In retort to insensitive faculty at Berkeley, “Academic Squaw” (1980) taunts her detractors with a pejorative self-labeling title. The poet employs the image of battered bone as the springboard to a native American sense of self. As though glorying in fragility and imperfection, the poet-speaker depicts her ancestry as a smudged design with “bowl-rim warped / from the beginning.” Fleshing out a human frame with “jumping blood,” saliva, and melted eyes, she marvels that so haphazard an ancestry allows a “random soul” to survive. The patchwork imagery moves to a surprise rhyme (trained/drained) and a defiant address, “Grandmother, / we’ve been framed.” The sturdy ending suggests that Rose, like her native foremothers, has no intention of building a life around victimization.
“If I Am Too Brown or Too White for You” (1985), one of Rose’s dialogues spoken to an unidentified “you,” clarifies her place as individual and poet in a world obsessed with categorizing. Toying with visual images, she moves from two colors in the title to the bold introduction of “a garnet woman” who is neither “crystal arithmetic” nor a “cluster.” To account for her dreams and blackbird pulse, she builds on the notion of a semiprecious stone that reflects the color of blood, a layered image that suggests pure and mixed blood ancestry as well as the bloodshed that followed the arrival of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere.
To express the Anglo world’s obsession with race, Rose envisions a seeker selecting polished river stone by color. She employs the term “matrix / shattered in winter,” which draws on the etymology of matrix from “mater,” Latin for mother. Native productivity suffered in a wintry era, the 1870s, when white society conquered native American tribes. Imperfect, clouded, and mixed in the late twentieth century, the stone’s interior shelters a “tiny sun / in the blood,” the pure aboriginal element that gives rise to song. By claiming a tie with the native story keeper, Rose nourishes that portion of Indian heritage that can’t be drubbed out or winnowed away. Her verse establishes the value of native poems as embodiments of native chant, a sacred utterance that defines and elevates.
