Images of California Dream in Music
Amy La Jeunesse
English 1B
Professor Lewis
May 15, 2008
The text books that I studied in grade school spoke of creation as the beginning, a group of electrons coming together to form a atom. Some versions spoke of creation as being the work of a religious god. But all of the text books were the same in describing Columbus as the explorer who discovered America. The scholastic society overlooked the natives who already lived on this land. Instead of teaching both sides like evolution vs. creation we were only taught one side which was that Columbus discovered America. This thinking, explains why the white man thought that the land was theirs and that they were justified in their actions of forcing the Indians off the valuable land. As the settlers moved west they forced the Indians from their ancestral land where their family networks were established, to outskirt areas with scarce resources. The large family bloodlines were separated losing their culture and society. In the poems, “Itch Like Crazy: Resistance” by Wendy Rose and “Indian Cartography” by Deborah Miranda, we see two stories of Indian tribes that were forced to migrate from their land by the forceful hand of the white man. The Indians, Native Americans, remember their life before the government destroyed their land and way of life. They re-live the memories of a land without the white man in their California dream. As the government destroyed the natives land their California dream was also lost.
The authors guided the readers through a journey into the lives of Indian tribe members as the government speaks of surveying and destroying their land. In Indian Cartography, Miranda’s father lived in a valley where the white man decided to dam the Santa Ynez River and flood their land. She describes how her father grew up there and learned to swim. The memories of his childhood days of learning to swim were washed away when the river was drowned by the dam’s water. Their family bloodlines, that mapped California, were displaced into far off lands with little and scarce resources. The salmon that returned home to spawn in a river every year was no longer there. She describes a lush, peaceful river valley that is now gone. Settlers from the European nation took away their way of life. Her father felt sorrow for the lost land and drinks alcohol to console his loss. In his drunken dreams he remembers the land before the white man. The author delivers her message in a straight forward story line of her father’s life and how the government bought off the Indians and gradually destroyed their people. She describes a river valley that is gone except for a ghostly essence is all that is left behind. Rose also speaks of a ghost laden land - Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Piedras, My Lai, Acteal, Hispaniola, Massachusetts Bay Colony – all places where their history walked and has now been mortared away. Her land Tewaquachi is now a ghost town.
They speak of a great sorrow, a feeling of helplessness, as the terror of destruction comes knocking at their door. Miranda describes her father’s experience by stating, “Where tragedy greeted him like an old unpleasant relative”. Rose summarizes her feelings by stating, “The terror crouches there in the canyon of my hands, in the pink opening rosebud mouths of newborns or the helplessness of the primal song”. They both speak of a helplessness that is brought about by the white man’s powerful government.
Miranda’s poem is very straight forward as a time line of a story. “The government paid those Indians to move away”, he says; “I don’t know where they went”. Her choice of lyrics is an exact example of the message that she is trying to project. Whereas in Rose’s poem is coded with more hidden messages, through symbols and metaphors.
“A mortar to split our seeds, every sunflower bursting from asphalt” is a beautiful description of Rose’s message. Instead of saying in clear English, nature and plants were replaced with cement of a city. She chose symbolic words that allow the reader to paint a picture in their own mind.
The most significant difference in the poems is that Rose’s poem is not only a historical story but she speaks about revolting and fighting against the system. “Now I dance the mission revolts again, let the ambush blossom in my heart, claim victory with their own language, know the strength spine to spine.” In this quote, she rises from being a victim and lets the fury give her strength to fight back, spine to spine means that she will confront the government with the support of many others. She will do it in English as an advocate for the native American community. Beyond Miranda’s poem, Rose fights back to stop the cycle and to remember the natives that were forced to migrate from their land, forced to convert to Christianity or who fought back and encountered the fate of death.
Whether the poem is written in clear text or poetic words, the message is the same. Sorrow, despair and destroyed lives, plagues the Native Americans. Few history books give true credit to the real first settlers of America. The true settlers have been forgotten as quickly as the water rushed in to flood their land. To the native Americans, their stories live on forever in literature and poems that reminds us that the Indians were the first real California dreamers who are now left remembering ghostly dreams.
