Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples living across the North American continent layered rock and packed soil into durable, multiply functional, highly graphic constructions of large-scale earthworks. These raised forms marked territorial boundaries and significant roadways; they created focal points within urban settlements and within centers for economic trade, technological and artistic exchange, and intellectual and spiritual practice. Platform, conical, pyramid, ridge-top, geometric, and effigy “mounds” thus represent achievements of science and aesthetics on a monumental scale. They integrate the precise observation of natural phenomena with geometry and other abstract forms of knowledge, as well as with practical skills in mathematics, architectural design, engineering, and construction. Many earthworks were sculpted to mirror perceived patterns in the sky, both in the bodies of individual works and in the arrangements of multiple works into complex sites and cities; moreover, particular works were often aligned with specific celestial events, such as an equinox or solstice sunrise or sunset point on the horizon.

The best-known examples of extant Indigenous earthworks are the well-preserved and, in some cases, reconstructed ceremonial, burial, and boundary-marking works in Cahokia, Illinois, located along the Mississippi River outside of what is now St. Louis, Missouri. The earthworks at Cahokia date from about a thousand years before the present, and they include the majestic Monks Mound, a platform rising in multiple terraces to a height of nearly one hundred feet. Within this solar-focused complex, Monks Mound is sited to correspond to the sunrise points of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices. Other well-known examples include the large-scale geometric earthworks (outlines of circles, squares, and octagons) and the large-scale effigy earthworks (including Eagle Mound, Alligator Mound, and Serpent Mound) situated along the waterways of what is now central and southern Ohio. The oldest of these works date from more than two thousand years ago, and depending on their specific locations, they are sited to correspond to key solar, lunar, or other celestial events.

Contemporary researchers have determined, for instance, that the Octagon Earthworks located at what is now Newark, Ohio, is both a mathematically perfect octagon the size of a football field and a type of lunar calendar that marks the 18.6-year cycle of the moon’s northernmost and southernmost rise and set points along the horizon. Remarkably, the accurate observation of these sky phenomena is possible in North America only within a restricted range of latitude. The Octagon Earthworks is thus uniquely sited to facilitate a particular set of astronomical observations.³ Researchers also have determined that the complex of geometric earthworks at Newark, which includes relatively few burial mounds, is connected to a related complex, the High Banks Works, located sixty miles to the southwest, near the town of Chillicothe, which includes a relatively large number of burial mounds and charnel houses. The two sites, each of which features the mounded outline of a large octagon connected to the mounded outline of a large circle, appear to have been connected by a straight and bounded roadway approximately two hundred feet wide. At certain times of the year, this roadway became aligned beneath the visible stars of the Milky Way, creating a “star path” between the lunar observation site at Newark and the mixed solar and lunar internment site at Chillicothe.⁴ In response to these and other types of archaeologically based evidence, including the presence of natural materials and trade items originating great distances from central and southern Ohio (copper, obsidian, mica, silver, meteoric iron, marine shells, bear and shark teeth), researchers speculate that beginning roughly two thousand years ago, the region was a center for Indigenous North American social, spiritual, and, importantly, intellectual and artistic activity and exchange. Archeologists have located over six hundred earthworks within the contemporary borders of Ohio, and there are literally thousands of individual earthworks and earthworks complexes sited across the North American continent, some dating to more than five thousand years ago.

Earthworks have been sketched, mapped, and surveyed, sometimes excavated, and too often looted by non-Indigenous settlers and their descendants since at least the eighteenth century. However, it is a twentieth-century technology—aerial photography—that has enabled contemporary viewers to see individual earthworks, bounded roadways, and earthwork complexes from a great height, the only perspective from which these works can be viewed as complete wholes. (Some archaeologists and art historians suggest that the geometric shapes and aesthetic forms of earthworks can be appreciated only from this overhead perspective and, thus, argue that earthworks may not have been intended primarily for human viewing at all.⁵) Aerial photography has made it possible to consider how these large-scale constructions of packed earth function as and within sign systems in what are increasingly revealed to be regularized patterns.

Drawing on knowledge gained from conventional surveying, mapping, and excavation, as well as from aerial photography, the legibility of earthworks and their systematic patterning has been further enhanced by the development of computer-generated models for particular sites.⁶ In addition, in 2008 researchers in Ohio began to survey earthworks through the aircraft-based use of the optical remote-sensing technology known as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which deploys laser pulses to measure ground elevation. Combined with Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) data, LiDAR creates highly detailed, three-dimensional, color-coded imaging of topographic data. These vivid pictures make it possible to see evidence of earthworks no longer visible to the naked eye, as well as to conceptualize more precisely the specific siting, geometric patterning, and celestial alignments of individual earthworks, roadways, and earthwork complexes. The archaeologist William Romain and his colleagues have demonstrated how LiDAR imaging strengthens hypotheses about Ohio earthworks that are based on ground-level observations and measurements, such as the finding that these works are consistently located near water and that they typically align with solar and/or lunar events. LiDAR has validated additional speculations, as well, confirming that Ohio earthworks are consistently oriented to the lay of the land, often running parallel to natural ridges or embankments, and that geometric earthworks (outlines of circles, squares, and octagons) are typically “nested”—that is, calibrated to fit within each other, even when located at some distance apart. Perhaps most intriguingly, LiDAR has confirmed speculation that the sizes of the major Ohio earthworks all appear to be based on a consistent unit of measurement, that unit’s multiples, and that unit’s key geometric complements.⁷ Romain suggests that any one of these aspects constitutes a striking achievement in the construction of earthworks. That Indigenous mound-building cultures spanning roughly fifteen hundred years of earthwork activity in Ohio were able to incorporate all of these aspects into the construction of specific sites at the same time is truly astounding.

