In the opening poem “Origin” from their debut poetry collection, Cut to Fortress, indigenous activist poet Tawahum Bige asks “Where is the green inside me?” They realize they cannot go back to their sacred connection with earth due to “eroding landfill / lifestyles.” They instead desire “sacred mire, to spread throughout / the insides of my body.” By the end, the lines break off and create the empty space for them to do so:
Purge cover
of any manufactured divine.We are all dirty here.
So, breathe.
By conflating the profane with the sacred, Bige challenges traditional colonial divisions between the holy and unholy. This subversion reflects a larger tension that runs throughout the collection: the struggle between colonized and colonizer who impose and contaminate. Bige, joining the tradition of protest poetry—from Rukeyser to Joy Harjo to Claudia Rankine—fully commits to their activists drive through a poetic voice that neither preaches as a dogmatist nor speaks as an “us” nor distances as an observer. Rather, in this worthwhile book, Bige as an in-your-face activist-poet resists the colonizer through a poetry they themselves appropriate and transform mainly via language play and voice into an indigenous poetry of personal redemption.
From the beginning, there’s something at stake in Bige’s poetry. Their tone, cadence and disposition lend force and energy to their voice. You cannot turn away. They implicate and sweep the reader along in their verbal thrusts. Bige’s power and strength is when they amp up the rhyme without forcing it, as in the following stanza from “Law and Order”:
the weapons they keep order with:
stocked armouries, their economies
designed to afford a system
built on Indigenous wrists slit
a message signed with our blood writ
while them bootstraps pulled through dusty grit
faulty free market sorted into feudal lord’s grip
while Nazi nationalists march
with tiki torches lit
the deals cross-crissed
like Christ’s blood drips.
Bige has a burst of language play here: the imported American dream in “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” becomes the more jumbled, informal “them bootstraps pulled through,” and “crisscross” becomes the more formal (yet broken up) “cross-crissed.” These phrases stand out, disrupting the very order they represent in “the weapons they keep order with.” By extension, Bige here resists what they perceive as injustice (i.e., a weaponized world). The rhymes add to this purposeful play. Disrupting a daggered anger in full-rhyme (slit, writ, grit, lit) are the half-rhyme (grip) and intrusive non-rhyme (march). “Grip” also matches up with “drips” four lines later at the end, barely constraining these lines (and this “ordered” worldview).
Other places in this poem (and elsewhere) seem less constrained:
trolls-in-tranches
waiting
traps triggering
creating through
Reconsimilation
this Corporation
that we proclaim
Nation.
Bige’s made-up “reconsimilation” appropriates the colonizer’s multi-syllabic, abstract language. It plays on “reconciliation,” “assimilation,” and “simulation” with “recon,” which is short for “reconnaissance,” as in a gathering of military information about an enemy or potential enemy—in other words, the colonized. In these shorter lines, Bige transforms language, creating a new one that aims to resist the very building blocks the colonizer uses.
Bige invites a reader into their indigenous world by giving a more powerful and direct voice in their perspective. In “run away,” for instance, “wetako / is all around.” Bige, in their Cree language, resists the usual colonizer’s transliteration, such as “wetiko.” This term refers to a savage beast full of greed—an evil intent on destroying through evil acts, including cannibalism. They use this metaphor to name and transform the colonizing power into their own language, thus giving them power, refusing to be appropriated through a colonizer’s language or even through transliteration.
Bige varies their language, showing poetic skill in their range, as in “Wetako’s Highway,” where they heavily rely on a multisyllabic slag when alluding to colonial power:
Connections emerge
between fur trade and mono-
agricultural practice, oolichan grease
under oil-slick
river from fracked
continent, to the rush of gold
copper uranium plutonium
Da Beers diamonds,
mountains hollow out
The flattened language here seems poetically deliberate, especially with no commas in the “copper uranium plutonium” line, as if the words all slam together and seize this poem’s language away from the speaker.
Four lines later in the following stanza, there’s a more energetic tone:
. . . If only
she could heal,
she can still
turn back. I wish
she would. If onlyshe was granted. . . .
The difference in this tone with the earlier flattening language is sharp, which seems to reflect the colonial power structure of sharp differences between the foreign and indigenous, between the haves and have-nots.
At times, though, Bige’s poetry runs into trouble. In “old-growth genocide,” where cutting the forest is akin to genocide, there’s some flat language, as in “subsidy-paying-rent / privilege / two hundred dollars per month.” While the flattening disrupts their protest-poetics, just as those with privileges disrupt indigenous life, the language here seems to pull the poem down and out in a way different from any flattened language showing up in documentary poetics and perhaps in the anti-lyrical protest traditions. When Bige foregrounds message, dogma, or persuasion, their work leans toward becoming prose forcing its message on a reader as object rather than letting a reader as subject engage the poetry, their text a disruptive force, one that could destabilize a reader’s assumptions. Fortunately, this focus on message, dogma, or persuasion seems to be minimal in this collection.
