen this kind of format before reading Cruikshank's book (perhaps I haven’t looked around enough, admittedly), but then I began to think about its appropriateness for my own interpretation of Annie Ned's story.

We learn to memorize and recite poems aloud in grade school (and if we are lucky we never stop) in order to draw the music from the page, like a horn player who sees and understands the notes of a piece of music but cannot be satisfied with knowing their complete effect until he/she breathes and expresses with sound.

When I look at a poem for the first time I try to understand how it breathes. I’ll scan it and attempt to gather its possible meaning by focusing on certain words that have an immediate impact on my senses. Like a musician reading a score for the first time, I scan peculiarities in structure, where notes (words) may present a particularly difficult passage or present a complexity that must be worked out in practice.

I suppose this is the way many people “read” poetry before declaring themselves done with the job and moving on to more important things in life. But the work of reading a poem, enjoying it, and taking everything away from it that you possibly can, is in my thinking an oral exercise connecting sound and sensation. This is not a new idea of course, rather it is one I believe best approximates how I see (hear) poetry.

So I read Annie Ned's thoughts aloud. Once her music flowed, I found myself caught up in something more than an interpretation of the historiography, landscape, culture and politics of an epoch--the stuff historians seek. With that in mind, understand this to be a purely visceral reaction to Annie Ned’s narrative. I’m on stage with Annie’s band and it’s my turn to improvise a counterpoint before all the players rush again headlong into the chorus of historical interpretation.

The numbers correspond to the page numbers in Annie Ned's narrative. They denote context, not Annie's verbatim responses to the historian.

Annie Ned’s Blues

This was before her
Marriage to her first husband
Before the talk talk talk of the whites
Before the highway cut-cross hunting paths
And before the caribou herds moved
Or died

She was a young girl becoming woman
When moose strolled along alone wide-eyed
And she listened to the glacier as
It caught fire burning and cracking
The water filling up
Before the gold and drunken ways of Skookum Jim (338)

Not seeing the mountain move
But knowing (333)

And knowing Crow and Beaverman
Were not afraid of the beasts who ate men (274)
Who put them down with sharp knives
And made stories through long time
Singing with old words again and again (268)

The next season the coast Tlingits
Returned with baskets of shells along thawed Lake Kusawa (272)
And admired the moccasins and mukluks of her Athapaskans
Offering trade-peace and pleasure

Mixed cultures in village Hutshi
Southern Yukon singing fat choruses

Before the sharing and
Turning over of fish at Nakhu
Narrows to hungry whites (299)
Who were worthless without the clans (moiety?) (271)
And might have starved without seeing
The bounty under their noses
Like children too young to know the secrets of elders
O where caribou?

Running into the eastern trap below the mountain
Ideal! (273)

Then she is ready for the lessons of grandmothers
You must prepare men for the mountains
With mukluks and warm skins (323)
To hunt and put up the food for everyone
The infants from pleasure and pain
Who next learn
Songs of place (277)

To pass on through
Stories

Telling of the open valley Kosandaga—I feel
Bad when I think about it
That is why I sing (269)
As grandsons wave warm Hellos! (269)
A few of sixty-four in Yukon (338)
Who survived the gold and whites and carry
Tradition like shovels to dig away the past

The highway
Climbs away like smoke

And the historians appear
As ghosts driving in from B.C. & L.A.
This sounds a little like
A railroad across
Something imaginary lying
On the frozen ground


All numerical citations are from Life Lived Like a Story, Julie Cruikshank, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1990.

TS