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Excerpts from The Visit:
-from the Prologue: I Am My Brother’s Keeper
Jack Retasket is a Native American/Canadian Shuswap-Lillooet survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School where he was imprisoned at the age of five—legally separated from this twin sister, his mother and father, ten other brothers and sisters, home and tribe. At seven he was raped by his Oblate, Brother Shirley; his account of that rape is at the center of this poem. At thirteen he ran away from Kamloops—across the U.S. border to Oroville, Washington to his family who had fled there to work as apple pickers in order to escape the mandatory placing of their younger children into Kamloops; the parents themselves had been incarcerated there as children. In 2004 at the age of 54, Jack Retasket was arrested and convicted of sexual violation of a female child under twelve, his girlfriend’s daughter seven years previously, and sentenced to fifteen years in Oregon’s Two Rivers Correctional Institution. “The Visit” is an investigative poem in the Ed Sanders’ tradition, a protest poem, and a love poem.
I was completing the first draft of My Father’s Love, the memoir of my father’s sexual violation of me from infancy to twelve, when Jack was arrested. One month after his arrest, Neil Goldschmidt, the popular ex-Governor of Oregon confessed to a similar crime but the statute of limitations meant he could not be arrested. Six months later Jack was found guilty in Newport Oregon. “The Visit” tells Jack’s full story as I know it and he has allowed me, and invokes the contrite Goldschmidt for his help: “that you work to free him/that you find self-forgiveness in this act of atonement.”….. Whatever, the unequal treatment, legal and social, of these two men, Goldschmidt and Retasket, is blatant.…
In our patriarchy the boy, helpless and in love with his mother, grows up to find his manhood in overpowering women. Especially his wives (and daughters and sons that come from her body). This is one of our most simple and clear reversals, but which, along with rape, we seem unable to examine. Somewhere I have a poem about human fecal and urinary control. Universally, the very young human gains control of this profound physiological phenomenon. We could, and must, do the same, sexually….
There are in fact other cultures through time which are not of the murderous, sexually crazed maniacs that we are….The Cherokee, for instance, of which I am part, is matriarchal (or was); the male is the “father” figure for his sisters’ children, not of his own, this in recognition of the psychotic imbalance of power that patriarchy would give him. …
I think here of the two contemporary French philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault who advocate sex with children, in vast evil blindness to what constitutes the human soul.
As an Oglala Miniconjou Lakota Sioux, what was Crazy Horse’s sexuality? What were his sexual fantasies after age thirteen when he found the body of his secret love, the sister of Long Spear at the Sand Creek Massacre? Her pudendum was scalped, a practice not uncommon among the US Army in the western Indian wars; they wore scalped Native vulvas on their caps.
…..
In my life-long, prayed-for story my father confesses his mistake and terrible violation of me, which in fact he did do four months before his death (My Father’s Love, Volume II, Chapter 17)—though inadequate to the life-long violation, psychic as much as physical, that he imposed on me and all the family. In my dream he is confessing because he knows the damage he did to me, to all of us, and to himself. In his confession I am meeting him. I am not falling to that other pole, I am not sadomasochistic. I am his keeper.
Invocation
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“I wish my adopted children to achieve amnesia….I want them to be well.” Michael Dorris[i]
Dear Neil Goldschmidt,[ii]
Kha-che-chee, Canadian American First Nation
Native: Shuswap and Lillooet
productive resident of Newport Oregon for thirty years
was arrested April 6, 2004 exactly one month
before you confessed, May 6, 2004
to the same crime, though yours
is perhaps more serious and he maintains
he is innocent.
But because you are the former mayor of Portland,
the former governor of Oregon, “Oregon’s most
successful and charismatic leader,” the web site still says,
“the most powerful political figure of the second half of the century”
you suffer only humiliation and career
not the loss of the riches you amassed from your privileged positions
while Kha-che-chee is put away for basically the rest of his life.
This is classism, Neil Goldschmidt, blatant
racism. And so I'm addressing my poem to you.
I’m asking you to help find justice, to find amnesty
for “Jack Retasket.”
Amnesty is forgiveness, not forgetting. Not
amnesia. This poem
seeks amnesty, full memory.
“First the truth, then reconciliation.” This poem
seeks you
to make amends
from the position of your privilege
that you work to free him
that you find self-forgiveness in this act of atonement
that Kha-che-chee find justice
and healing, that all victims
of abuse and molestation
find justice and healing
…..
with you as Portland’s “beloved mayor”
as “Oregon’s most charismatic Governor,” Elizabeth
went crazy, went to booze, drugs, the street, years circling
your downtown Mayor’s Office, your governor’s mansion in Salem, our
American witch returned from the Dead, circling
those who knew and were subsequently enriched
and empowered in Oregon politics and business
I accept your apology, Neil Goldschmidt
as I accept Kha-che-chee’s plea of innocence
as I accepted my father’s confession
“I never forgot for a single day what I did to you
I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
But he wasn’t sorry enough
to stop himself from repeating
the same molestation of my brother’s daughter.
