Book review: 'Dark Traffic,' a new book by Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane, mourns the disruption and erasure of the Indigenous people and culture of the North
By Joan Naviyuk Kane. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2021. 88 pages. $18As Americans, we don’t like to think of ourselves as colonizers. That was the dirty work of Europeans in Africa and Asia, but certainly not here. This is our land. Not stolen, but given to us by our God. That’s not colonization. Or so we quietly reassure ourselves. And certainly the Arctic was not colonized. There were no wars for it. Europeans simply trickled in and took possession.
Sixteen times in the first stanza of one of the poems directly addressing White Alice, Kane repeats the Inupiaq word “sassaq,” which translates as clock, or an instrument to measure time. In the second stanza the word is again repeated sixteen times, but in this case a line is drawn through each of them. It’s an analogy, perhaps, for the erasure of history.
“How many Eskimo words are there for for white people,” Kane asks elsewhere pondering those who came and took over their lands. In “Counterpane” she tallies the return that Indigenous residents received for their lands. A dependence on outside resources; orphanages; planes that sometimes crash, decimating villages; food airdropped from the sky in the form of Western staples rather than drawn from subsistence; “the flu pandemic of 1918.
The wish to reclaim her home persists nonetheless. “Let us lose our grief / in great rafts as we translate the renamed straits” she writes in “Darker Passage.” And in the following poem she adds, “I no longer circle / the graves of the dead, the ones who exact / so much from the living.” And elsewhere, “at worst, radical emptiness reminds us / of our humanity.”
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