The poems in Luci Tapahonso's A Radiant Curve inhabit a world defined by a fusion of the history of colonization with traditional Navajo stories of creation. The poem “In 1864” remembers the Long Walk in the course of a car trip that apparently retraces part of the ancestors’ journey into exile. Published in 1993 with Tapahonso's collection Sáanii Dahataat: The Women Are Singing, the poem claims a terrible piece of Navajo history in order to remember and mourn the people’s suffering. “In 1864” continues and responds to the oral tradition, and does so in ways that are both structurally and thematicly advances the decolonization imperitive. By retelling the story to a new generation, it confirms Navajo continuance and thus constitutes as an …show more content…
Then the Long Walk is retold in a first-person narration that seamlessly includes the voices of a great-grandmother who experienced the exile, an aunt, and the frame speaker, who introduces and concludes the poem. It is a story that has been told many times, one that this family recognizes as an intimate part of their existence: “My aunt always started the story saying, ‘You are here/because of what happened to your great-grandmother long ago’” (8). In words that are at once the great-grandmother’s and the aunt’s, and that become the frame speaker’s as she repeats them to us, we learn of Kit Carson’s campaign (“they killed our sheep right in front of us. . . . It was then I knew our lives were in great danger” [8]), the family’s decision to surrender, and some of the horrors of the journey— the murders of pregnant women, the drownings of children and elders: “We must not ever forget their screams and the last we saw of them—/hands, a leg, or strands of hair floating” …show more content…
Implicitly recognizing this need, as her daughter speechlessly weeps, the frame speaker tells her child that “it was at Bosque Redondo the people learned to use flour,” with which they now make the “‘traditional’ Navajo” fry bread, and that there the women began to make the skirts, velvet shirts, and blouses decorated with coins for which Navajos are now known. In this way the poem not only memorializes and re-experiences but it also brings this family back home, through familiar references and imagery: “It is always something to see—silver flashing in the sun/against dark velvet and black, black hair” (10). As the poem ends with these vivid, vital images, it re-enacts the Navajos’ survival, drawing attention to the role of language and story in reclaiming history from the whites’ intentions and thus, symbolically, in reclaiming the Navajo homeland. The grief of the Long Walk can never be expunged ordenied, but it can be made bearable, Tapahonso suggests here; thus it can be told to children, who must know their history, and yet must know as well the promise of life and home if they are to participate in the ongoing project of communal