In short, the more legible the earthworks become through aerial-based technologies—that is, the better contemporary viewers are able to see these works both as individual constructions and as multigenerational components within larger sign systems and patterns—the better we are able to understand earthworks as technologies and the better we are able to conceptualize earthworks as a form of Indigenous writing that inscribes knowledge not simply on the land but literally through the medium of the land itself.⁸

Although Hedge Coke did not have access to LiDAR imaging technology when she wrote Blood Run, her multiply coded, three-dimensionally imagined, and highly patterned sequence of poems—dense with data—similarly reveals new ways of seeing and new ways of conceptualizing an important earthworks site. In contrast to the three-dimensional images produced by LiDAR, however, Hedge Coke’s sequence of poems provides a fourth dimension: perspectives that are explicitly and distinctly Indigenous.⁹ Blood Run is the first American Indian literary text to give voice to the traditions of Indigenous mound-building cultures and, most strikingly, to the earthworks themselves.¹⁰ And although she does not attempt to speak for the Oneota peoples of the past who built and then flourished at Blood Run, or for their descendants scattered across the region, who she believes can and should speak for themselves, Hedge Coke creates a series of sixty-four persona poems through which a range of elements associated with the Blood Run site and its long history are enabled to “speak.”¹¹ These voices include the site’s Ceremonial, Burial, and effigy Snake mounds, which speak both individually and collectively across the sequence, as well as the central River along which the site was constructed and the distant Horizon that marks its physical and conceptual borders. They also include “wild” and “domesticated” flora and fauna associated with the site, Dog, Starwood, Corn, Redwing Blackbird, Sunflower, Deer, Beaver, Buffalo, and Fox; the celestial bodies Morning Star, Sun, Moon, Blue Star, and North Star that move above and mirror back the site; an abstracted Memory that pervades the physical space across time; a Tree that marks time’s passage since the “interruption” of natural life at Blood Run; and evidence of Indigenous writing systems on Cupped Boulder and Pipestone Tablets. In addition, there is an ambiguous spiritual guide who moves among these different aspects of space and time called Clan Sister and an ambiguous medicine called Esoterica, Skeletons and Ghosts of the interred dead, and, perhaps least expectedly, multiple non-Indigenous human and mechanical intruders to the site: Jesuit, Squatters, Tractor, Looters, Early Anthro, and Early Interpreter.¹²

In their discussion of the possibilities for LiDAR technology in the interpretation of earthworks, Romain and his colleague Jarrod Burks remark, “In the 19th century, when many of these sites were first mapped, thousands of years of erosion had already obscured the earthwork outlines. Thus, many of these earthwork sites have hidden discoveries waiting to be revealed by modern investigators and LiDAR imagery represents one avenue for reexamining these monumental sites.”¹³ The archaeologists caution, however, that

It is important to recognize that the process of creating a LiDAR image is part science and part art. Similar to a map, or drawing, what the viewer is presented with reflects what the image-maker wishes to show and is based on a series of subjective decisions. By changing perspective, lighting intensity and angle, height exaggeration, and color, very different results are achieved. Certain features can be exaggerated, others minimized.¹⁴

Hedge Coke harnesses this ambiguity between “science” and “art” in the animation of multiple personas and multiple perspectives in order to make visible at Blood Run what has not been seen with the human eye for over three centuries. What she creates is neither static nor simply a poetic “map” or “drawing.” Rather, in her core sequence Hedge Coke creates a series of dramatic monologues spoken by thirty-seven distinct personas, some of which recur across the book’s sixty-four persona poems and some of which speak only once. Simultaneously, she creates a series of staged dialogues spoken between some twenty-nine personas that become paired across the central and defining spine of the open book. More than a sequence of related poems, at the core of Hedge Coke’s Blood Run is a script meant for embodied performance, an activist play. In contrast to work produced by archaeologists, the purpose of Blood Run is not to reveal “discoveries” about an exotic or past culture. Rather, Hedge Coke’s highly patterned, multidimensional script endeavors to move audiences (and performers) in the present so that they might act in the future, to persuade readers (and speakers and listeners) that the Blood Run site continues to carry intrinsic value and thus deserves to be treated as sacred and preserved for future generations.

Despite potential tensions between “science” and “art,” the reading practices developed for interpreting aerial photography and LiDAR-produced three-dimensional imaging of earthworks are suggestive of reading practices appropriate for interpreting the structural patterning of Hedge Coke’s Blood Run. Viewed from the surface—that is, moving among the intricate language and specific content of Hedge Coke’s five nonpoetic and sixty-six poetic pieces—the formal structures of the sequence appear rather flat or two-dimensional; they do not stand out as especially developed or regularized. Viewed from an “overhead” perspective and at a relatively great height, however, the book’s macrostructure becomes more clearly visible and increasingly legible. The patterning of Hedge Coke’s sequence of diverse but multiply related poetic and nonpoetic forms is revealed to be highly complex—even, one might argue, as three- or possibly four-dimensional.¹⁵ From an aerial position we can better see the mathematics and geometry at the foundation of Hedge Coke’s carefully constructed “earth”-works and better determine the specific units of measurement on which the poet has based individual constructions and complexes and their multiple alignments and, indeed, multiple nestings.

Viewed from above, the world built in Hedge Coke’s Blood Run is revealed to be based on a principle of layering diverse forms and materials, the construction technique for actual Indigenous earthworks. This textual world of sections, poems, stanzas, lines, words, and syllables is also revealed to be based on the repetition, recombination, and reconfiguration of a limited set of natural numbers—four; three; their sum, seven; and multiples of all three—as well as on the repetition, recombination, and reconfiguration of the sequence of primes, those natural numbers that can be divided only by themselves and the number one, which is itself unique in the sense that one is neither a prime nor a composite number.¹⁶ An aerial analysis of the title page of Blood Run begins to reveal the significance of these repetitions, recombinations, and reconfigurations for building Hedge Coke’s conception of Indigenous settlement. The title and author information Hedge Coke presents is organized into four horizontal lines or layers, and each is made distinct not only through variable spacing but also through differences in typeface, font, size, and capitalization (see Figure 10). Reading from the top down, the sequence begins with the primary title, “Blood Run,” in a large, bold typeface, followed by a space and then by a secondary title, “Free Verse Play,” in a smaller, italicized typeface. The second layer is followed by a second, larger space and then by a tertiary title and preposition, “Earthworks By,” in small caps. The third layer is followed by a more narrow space and then by the author’s full name, “Allison Adelle Hedge Coke,” in bold small caps. An excavation of the four layers moves from the bold surface of the physical site—that is, the boldly marked surface of Blood Run itself—to the italicized “slopes” of the book’s two primary genre classifications—“free verse” poetry and embodied dramatic “play”—to the central, “capital” concept of the construction of “earthworks” “by” a particular people, and finally to the four-part, boldly “capitalized” base of the author’s full name.¹⁷

The most significant unit of measurement in the title page, as in the book as a whole, is the number four. In many Indigenous North American cultures, the number four is associated with the cardinal directions and recognized in the regular patterns of the seasons and other natural phenomena. Moreover, in these cultures four is often associated with ritual activity, with completed action, and with balance or harmony; four is thus often associated with the sacred. In the specific context of contemporary literary production, these and other associations have meant that four has been used as a primary organizing structure in a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Indian poems, plays, and novels, including Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Silko’s Ceremony, and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, among others. Mathematically, while four is not prime, it is the square of two, the first and only even prime. Four thus evokes balance, harmony, and completion by making the first and only even prime two-dimensional.