…..
Some say you should be in prison.
I say no one, especially Kha-che-chee, innocent or not
should be in prison. Prison
is sadomasochism, the reinforcement of our national psychic pattern, our
psycho ways, our sick sex and religion of conquest. The only justice
the only healing, is in full memory: that we know
what we did, that we know
what was done to us
that we know of Kha-che-chee’s kidnapping at five by the State and Church
from his mother and father, from his brothers and sisters,
from his twin sister
that we know the loss of his language, his tribe, his culture.
The loss of his name, of his being renamed Jack
by the State and Church
that we know of his rape at seven by the Oblate
of his Kamloops Indian Residential school
that we know the theft of himself from himself
that we know the mental illness we create
that we cause the soul loss
that becomes sexual obsession
Domination and submission is not democracy, Governor.
Only justice can stop a curse. Amnesty
is remembering. This poem seeks
full memory. We, the only nation
without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission
…..
This poem, this United States’ Truth
and Reconciliation Commission
You could free
our love, our Crazy Horse, our Leonard Peltier
You could save Kha-che-chee
…..
…..from 1. “What Am I Doing Here?”
“Some 100,000 children were required to attend residential schools over the past century in an attempt to rid them of their cultures and languages. The legacy of sexual abuse and isolation among these children has long been cited by Indian leaders as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide on Canadian reserves.”
….
“Ye have heard that it hath been said,
thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.
But I say onto you: Love your enemies, bless them
that curse you, do good
to them that hate you, and pray
for them which despitefully use you and
persecute you.” (Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, Mathew 5:44 )
I sit here
inside your clanging steel gates
amidst armed guards on this sacred site, Two Rivers
where the Snake enters the Columbia
unsure which of the four doors you’ll come through
unsure I’ll recognize you
But it is you
for all you’ve been through
beautiful man of the Niatallchkwa
fullblood of this land
Our brief embrace, ten seconds the instructions scream
from ceiling and walls. The guards watch us.
We sit four feet apart
facing each other
…..
I would have recognized you anywhere
though now crippled
for the suicide attempt after the verdict
“Easier,” you sigh, “than Kamloops
Indian Residential School.”
I am here, for you, simple as that, your
sister. Not a serious distortion in my mind, Governor,
(is this not blaming the victim again?)
but yes, something of repetition.
I am here for us, despite all who won’t understand,
who triumph I’m sick, a deer attracted to the headlights.
Inexplicable, how I, raped, violated
by my father, could be supportive of you.
How is it that I still love my father?
The Stockholm Syndrome, they diagnose
though not the Jesus Syndrome.
The battered mate syndrome
though not the Forever vow of marriage
not the for-better-or-worse syndrome, not
Forgiveness
Not the Michael Dorris Syndrome
the successful Native American (Modoc) writer
who founded and worked untiringly for children’s organizations
and Indian causes, funded and acclaimed all over the world
for his heroic campaign
to inform us of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome
In 1971 Michael Dorris was the first unmarried man in the US
allowed to adopt a child. At the end of a long
homosexual relationship, he adopted three Sioux infants.
Homosexuals are no more likely to abuse their children than heterosexuals.
This is simply testimony of Dorris’ legal prowess.
In 1972 Dorris founded Dartmouth College’s Native American Studies Department
one of the first in academia.
Ten years later he married his Chippewa-Turtle Mountain/German student,
Louise Erdrich. Together
they published, became wealthy, famous, and revered.
She wrote a memoir, the exquisite The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood[iii]
of birthing one of their three daughters
I used as a guide in my own writing
of the birth of my son[iv]
But something was wrong with his adopted Sioux children:
No doubt, their natal mothers
drank.
Dorris won international acclaim for the TV Special
about these children, about Native Americans, their abuse of alcohol.
The Broken Cord won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award
for General Nonfiction. Erdrich and Dorris both advocated
imprisoning pregnant Indian women who drank.
Like you, Neil Goldschmidt who established the Oregon Children’s Foundation
after announcing to the shock of all Oregon
you would not run for your second term, afraid
the fact of Elizabeth was coming out
Michael Dorris founded Save The Children Foundation
and other such programs
in the name of children, in the name of Indians
in the name of grants, publications, acclaim
“manifest manners” a scholar names it[v]
to hide the fact
to hide his guilt, to appease his shame, to blind himself
that all the while he was sexually molesting his children.
At least this will be the accusation of four of his six children, even his
Modoc-Chippewa daughters
maybe even the one whose pregnancy and birth
is so beautifully told in The Blue Jay’s Dance
