Past Silence: Indigenous Perspective in the Poems of Karenne Wood

Abstract

The essay attempts to introduce to Polish readers the literary work of Karenne Wood, an Indigenous poet of Monacan Nation, who passed away in 2019. Poetry was for Wood another venue for self expression, next to broadly understood activism. For many years, Wood directed the Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Center for the Humanities, and served as the repatriation director for the Association on American Indian Affairs. As tribal historian for the Monacan Nation, she worked on implementing changes to the school history curriculum so that it would encompass the Indigenous voice, and create space for alternative, often silenced versions of historical events. The essay examines the converging points of Woods activities: poems in which commonly known events from colonial history gain new meaning by changing the perspective, as well as those which altogether contest the mainstream version of history. Given the clearly pro-social tone of Wood’s work, the aim of the essay is to read her poetry through the concept of tribalography, coined by Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe. One of the assumptions of tribalography stipulates that the means to reassert Native identity and to achieve symbolic reconciliation is through constant renegotiation of the past, as well as through acknowledgment of oral tradition as an equally valid historical source.