Hedge Coke’s second basic unit of measurement for Blood Run, three, is the second (and first odd) prime. As noted in chapter 3 in the discussion of the semiotic geometry of Navajo weaving, in at least some Indigenous North American cultures three, in contrast to four and other even numbers, is associated with creative activity and with action that is incomplete and ongoing. The sum of four and three is seven, Hedge Coke’s third basic unit of measurement for Blood Run. Seven is the fourth prime, and like the natural number four, it is associated with the sacred in many Indigenous North American cultures. Cherokee social organization, for instance, with which Hedge Coke identifies, is arranged into seven principal clans. Moreover, within Cherokee medicinal texts, these numbers calibrate the geographical world with the cosmological world: while the number four indicates a two-dimensional, horizontal schematic of the world divided into the four cardinal directions, the number seven describes a three-dimensional, spherical schematic that adds to the four cardinal directions the three complementary spatial positions zenith (above), nadir (below), and center.¹⁸ As we shall see, in addition to the auspicious numbers four, three, seven, and their multiples, the sequence of the first twenty-four primes, which range from two to eighty-nine, and the condition of “primality” are also significant for measuring Hedge Coke’s earthworks and for building her conception of Indigenous settlement in Blood Run.

Consider the following measurements in Figure 11 of the words and syllables in each layer of the Blood Run title page and how each can be mapped onto information presented in the book’s table of contents. The recurrence of Hedge Coke’s basic units of measurement becomes increasingly visible when we examine the title page in relation to the table of contents’ schematic overview of the macrostructure for Blood Run. As noted, the table lists a total of seventy-one distinct components to the book; seventy-one is the twentieth prime.¹⁹ Similar to the title page, the table of contents reveals a technique of layering diverse forms and materials. Of the seventy-one components, five are nonpoetic; three of these precede the book’s sixty-six poems (Noori’s introduction, Hedge Coke’s foreword and note), and two follow (the acknowledgements and dedications).²⁰ Two, three, and five are the first, second, and third primes. The book’s central core, however, is the sequence of sixty-four persona poems, which are divided across sections 2 (twenty-eight persona poems), 3 (twenty-seven persona poems), and 4 (eight persona poems) and the epilogue (one persona poem). Sixty-four is the square of eight, a number associated with the third layer of the title page and the number of poems included in section 4, “Portend.” Sixty-four also can be factored as four raised to the third power, 4 × 4 × 4, or four cubed—what we might think of as the sacred basic unit of measurement, four, made three-dimensional.

By now the significance of the book’s larger sequence of sixty-six poems organized into four numbered and titled sections will have become increasingly legible.²¹ In addition, we can note again that one, the number of poems in section 1, “Dawning,” is neither a prime nor a composite number; one stands alone as itself and can be multiplied by itself infinitely—squared, cubed, quadrupled, and so forth—and produce the consistent result of one. Section 1 is composed of the first narrative poem, “Before Next Dawning,” which offers an expansive overview of the history of Indigenous peoples in the Americas in a total of 176 lines.²² At first glance this number appears arbitrary. However, 176 indexes the number of earthworks still extant when the Blood Run site was mapped at the end of the nineteenth century, a fact to which Hedge Coke draws attention in her author’s note (xiv). It can be factored as 4 × 44, emphasizing the book’s sacred basic unit of measurement, four, and in effect evoking its cube and, thus, its three-dimensionality; this factoring of 176, in other words, evokes the number sixty-four (4 × 4 × 4), the number of persona poems that make up Blood Run. Hedge Coke’s alignment of the numbers one and 176 thus asserts both the singularity and the multidimensional sacredness of Indigenous settlement at the Blood Run site.

The measurement of other sections is equally suggestive of thematic connections to Indigenous settlement. Section 2, “Origin,” is composed of twenty-eight persona poems, the result of four, the book’s basic unit of measurement and primary but not prime sacred number, multiplied by seven, the fourth prime and another number aligned with the sacred. Section 3, “Intrusions,” is composed of twenty-seven persona poems, the cube of three (3 × 3 × 3), the second prime and a number associated with ongoing and incomplete action. And section 4, “Portend,” is composed of eight persona poems, the result of four multiplied by two, the first prime, and also the cube of two (2 × 2 × 2). Cubing suggests not only geometric three-dimensionality but also movement in multiple directions and general vitality. Indeed, the cubing of the first (and only even) prime—multiplying two by itself three times—is suggestive in section 4 of the possibility of a restorative, fully functional future at Blood Run that is both three-dimensional and balanced. Finally, the unnumbered epilogue is composed of two poems, the sixty-fourth and final persona poem and the second narrative poem, “When the Animals Leave This Place.” The latter is composed of eighty-nine lines, the twenty-fourth prime.²³ Ending with a section of only two poems repeats and emphasizes the first prime, two, the square root of the basic unit of measurement, four, potentially adding a fourth dimension—time—to section 4’s prophecy for the future.

This line of aerial analysis of the book’s macrostructure can be extended, as well, to Hedge Coke’s core sequence of sixty-four persona poems, which is composed of thirty-seven distinct personas. Thirty-seven is the twelfth prime, and twelve is the product of the two basic units of measurement for Blood Run (4 × 3). Of these thirty-seven distinct personas, twelve can themselves be considered prime if we enumerate the order of their first appearance in the sequence. (Thus, the second, third, fifth, seventh, eleventh, thirteenth, seventeenth, nineteenth, twenty-third, twenty-ninth, thirty-first, and thirty-seventh personas can be considered prime.)²⁴ Ten of the sequence’s thirty-seven distinct personas speak more than once, while twenty-seven speak only once.²⁵ Of the twelve personas considered prime, four speak more than once: the second, third, fifth, and seventh personas, corresponding to the first, second, third, and fourth primes. The number of times specific personas speak in the sequence varies considerably: two personas speak seven times each; three personas speak four times each; one persona speaks three times; and four personas speak two times each. These ten “repeating” personas speak in a total of thirty-seven poems, which, as already noted, is the number of distinct personas and the twelfth prime, the result of four multiplied by three.

