The Secret Powers of Naming by Sara Littlecrow-Russell

The University of Arizona Press, 2006
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

I Write, You Listen

Sara Littlecrow-Russell is Anishinaabe (Ojibway) and Han-Naxi Métis, a single mother of two, a lawyer, an anti-racist organizer, and a professional mediator. Her first book, (italics)The Secret Powers of Naming(/italics), won the Independent Publisher Book Award (Bronze in Poetry) and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (from the Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights), and was a finalist for both the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award. The secret is out: Littlecrow-Russell can (italics)write(/italics).

With mordant humor, she not only “reinvents the enemy’s language,” but also incorporates her native language into her work, further resisting cultural genocide. In her author’s statement, Littlecrow-Russell explains that in Ojibway “survival” (“zhaabwii”) is a verb that means “the act of passing through intact” and that “this book is the search for the spiritual and political power of ‘zhaabwii.’”

These poems witness to survival–as a verb. In “Russian Roulette, Indian Style” “the spinning cylinder / of a 500 year old gun” is loaded with five colonial bullets: “Alcohol / Disease / Poverty / Violence / Assimilation / Survival is finding the name / Of the empty chamber.” Since “the sacred act of naming brings power over [what is named]” these poems serve as ceremonial acts.

Dance is central to many poems, highlighting cultural incongruities:

Skin-tight bellbottoms
strain against the muscles
of your Iroquois Smoke Dancer’s legs—
10,000-year-old rhythm collides
with hardcore hip-hop thunder.
You dance hard in a world
that does not welcome you as Indian,
but loves a delectable 12-year-old girl.

In one of the most moving poems, a widow dances to honor her slain husband, victim of a hate crime: “You danced, we cried. / The tourists snapped their cameras / And reached out to run their hands / Over the beadwork on your dress.”

Real Indians are often rendered invisible by stereotypes. In “Invisible Indians” those who are “nameless, invisible” under florescent lights of a 7-11 regain identity when “an owl shattered / Brittle moonlight of urban winter / With the power of naming, / ‘Ko-ko-ko!’ / We lifted our arms in greeting, / Spoke our names, / And were visible again.” Indian women, in particular, are subject to invisibility except as sexual commodity: “Half-naked maidens with feathers in their hair.” (Look closely at the cover art by Diane Way, Lakota/Cheyenne.) Littlecrow-Russell claims solidarity with women of all races, from “12-year-old Chinese girls / Imported for the 1900s sex trade / Forced to their knees…” to “Cheyenne grandmothers kneeling on the ground / Gathering wet fragments of their grandchildren’s skulls…‘We all have wounded knees.’”

The massacre at Wounded Knee was precipitated by the perceived threat of the Ghost Dance religion. Although “…History books say the threat is gone…/ Each time it rains, / I go out to the sidewalk, / Where the tree roots / Have broken the concrete / Listening to the water’s whispering: / ‘It is coming soon.’”

With poetry as powerful as this, Littlecrow-Russell’s second book cannot come soon enough.