Rainbow Dancer - Softcover

Harris, Heather

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0920576761 ISBN 13: 9780920576762

Publisher: Caitlin Press, 1999

Synopsis

Gritty, funny, provocative, angry - all of these adjectives might be used to describe the poetry of Heather Harris. Of Metis and Cree background, she interweaves native stories with the reality of the present-day native life. The result is sometimes humourous, sometimes provoking and at other times saddening. But the poetry never leaves the reader unmoved.

Harris' voice is a powerful one, showing her individual strength and the strength and character of North America's native cultures. She writes to celebrate her native roots. As the Rainbow Dance unites future and past generations, Heather's poetry will bring together those who embrace and those who just admire the heritage. The poems act as a gateway to a further understanding of an ancient culture that has fascinated non-native Canadians for centuries.

About this title

About the Author

Heather Harris is a professor in Native Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia and is currently completing her Ph.D in Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Never one to be idle, she creates clothing and jewelry in the Northwest coast style. As well she and her daughters dance with the Rainbow Dancers. She says, " I'm not happy unless I'm busy...if I don't create something every day, it is not a happy day."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I want my words to be as eloquent
As the sound of a rattle snake.
I want my actions to be as direct
As the strike of a rattle snake.
I want the results as conclusive
As the bite of a beautiful red and black coral snake.

-Jimmie Durham
"Columbus Day"

POETRY IS UNDOUBTEDLY the literate world's closest approximation of the oral traditions by which indigenous societies have always defined themselves. This is perhaps why, amidst the "American Indian Renaissance" which is said to have occurred since the mid-1960s, poets have played a singularly substantial role, sometimes threatening by the sheer power embodied in their attainments to overshadow contributions offered through other media. The list of those fitting this description, while not especially long, evidences a clear and penetrating luminance, including as it does the likes of Simon J. Ortiz and Chrystos, Adrian C. Louis and Wendy Rose, Elizabeth Woody and Joy Harjo, Barney Bush and Carter Revard, Mary Tall Mountain and Peter Blue Cloud, Linda Hogan and Maurice Kenny.

Comes now Heather Harris and Rainbow Dancer, a collection of poems so strong, so compelling, so unequivocally vital as to captureindeed, to incarnate - the very essence of an ancient and collective wisdom cast up in all its primal vibrancy upon the pocked terrain of socio-literary postmodernism. The verse is tough, honest, sinewy, uncompromising in its finality, yet simultaneously imbued with such gentleness, such tenderness of purpose as to transcend the intellectual/moral stultification with which contemporary existence has become so deeply afflicted, providing instead that most elusive of all prospects: hope.

The book is thus, as it should and must be, many things, many voices, each and all of them drawn into a harmony so irrefutable as to echo the sounds of the wind upon the buffalo grass.

Rainbow Dancer is first of all an honouring song - a testimony to and a prayer for ancestors whose struggles against the predatory madness of an invading culture have been carried from generation to generation over five centuries. There were struggles that were at the cost of incalculable suffering, not simply to repel or survive the relentlessly genocidal onslaught but to sustain the very possibility of natural equilibrium in the face of what the Hopis have come to call "Koyaanisqatsi."

So too is the poetry an embrace and salute, a fervent enunciation of respect and solidarity with those today who assert the inherent continuity of that which was and that which remains, apprehending and comporting themselves in the spirit of Crazy Horse and Tecumseh, Almighty Voice and Black Buffalo Woman. They are willing of necessity to pay the price of their resistance, establishing themselves in eternal remembrance as beacons shining undaunted and undiminished through a twilight that, without them, might harken the blank endlessness of a truly ecocidal night.

Most of all, in laying bare these linkages joining Native past to Native present, Harris reveals the bedrock upon which both are, or can be, connected to the Native future as well. Hers is thus, and most importantly, a celebratory verbal dance devoted to the welcoming of a new dawn birthing among coming generations. Upon them as well as us she bestows, as Native women always have or with justice always will, the gifts of her vision, her courage, her dignity and the integrity of her unflinching dedication neither to forget nor to surrender that which is hers, and, by extension, theirs to inherit. No greater tribute can be asked or offered.

-Ward Churchill July 1999

About this edition

• Publisher: Caitlin Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0920576761
• ISBN 13: 9780920576762
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112