The repetition of basic units of measurement and the sequence of the first twenty-four primes across multiple levels of organization, including not only the title page, table of contents, and distinct personas but also the number of lines and stanzas for each of the book’s sixty-six poems, creates more than a regular system of poetic patterning for Blood Run. Such repetition conveys on the printed page a sense of the architectural, geometric, and astronomical patterning evidenced at actual earthworks sites. The packed earth at Cahokia, the Octagon Earthwork, or Blood Run is sculpted not only to mirror sky but also to orient human bodies that approach, enter, or move among their structures; they guide the physical movements of those human bodies into particular ritual, social, and civic patterns. Similarly, Hedge Coke’s packed repetitions of key natural numbers and primes orient human minds that enter her poetic structures toward particular intellectual and aesthetic patterns. Hedge Coke’s elaborate patterning works, as well, to bolster the message of her book’s specific content by guiding readers to move toward rather than away from the difficult moral issues raised by the history of Blood Run and the difficult political issues raised by its specifically Indigenous settlement.

Hedge Coke’s book-length sequence of poems was published as part of the Earthworks series of Native poetry produced by Salt Publishing, based in the United Kingdom with printing and distribution networks in the United States and Australia.²⁶ Blood Run appears designed for a broad primary audience of U.S., British, and other English-speaking readers who are likely to be unfamiliar with the technology of Indigenous earthworks and with the histories and ongoing legacies of North American mound-building cultures. Hedge Coke guides readers into her poetic city of mounds through elaborate procedures of mediation, and she offers readers extensive metacommentary on her literary project and its activist goals. Before the “free verse play” begins among the dramatic monologues and staged conversations of her persona poems, Hedge Coke first provides readers with multiple layers and multiple genres of introductions that define key terminology, relate relevant history and specific site details for Blood Run, and establish her own ethos. Her opening narrative poem, “Before Next Dawning,” then provides readers with a panoramic overview of Indigenous history in the Americas and a précis of the book’s larger argument for preserving and protecting earthworks and other sacred sites. The narrative poem ends in a brief ceremony that promotes the earth’s restoration. The multiple introductions and the panoramic narrative poem literally set the stage for the drama that will be performed by Hedge Coke’s cast of Blood Run personas.

Another model for conceiving these layers of introductions is provided by the archaeologist William Romain. In Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands (2000), Romain notes “an ancient belief among many peoples that spirits can only travel in straight lines and not in zigzags. To obtain entrance or exit, however, into or out of [an Ohio earthwork] enclosure that has a gateway or guardian mound, a zigzag path is required” (182). We might conceive of Hedge Coke’s layers of introductions as functioning like a “gateway or guardian mound” that requires readers to take a “zigzag path” into her sequence of “earth”-works.

The first of these gateways is the three-page formal introduction by Noori, which provides historical and site details for Blood Run, identifies major themes in the book, and positions Hedge Coke not only as poet and teacher but also as Indigenous activist.²⁷ The second gateway, the two-page foreword by Hedge Coke, builds on Noori’s introduction by guiding readers toward a series of key concepts that, together, create a site plan or schematic map both for Blood Run and for the book’s core sequence of persona poems. These concepts include the ancient activities of North American “trade relationships” and the “archetypal practice” of Indigenous humanitarian “relations,” as well as physical “throughways” and “language systems,” including specifically “trade languages.” Toward the end of the foreword, Hedge Coke writes, “Blood Run is such a place, one of significant trade, once a great city” (xiii). In this formulation the place that was and is Blood Run is defined not in terms of static geographical coordinates, fixed points on an imagined grid, but rather in terms of “relations,” “ways,” and “systems” that are multiple and dynamic. Finally, Hedge Coke defines Blood Run as “this memory [. . .] of these civilizations at their peak.” Her sequence of personas will enact this memory of the dynamic relations, ways, and systems of the historic Blood Run site and argue for their potential, in the future, to be fully dynamic once again.

In the third gateway, the two-page author’s note that follows the foreword, Hedge Coke offers more precise statistics for Blood Run and more precise descriptions of the “building culture” of the Oneota peoples who lived there.²⁸ Many of the numerical details she cites are identical to those provided by Noori; others are rounded up or down. Hedge Coke notes, for instance, that although first occupancy of the site “dates back over 8,500 years ago,” Blood Run was most heavily populated at “the beginning of the 18th century”—not in the so-called prehistoric deep past but rather within the period of written history.²⁹ Like Cahokia in Illinois, Blood Run was an urban space, a large city, and a regional trade center. Hedge Coke relates that the available evidence indicates that “as many as 400 mounds existed in upward to 2300 acres” at the site. An 1883 survey documented “276 mounds” spread “over 1200 acres,” while subsequent mapping indicated “only 176” earthworks as still visible. Hedge Coke states that at the time of her writing, after more than a century of looting, physical removal, and agricultural cropping, “less than 80” earthworks remained visible at Blood Run. The numbers Hedge Coke relates in this metacommentary are foundational—though not fully adequate—for explaining the complex systems of numerical patterning that develop among individual poems and across the larger sequence of Blood Run. Although Hedge Coke does not name the number four explicitly as her basic unit of measurement, every number she lists in her note that describes a relevant statistic for Blood Run is, in fact, a multiple of four.³⁰ As demonstrated, however, four is but one of several basic units of measurement for the Blood Run sequence.

Hedge Coke’s opening narrative poem, “Before Next Dawning,” continues the process of guiding readers through gateways into the city of mounds by providing an expansive overview of the history of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In these 176 lines, which reinscribe the number of mounds surveyed in an earlier era and emphasize the basic unit of measurement, four, Hedge Coke establishes a broad and highly politicized context for Blood Run’s history of creative building, vibrant life, multiple intrusions by European and American settlers, and finally decimation, decline, and near erasure. Indigenous settlement and its link to earthworks as technologies for “Marking worldly occurrence” and “[becoming] part of this landscape” develop as a primary theme across the poem (5). “In building earthworks, effigy, / community civic sculpture, structure,” the speaker states, the mound-building community creates a “safe barrier bound by / earth,” a barrier suitable for “taking in the bones of The People upon their untimely / passing” (9). Through the building of multiple earthworks, and through the interment of the dead within specific works, the human community becomes both “part of this landscape” and “Immortal” (5). Finally, following an account of the destruction brought to “this great civilization” at Blood Run by “new disease” and “new ways” from “The Lands Across the Waters” (8), “Before Next Dawning” ends in prayer, with the final twenty lines arranged into six stanzas that emphasize repetition and a four-part ritual structure.³¹ Readers are invited to pray for the restoration of the endangered land, the violated earthworks, the desecrated human remains at Blood Run, and, ultimately, for the restoration of the entire planet: “May she breathe. / May she breathe again” (10).