Bige’s resistance is vibrant and energetic from the start, as in “Cartridge Discharges,” where the speaker is “Trying to survive / and make a change. Can’t run / or hide, so I fight—.” The physicality Bige expresses, though, is not simple. What makes these poems even stronger is that they examine themself, “Meeting myself lately / so many times,” and he struggles not only outwardly but inwardly and not only in setbacks but in progress as well. He is
decentering
expunging
the interrupter
from
inside
me.
The strength here and other places is the poetic rhythm they infuse within these lines, the vulnerable energy of resistance. The singular column slows the speaker down, as if realigning focus, which invites the reader into their exasperated struggle, defiance, and personal recovery. Bige gives powerful expression to the complexity within their activist impulses.
In Bige’s “in time of war,” a powerful poem of not knowing their identity in this fight for justice, Bige realigns into who they are. It’s a prime example of their spoken-word voice:
. . .
crack wrist,
colonial
rhymes with
all they stolei reclaim, hold stake
i repatriate, sold fakes
appropriated
inappropriatediscontent
where’s the rent
complacence
what i spent
. . .
Bige seems so easily to rage into this spoken-word pace and rhythm contained in these rhymes and play with words. They seem to appropriate abstractness into protest, a protest in sound and the life of sound. They essentially resist in their language—doing to the colonizer language what the colonizer does to Bige’s life. This move by itself gives power and momentum to Bige’s poetry and activist endeavor.
Throughout the collection, Bige explores internal pressures due to colonization, as in when he was told to “Play with the toy soldiers” as a kid to when older he admits, “I’ve internalized misogyny,” revealing his capacity for intergenerational trauma. In this case, he transforms this capacity into a capacity for “self-care,” which ultimately leads to their broader activist response appearing “as a nod / speaking affirmatively.” Their subjects from outer pressures of colonization range from all sorts of land and air pollution to oil and hydroelectric dams, such as protests (and potential arrests) at the “Kinder Morgan oil terminal.” Bige also looks at the colonizer’s structure, as in “Umbrella” where they use a metaphor for exploitation that carries racist overtones:
black, black, brown,
red—rarely white—
waiting to be
bought, stolen, opened,
inside out, exported, infringed / upon.
Bige also looks at the colonizer’s tools, especially technology. They begin to engage, as in “He builds a computer with cartilage and sinew,” yet escape as well, as in “Videogames the escape key / I explore endlessly. . . . / Liberation in Confinement.” Bige struggles with this limitation. Technology is oppressive. It threatens and distances the indigenous from the land and ultimately threatens the indigenous. It’s troubling since just as their escape through technology is limited, so might their writing from the colonizer’s language. Neither escape nor engagement with the colonizer works for Bige. By the end of “He Builds Himself a Computer,” though, Bige more fully spells out his destination on this poetic journey. The speaker transforms his activity from engaging with this colonizer’s tool to engaging himself in growth, “He builds himself”—such as it is with his poetry.
By the end of the collection, Bige’s poem “Tawahum,” their indigenous version of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Bige reclaims “who I am now” in all the fluid, colonized ways. As they embrace what’s left in nature—both profane and sacred—in themselves, they fuse with all—”I am you / I am us / Me.” In this world of the poem, free from Wetako, Bige repeats, “I am your guide,” and essentially becomes the poet-guide.
There are lists, repetitions, and spatial rhythm that pull and push as if hypnotically. With an epic’s momentum near the beginning of the poem:
Can you feel my fire?
Can you smell the smoke rise?
The sage burning?
Can you feel my heart?
Bige connects to nature—a kind of ritualistic, grounded wildness in fire, smoke rising, a burning. It all becomes as intimate as possible in the heart—such wonderful movement and power at this moment. The confident speaker then builds momentum through the poem, enlarges to momentous “tectonic shifts”—almost larger than life events of things, including not of this earth but in the universe. Bige’s reach is ever broadening and reaching.
At this poem’s beginning and occasionally toward the middle, there’s some punctuation. By the end, there’s none. There’s no limit. The only indications of sentences are with occasional capital letters. Its spacing lends a sparseness to it, but it is far from sparse in its silence. It’s as if in the poem’s form here, and in many other places in this collection, Bige is showing that ultimately, this world—as well as his internal world—is breaking apart and reconstituting, “Let us rebuild this world together.” At the end of the poem, Bige resorts to their native language, and it is untranslatable to most readers. Bige resists. They will not be appropriated. They—perhaps this book—instead might be a guiding light for this rebuilding.
