Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger is a Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, South Dakota. She writes and teaches at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation.

It is my luck to share four poems written by Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger, a Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, South Dakota, a recent graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program, as well as a teacher at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation. This is her first publication of poetry.

As we talk about Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger’s work, it is important to distinguish between linearity and narrative. Many non-western narratives, including the narratives of many tribes indigenous to what is now America, do not unfold in “linear” movements. In my own Mojave culture of story-telling, some story and song cycles take days to complete—this type of time structure allows for repetitions, diversions, and leaps which create momentums, energies, and intimacies not common to western structures of story and poetry. Bordeaux-Seeger has many strong moments of straightforward linearity within her poems—she understands the craft of narrative—and she has also found ways to break and redefine a more typical linear structure so that her narratives are more emotionally overwhelming and less streamlined. The history of indigenous peoples in the Americas is not streamlined. In fact, the history of indigenous peoples in the Americas is not even over. 

The way Bordeaux-Seeger writes history, how she tethers it to the present, is a powerful and necessary way to question it. Like the work of Joy Harjo and Louise Erdich, part of the power in Bordeaux-Seeger’s narratives is that they obliterate the structure of an American calendar or timeline. In these poems, such as in “The Report from Cankpe Opi Wakpala (Wounded Knee, October 18, 2014),” the speaker is at a burial ground which is owned by white people and might potentially be purchased by Johnny Depp, while plastic bags from grocery stores blow over the graves of Lakota women and children massacred by the U.S. government, at least one of whom is the speaker’s relative. Time in these poems needs to be more than it has ever been—a complicated knot of what has happened and what might happen, of tradition and modernity, of memorial and future, of our ancestors and our own lives, as it has always been for indigenous peoples. A reader will not be able to come to these poems for a fast and healing dose of historical facts or nostalgia (yes, often America’s griefs and outrages over its crimes against humanity can feel nostalgic)—instead, these poems require readers to face their own lives, memories, gestures, and ultimately their complicities. 

As well as being a poet and teacher, Bordeaux-Seeger is also a quilt maker, and the influence of this lexicon is evident throughout her work. In “1900,” the poem springs from a photograph of a great grandmother in her youth, holding the quilt she would eventually be buried in. The poem “Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur,” dialogues with O’Keefe and finds a quilt hidden in the “black petals of hollyhock” and the “center star that bleeds” from O’Keefe’s painting. In the poem “Buying Thread,” we watch her explore the precarious American relationship between nativeness and whiteness, following along the path of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. While these three poems directly reference quilts, Bordeaux-Seeger’s knowledge of quilt-making has also helped her craft a unique balance of color and shape, of shadow and light, of image and emotion in her work. In “The Report from Cankpe Opi Wakpala (Wounded Knee, October 18, 2014)” in a drink of coffee the speaker holds in their mouth the dark liquid of mourning, of death, and also what is burned sweetly and in prayer:

            Sip my coffee and it tastes like greasy soup, wahumpi.
            It tastes like all the food at the end
            of the night. It tastes like dead animals
            and braided grass and ashy leaves
            and tobacco smoke.

It is too much for the speaker, to imbibe and enjoy a drink in this place, so the coffee is poured out.

           I pour it out slowly, letting the ground absorb it.
            It’s the Moon of the Leaves Falling and the ‘Knee is fading.            

Just as the reader is lulled into the too-easy role of witness and empathy, Bordeaux-Seeger jolts them awake and alert with the following lines fueled by humor, anger, and ache—each handled carefully and intentionally: 

            Johnny Depp wants to buy this place,
            the white owner wants to sell it.
            Two million dollars to purchase a hill full of bodies,
            and only half those who didn’t survive.
            Can you own the dead?

            Does he know the women and children
            are finally hidden and safe?
            Someone has to tell Johnny Depp
            you can’t buy ghosts. 

It has been my pleasure to share with you a small corner of Sammie Bordeaux-Seeger’s poetic landscape. It has made my own work, as a reader, a storyteller, a poet, and a teacher better. Perhaps the best thing to be said about her work is something a poet-friend said to me when I read her Sammie’s poems out loud: I’d read that book.
                                                                                                                     --Natalie Diaz


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