Taken together, Hedge Coke’s layers of introductions, historical overview, and prayer—these multiple gateways into the city of mounds—position readers not at ground level to walk among the earthworks themselves but rather high enough overhead to see the monumental and multidimensional whole. The zigzag perspective these gateways create is aerial, panoramic, schematic, a dynamic map of the physical site and its long history within which to situate the dramatic monologues and staged dialogues of the persona poems that follow.³²

The persona poems draw attention to what outsiders, invaders, and looters have viewed as mere inanimate objects and revivify these as living and articulate entities situated within multiple contexts, relationships, and narratives. Their voices bear witness to the site’s former glory, historical and ongoing violation, and possible reclamation, repatriation, and renewal. The collective and singular personas of the earthworks at Blood Run (The Mounds, Ceremonial Mound, Burial Mound, and Snake Mound) describe themselves as technologies for relating the human community to the earth and cosmos—that is, as technologies for connecting the “middle world” of their raised surfaces to both a “lower world” and an “upper world.”³³ The earthworks form part of a vital middle space that is simultaneously natural and artistic, spiritual and civic. The mounds assert that the activities that take place on, in, and among their bodies of packed and sculpted earth place humans within a matrix of relationships—with each other, with the natural forces of the universe, with the spirit world—that produce significant meaning. These assertions narrate an evolving story about place identity and sacred geography. Understood as extensions of the mathematics and geometry at the structural foundation of Hedge Coke’s poetic sequence, these assertions develop, as well, a highly nuanced definition of what it means for humans to legitimately settle—not simply to occupy a particular place or to exploit its resources but to become integral to the regularities and harmonies of its dynamic systems.³⁴

Seven poems spread across sections 2, “Origin,” 3, “Intrusions,” and 4, “Portend,” voice the collective persona of The Mounds. Five of these are arranged on the page as distinctly visual poems whose shapes mimic the slopes of terraced earthworks. One poem situated in section 2 voices the persona of Ceremonial Mound; three poems spread across sections 2 and 3 voice the persona of Burial Mound. In addition, a single poem positioned in section 2 voices the persona of the effigy Snake Mound, who reappears in section 3 in the altered form of the persona Stone Snake Effigy.³⁵ The Mounds persona describes its collective self as the physical embodiment of prayer, “the love of man honoring mystery” (55), its “purposes” as “funerary, fundamental, immaculate” (82). More precisely, the collective Mounds assert that they were constructed in alignment with “constellation rise, cyclic phenomena, lunar cycle, / solar event” (17), “positioned relevant to all that was” and “will be” (17), made to “model / each rise, fall; Sun, Moon” (30) and to “mirror” not only specific “constellations” (30) but the entire “universe” (52). Ultimately, they “were meant to make matters meaningful” (82). It is the singular Ceremonial Mound, however, positioned early in section 2, “Origin”—aligned, that is, with the era before non-Indigenous intrusions into Blood Run—that outlines a detailed model for how the earthworks relate the human community to the earth and cosmos (18). Similarly, the third appearance of the Burial Mound persona, positioned as the fourteenth poem—and the precise midpoint—of section 3, “Intrusions,” outlines a detailed model for how the earthworks relate the living to both their interred dead and to unborn generations yet to come (58). Each stresses the relational function of the earthworks, how these structures of embodied knowledge position the living human community, either as a whole or through designated representatives, at the center of ongoing processes. And each poem deploys unexpected wordplay and a type of bilanguaging in English (a concept discussed in detail in chapter 4 and redefined below) to suggest the nuances of this Indigenous technology of settlement.

Ceremonial Mound describes itself as a sacred altar “raised from flatland” upon which “The People” can come together as a body to “praise / what holds the unending universe intact.” In twenty lines divided into nine stanzas, the mound emphasizes the role its elevation “above mortal reach” and “higher than common ground” plays in “positioning” humans in closer proximity to the cosmos and, by analogy, in closer proximity to the spirit world while keeping The People literally grounded: “eyes to Sky; feet on Earth.” The raised surface of Ceremonial Mound is thus a transitional space between “Earth” and “Sky,” a middle world where one can not only “diagram the phases / of Sun, [and] Moon” but also engage in reciprocal relations with cosmic forces. Indeed, in the fourth stanza, the conclusion of the first half of the poem, in a moment of subtle wordplay the mound invites humans to “Climb upon my table, my bone plate. / From here, you can touch the clouds. / From here clouds embrace.”

Although “table” indicates the flat surface of the terraced mound, it also suggests a place of sustenance, a supply and source of food, as well as a place of assembly. More abstractly, it points to elements arranged in horizontal rows and vertical columns. Within the context of Hedge Coke’s poetic sequence, “Climb upon my table” connotes this sense of entering into a set of complex relations. Like the common word “table,” the unusual phrase “bone plate” can suggest sustenance. It also can suggest a Native breastplate constructed from animal bones, an esteemed piece of regalia, a type of armor to protect a warrior from injury. But “bone plate” refers, as well, to a contemporary medical procedure for holding together a fractured bone when a solid cast cannot be used; these plates help healing bones to regain strength and allow tissue to regenerate. Ceremonial Mound’s invitation to “Climb upon my table, my bone plate” thus suggests a process of healing bodies, renewing strength, regenerating the reciprocal, living tissue of cosmic and spiritual connections. Although these lines are composed entirely in English, their wordplay is suggestive of the potential for Indigenous bilanguaging discussed in chapter 4: not simply the grammatical act of translating from one distinct language to another but the political act of operating between two or more languages and cultural systems, actively engaging the politics of their asymmetry within (post)colonial relations. Walter Mignolo discusses similar examples of “bilanguaging in the same language” in other contexts (264). In Blood Run the singular voice of Hedge Coke’s Ceremonial Mound intervenes in the politics of contemporary U.S. settler English by juxtaposing multiple discourses—topographic, cultural, medical—in order to provoke unexpected connections.

