Louise Erdrich's "Jacklight"
Cultural and Societal Boundaries in a Native American Woman's Poem
The title poem in Louise Erdrich's first collection of poetry, "Jacklight," captures an encounter between hunted and hunter at the "edge of the woods" (line 1). In it, the "we" (most likely Erdrich's Chippewa people) confront the threatening, encroaching Western society.
Meeting of Two Cultures
The Native people have come "out of hiding" and are "drawn out of [themselves] by th[e] night sun" (4: 11). The meeting between the Native American culture of "brown grass,""knotted twigs," and "leaves creaked shut" (2: 4) and the technology-paced West of "polarized acids" and "raw steel" (12: 16) is laced with the threat of violence.
These are not two cultures that mix easily. It is clear that in this poem, as in history, it is the hunted, the Native Americans, who will suffer at the hands of the "faceless, invisible" hunters if they leave the woods.
An Invitation
Yet there is the sense that the Natives have learned from the hard way how to deal with those who would hunt them. At the end of the poem, they realize that "We have come here too long" (31) but instead of leaving the safety of their culture, the woods, they invite the hunters in with a warning of "how deep the woods are and lightless" (37).
For all their "gun barrels" and "silver hammers" (16: 25) the hunters don't know how to behave in the woods and must "put down their equipment" (34) for "it is useless in the tall brush" (35). So, though the Native Americans know from history that the "jacklight" (23) poses a danger to them, the woods (and Native American culture) are untested by white Europeans.
There is a hint of threat and mystery about what would occur if they were to abandon their majority rule and try to accept and incorporate Native American ways. Louise Erdrich invites the hunters to find out as "it is their turn now" (32).
Borders and Maps
In the confrontation between the woods and the light beyond, the reader can see that borders, both cultural and physical, play an important role in Louise Erdrich's poem. In many popular portrayals of the "Old West" there is often this idea of "my land" among both "Indians" and "cowboys."
However, though possession is an important theme in Western culture, it is valued as highly by traditional Native American culture. In "Jacklight" the reader sees that violence was the medium through which the Native Americans were forced to value boundaries, maps, and the invisible lines Westerners drew in the dirt.
Re-mapping
Blurring those lines and re-mapping thus emerges as a goal of Erdrich's poem. This is a theme shared by many of her fellow Native American writers. In Janice Gould's "Poems as Maps in American Indian Women's Writings," she contends that Native American women's usage of cartography analogies in their poetry is representative of their desire to find their own "map" or the one that might have been if their culture hadn't been devastated by displacement and alienation.
The idea of mapping in poetry, Gould argues, is also "important to our concept of sovereignty as Indian nations, and to our self-sovereignty as Indian individuals" (25). Native American writer, Marilou Awiakta, wrote, "To be accurate and useful, a Native American story, like a compass needle, must have its direction points."
References
Awiakta, Marilou. Selu: Seeking The Corn-Mother's Wisdom. Colorado: Fulerum. 1994.
Erdrich, Louise. "Jacklight." Jacklight. Eds. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. New York: 1984.
Gould, Janice. "Poems as Maps in American Indian Women's Writing." Speak to Me Words. Eds. Gould, Janice and Dean Rader. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 2003.