The third Burial Mound poem, composed of seventeen lines (the seventh prime) divided into six stanzas, enlists similar wordplay to create similar effects in its alliterative opening line: “My seed coat meant for sheltering, chambers choate.” Across these eight words of erudite, somewhat obscure, ambiguous English, the mound enacts a process of Indigenous bilanguaging as it shifts its discourse among botany, architecture, human biology, and law. A “seed coat” is a protective covering for a plant’s technology for regeneration. “Sheltering” and “chambers” suggest functions and forms of architecture, with “chambers” carrying the specific connotation of private rooms and, more precisely, private rooms used by judges in a court of law. “Chambers” also connotes cavities within a body or organ, such as the human heart. The mound’s use of the unusual word “choate,” which works across the line as an echo of “coat” that picks up the morphing “sh” and “ch” sounds from “sheltering” and “chambers,” draws particular attention. “Choate” is a back formation from the more familiar “inchoate”—with its typical meanings of rudimentary, incomplete, disordered, or otherwise imperfectly formed—and “choate” is used almost exclusively within legal discourses to signify the exact opposite of “inchoate”: the idea of a legal order, such as a lien against property, being completed and perfected in and of itself and, thus, superior to all other legal orders that might attempt to challenge its authority. Through this process of bilanguaging, in asserting the “perfection” of its body, the voice of Burial Mound asserts both a biological necessity and a legal authority for its civic role at Blood Run. The line and the poem as a “perfect” whole work to disrupt colonial practices of containing Indigenous technologies within settler metaphors of the rudimentary, the incomplete, the disordered, and the otherwise imperfect.³⁶

Moreover, in contrast to Ceremonial Mound, which emphasizes its raised surface as a ritual platform, the third Burial Mound describes its surface as a “tremendous testa,” an old term for “seed coat,” a protective covering. Following this logic, Burial Mound describes its primary function as providing a “womb” that “shield[s]” the human remains buried within it.³⁷ These roles are described in more precise detail in the poem’s ongoing wordplay and bilanguaging, especially through the juxtaposition (in line four at the end of the first stanza and line eight at the end of the second stanza) of the near homographs “anthesis” and “antithesis.” At the conclusion of the opening four-line stanza, the mound states that its role is to “nurture” the “blooming spirits” of The People until they are prepared for “anthesis.” A botanical term, “anthesis” describes the period during which a flower is fully open, in its most receptive state—in “bloom”—when the anthens release their pollen and pollination occurs. To explain this particular process of pollination, in the second four-line stanza Burial Mound invokes the philosophical concept and rhetorical device of antithesis:

Their heritage seed below at Macy, in Omaha—

They speak to me, from both sides,

turnip hole; still breathing.

Each needing antithesis to fare well through me.

Burial Mound asserts its function as the point of contact between the world of the living and the world of the spirits, the human community and their dead, a function that the mound links to the story of Sky Woman (also known as Feather Woman) in its reference to a central “turnip hole” through which contact can be made. A culture hero, Sky Woman left the human community to marry a star but later returned to earth through a turnip hole she dug in the sky world, bringing home both new blood in the form of her children and various new technologies.³⁸ The mound names the community “at Macy, in Omaha”—the location of the contemporary Omaha Reservation—as the “heritage seed” of the interred dead. These descendants are the enduring, genetic link to Blood Run and to the Indigenous ancestors who built its earthworks. The mound states that each world needs the other in order to achieve the benefits of the mound’s particular technology: “Each needing antithesis to fare well through me.” The use of “antithesis” complements the earlier use of its near pun “anthesis,” abstracting literal into spiritual pollination and growth. The spirits of the dead require the living for their “flowering,” but the living require the spirits of the dead, too, if they are to “fare well”—with that phrase’s connotations of travel, sustenance, and success—and prosper in their own futures and in those of the coming generations. Through these poetic strategies, the voices of Ceremonial Mound and the third Burial Mound convert the dead objects of settler nostalgia—mapped, surveyed, excavated, and looted “mounds”—into sites of Indigenous technological power, civic celebration, and physical resurgence.

The contrast between Indigenous and non-Indigenous technologies of settlement is rendered particularly acute within the specific drama and patterning of the thematically volatile section in which the third Burial Mound speaks, section 3, “Intrusions.” This section enacts a sequence of twenty-seven persona poems in which six historical, non-Indigenous entities “intrude” among eight distinct Indigenous elements of the Blood Run site. The six intruders appear in seven poems (the fourth prime), and their names indicate spiritual, physical, and intellectual intrusions into Blood Run: Jesuit, Squatters, Tractor, Looters, Early Anthro, Looters, Early Interpreter. Only the Looters speak twice, and their repetition creates a pattern of alternating individual and collective intrusions. The eight Indigenous personas that speak in the section—The Tree at Eminija Mounds, Burial Mound, Ghosts, Skeletons, Clan Sister, The Mounds, Horizon, River, Stone Snake Effigy, and Memory—appear in the twenty remaining poems of the section; five of these personas (the third prime) speak more than once, and three (the second prime) speak only once. Within the sequence of twenty-seven poems in section 3, the “intruders” speak in poems five, seven, nine, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen. Five of these numbers are prime: five, seven, thirteen, seventeen, and nineteen (corresponding to the third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth primes). The other two, however, are also prime within the book’s larger sequence of sixty-four persona poems: poem nine in section 3 corresponds to poem thirty-seven in the overall sequence, the twelfth prime, and poem fifteen in section 3 corresponds to poem forty-three in the overall sequence, the fourteenth prime. Similar alignments become apparent if we look at the position of all of the intruder personas within the book’s larger sequence.

The prime status of these non-Indigenous, destructive intruders seems to challenge what we might call the thematic geometry of Hedge Coke’s carefully coded macrostructure. The condition of primality suggests originality and primacy, positive qualities Hedge Coke consistently aligns with the Blood Run site personas and with the concept of Indigenous settlement. Primality also suggests the positive quality of indivisibility or, put another away, the positive state of an activist unity. At the same time, primality can suggest the negative qualities of primitiveness and baseness, a lack of sensitivity and sophistication. Rather than an unbreakable unity, this understanding can suggest a potentially debilitating singularity and self-focus, a lack of complexity and an unwillingness—or inability—to become associated with others—that is, to become “composed” like a composite number, formed into a balanced whole. These last qualities align with the six intruders and their seven poems.

The actual intrusions of section 3 occur in an interior sequence of fifteen poems (3 × 5, the second and third primes) whose individual voices and staged interactions articulate competing understandings of settlement. Four poems precede the initial intrusion, while eight poems follow the final. Poem four in the section, which immediately precedes the first intrusion, is also poem thirty-two (4 × 8) in the book’s overall sequence of sixty-four and thus marks its midpoint. Poem twenty (4 × 5) in the section, which immediately follows the final intrusion, is also poem forty-eight (4 × 12) in the sequence of sixty-four and thus marks the beginning of its final quarter. The precise midpoint of the interior section of fifteen poems is poem twelve (4 × 3), “Skeletons,” one of the Indigenous elements that speaks three times within section 3. “Skeletons” is composed of twelve lines divided into three stanzas of four lines each. It is positioned in dialogue with poem thirteen, the first “Looters,” which is similarly composed of twelve lines but divided into four stanzas of varying lengths: two, five, three, two. Across the central river of the open book’s spine, “Skeletons” warns “Looters,” “Do not unsettle us. / [. . .] Until there is dust we must remain / settled here where we were lain” (56; emphasis added). The significant conceptual movement from unsettle to settled is positioned not in lines that correspond to multiples of four, the book’s sacred basic unit of measurement, but rather in lines five and ten. When “Looters” responds to “Skeletons,” however, its most damning phrases are placed precisely at line four: “Nothing is sacred in this world. Nothing” (57). Seven poems (the fourth prime and another number aligned with the sacred) precede poem twelve, “Skeletons,” in this interior section, and seven poems follow. In the former, three intruders are sequenced with four Indigenous personas; in the latter, four intruders are sequenced with three Indigenous personas. Thus, although the interior section is focused thematically on challenge, disruption, and imbalance, its numeric structures are not simply inverted but surprisingly balanced.

The precise midpoint of section 3, however, is not poem twelve, “Skeletons,” but rather poem fourteen, the third “Burial Mound,” previously discussed in some detail, which shifts emphasis back to sculpted earth and recenters its particular kind of balance. (At this point we may notice that the number of Indigenous personas that speak, eight, and the number of intruder personas that speak, six, add up to a total of fourteen distinct personas in the section.) Burial Mound is the seventh persona (the fourth prime) introduced in the book’s overall sequence, and it is also one of the Indigenous elements at Blood Run that speaks multiple times: once in section 2 and twice in section 3. In section 3, poem fourteen is both preceded and followed by thirteen poems (the sixth prime). It is composed of seventeen lines (the seventh prime), divided into six stanzas of varying but related lengths. Despite this variation, the poem’s stanzaic structure is “balanced” and describes its own precise midpoint—a fulcrum or hinge—at line nine, a number that squares and thus emphasizes the active number three within the volatile section 3. The stanzaic structure is organized as four, four, one, four, two, two. Eight lines divided into two stanzas of four are positioned above the midpoint at line nine; eight lines divided into three stanzas of four, two, and two are positioned below, guiding readers to the pivotal center:

My seed coat meant for sheltering, chambers choate.

Though now my beauty furrowed, furled so

I can scarcely shield the remains of my People,

nurture their blooming spirits for anthesis.

Their heritage seed below at Macy, in Omaha—

They speak to me, from both sides,

turnip hole; still breathing.

Each needing antithesis to fare well through me.

So lamentable, what was!

I was a fine, broad hull, tremendous testa.

From far distance, rivaling hills

lain like kernelled landscapes, ideal body.

Before the novices came chiseling ruins.

I endure wrath of the till

bludgeoning of benighted.

Take pity on me! I appeal.

Without my womb, they but dust.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

(58)

In line nine, the midpoint of section 3’s midpoint, the intruded upon Burial Mound exclaims, “So lamentable, what was!” The mound’s exclamation condenses the section’s theme of Indigenous response to a history of multiple violations into four words and seven syllables, repeating and realigning, once again, the book’s sacred “primary” but not prime basic unit of measurement, four, and the similarly sacred fourth prime, seven. As noted, the product of four and seven is twenty-eight, the number of preintrusions persona poems presented in section 2, “Origin.”³⁹ Moreover, a comma divides this pivotal line in two, signaling both space and breath at the center of the poem’s center, creating a caesura crucial not only to the line’s potential meaning (the two parts suggestive of a thesis and its antithesis) but also to its visual, aural, and even somatic effects—that is, how it looks on the page and sounds when spoken aloud, but also how it is experienced by the speaking body. While subtle on the fixed page, in performance the caesura can be rendered especially provocative: its extended beat of silence creates dramatic tension, heightens the force of both the alliteration in the repeated w sounds of the line’s penultimate and final syllables and of the exclamation point at its end. The caesura suggests that the purpose of the poem is not to record irretrievable loss—“So lamentable”—but rather, in its emphasis on life-giving breath, to assert Indigenous endurance beyond the interruptions of recent history—“what was!” Indeed, such alignments gesture toward the possibility of future regeneration (not to be confused with a nostalgic return to the past) even at the very center of destructive “Intrusions.”⁴⁰ This central exclamation also can be aligned with the fourth layer of the Blood Run title page, the author’s full name, which is similarly composed of four words and seven syllables. The assertive sentiment expressed at the midpoint of the midpoint of the volatile section 3 can thus be aligned with that of the contemporary Indigenous poet. The center of destructive action, in other words, directs attention not only to the constructive beginning of the mound but also to the constructive beginning of Hedge Coke’s text, emphasizing the purposefulness of both the historic earthworks at Blood Run and the contemporary sequence of activist poems that bears their name.

This focus on the potential for new construction and new beginnings reverberates, as well, in the second narrative poem of Blood Run, “When the Animals Leave This Place.” This final poem in the sequence offers a prophetic vision in which the River at the center of the Blood Run site reasserts “its greatest force”: animals seek higher ground, and clouds gather in auspicious forms; the waters of the resultant storm flood the River, which reclaims and, in its reclaiming, remakes and renews the land.⁴¹ Hedge Coke’s description of “gathering clouds” forming “sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants” can be read as an oblique reference to the North American myth of the Earth Diver, in which various animals and birds attempt to retrieve earth from beneath the depths of a flood in order to begin the process of world creation and renewal. Romain hypothesizes that Ohio earthworks built on river floodplains were designed, in fact, to demonstrate the pervasive Earth Diver story:

Imagine, then, the stunning effect during a flood [. . .] as [the mounds] slowly emerged from the surface of a retreating expanse of floodwater. As the [people] looked on, they would have been witness to an ever-expanding bit of earth, slowly gaining in size as the lowering floodwaters revealed more and more of a circular earthwork or burial mound. What better visual metaphor could there be for the creation of the earth, just as told in the Earth Diver myth? (194)

Hedge Coke’s final poem and the larger sequence end at line eighty-nine (the twenty-fourth prime) with the stark phrase “It has begun.” Read as either prophetic warning or celebration of the next turn in this cycle, the three words and four syllables of the final line repeat Hedge Coke’s basic units of measurement for Blood Run as they herald a reclaiming of the land and a new beginning for Indigenous peoples through seeming destruction.

Hedge Coke’s closing emphasis on the renewal of the local—“When the Animals Leave This Place”—extends to the final, nonpoetic components of Blood Run, the two pages of formal acknowledgements and four pages of formal dedications, and ties this emphasis explicitly to her activism on behalf of the Blood Run site. She states in the acknowledgements, “This volume was written in effort to move the state and its citizens to protect, preserve and honor an Indigenous mound site.” More precisely, she reveals that the opening narrative poem, “Before Next Dawning,” “is a version of the author’s oral testimony that urged the State of South Dakota Game Fish & Parks Department to vote unanimously to secure the site after twenty-three years of deliberation” and that “a portion of the proceeds from this volume will go to the preservation of this site” (94).⁴² These remarks, along with the long list of activist poets named in the dedications, effectively reframe “When the Animals Leave This Place,” linking its vision of renewal of the natural world to the unresolved human conflicts in the Americas detailed in the opening poem—“[. . .] lands were overrun in Strangers, settling in, erasing, / erasing. [. . .] Yes, this is a story of Blood Run, of sudden / regional mound culture departure. [. . .] let us not / erase what has happened here before” (8)—and in the persona poems of section 3, “Intrusions”—“So lamentable, what was!” (58).

Similar to Hedge Coke’s Blood Run, Sullivan’s Star Waka orients its readers to view individual poems and the larger poetic sequence from a particular perspective that is culturally and politically situated. Star Waka was published by Auckland University Press and appears to have been designed for a primary audience of New Zealand readers familiar with the basic history of Polynesian voyaging and with basic aspects of Māori culture, including words and phrases in te reo Māori (the Māori language). In contrast to Hedge Coke, Sullivan “launches” readers upon his poetic vessel with relatively little mediation and metacommentary. Before the sequence of one hundred numbered poems begins—while the poetic vessel rests on shore, as it were—Sullivan offers directions for navigating Star Waka’s complex journey through an author’s note that explains the book’s kaupapa (overall plan) in four brief statements. He then offers a ceremony for safe voyaging through an unnumbered opening poem, “He karakia timatanga” (“A beginning prayer” or “A prayer for beginning”), of thirty-two lines. Thus launched, readers are left mostly on their own to notice and to interpret signs provided by the various guidance systems embedded in specific poems—star paths and the shapes of clouds, wave movements and floating debris, the flight patterns of birds—to navigate the poetic waka.⁴³

Following the expected title page, copyright page, and table of contents, Sullivan provides his brief navigational note, in which he makes four explicit statements about the book’s kaupapa, the overt scheme of the sequence’s methodology, themes, and organization. To aid analysis, I have numbered these brief paragraphs:

I wrote Star Waka with some threads to it: that each poem must have a star, a waka or the ocean. This sequence is like a waka, members of the crew change, the rhythm and the view changes—it is subject to the laws of nature.

1

There are three sections, indicated by the change in title numbering from Roman to Arabic to “waka” numbering. Occasionally a poem’s numbering breaks into another part of the sequence.

2

There is a core of one hundred poems, and 2001 lines.

3

For references to Maori mythology see Margaret Orbell’s Encyclopedia of Maori Mythology. Other references are built into the text.

4

At first glance, similar to Hedge Coke’s, Sullivan’s metacommentary appears to provide a comprehensive map for navigating Star Waka. Read against the actual sequence, however, this map turns out to be surprisingly ambiguous and less than complete. In the first statement, for example, Sullivan draws attention to the three terms that organize his sequence—star, waka, and ocean—but offers no explicit rationale for these choices (or for this combination of English- and Māori-language terms) and, notably, no definition for the Māori term waka. An explicit definition does not appear until poem “xvii: Some definitions and a note on orthography”: “in English the waka / is a canoe / but the ancestral waka / were as large / as the European barks / of the eighteenth century explorers” (21). In the second statement, Sullivan draws attention to his three-part numbering system—Roman, Arabic, and “waka”—but again offers no rationale for these choices and no explanation for why the three numbering systems contain different numbers of poems: thirty-four Roman, nineteen Arabic, and forty-seven waka. Do the three systems align with “a star, a waka or the ocean,” the three organizational terms designated for the sequence? Do changes in numbering indicate changes in speaker or changes in temporal, geographical, or cultural positioning? Something else? Sullivan draws attention in this statement, as well, to the fact that there are occasional “breaks” in the three-part numbering sequence, suggesting that a “break” of one numbering system into another will in some way affect meaning. But such breaks in the numbering occur only twice, and in both cases waka numbering from the third section disrupts the Roman numbering of the first. Again, no rationale is given.⁴⁴

In the third statement, Sullivan draws attention to the fact that his sequence, published in 1999, anticipates the turn of the twenty-first century with its “core” of one hundred poems, as well as passing into the second millennium with its 2,001 lines.⁴⁵ These numbers draw attention, as well, to the general significance of numbering and patterning in Star Waka, suggesting a possible link to Blood Run. As we shall see, similar to the numbers Hedge Coke relates in her own explicit metacommentary in her author’s foreword and author’s note, Sullivan’s explicit rationale of one hundred and 2,001 is less than fully adequate for explaining the complex numerical patterning that develops among his individual poems and across his book’s sequence—which, in addition to the “core” of one hundred, includes the unnumbered opening poem located within the pages of the book and a second unnumbered poem printed on the book’s back cover. Although the “total” of 2,001 lines stated in the metacommentary includes the opening poem’s thirty-two, it does not include the cover poem’s fourteen.

Finally, in the fourth statement, Sullivan draws attention to the need for a secondary text to decode allusions to Māori culture made in the sequence. He lists Margaret Orbell’s Encyclopedia of Maori Mythology, a title that does not actually exist.⁴⁶ As noted in chapter 4, Orbell is a preeminent Pakeha scholar of classical Māori texts; she is the author of two encyclopedias, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maori Myth and Legend (1995) and A Concise Encyclopedia of Māori Myth and Legend (1998). These books will be readily available to the primary audience but much less accessible to potential readers outside Aotearoa New Zealand. Sullivan also indicates that additional texts will feature in his poems. Alongside classic works of literature (sonnets by Shakespeare), works of art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (paintings by C. F. Goldie and Peter Robinson), popular culture texts from the twentieth century (the 1969–1971 U.S. children’s television series H. R. Pufnstuf, the 1997 film Boogie Nights), and Internet resources (the NativeNet Listserv), a number of works of scholarship are either quoted, paraphrased, alluded to, or discussed in various poems. These secondary sources include the classic work of anthropology The Maori Canoe by Elsdon Best, originally published in 1925, and the ocean survival guide The Raft Book: Lore of the Sea and Sky by Harold Gatty, published in 1943, as well as more recent scholarship on waka, such as Nga Waka Maori: Maori Canoes by Anne Nelson, published in 1991, and Nga Waka o Nehera: The First Voyaging Canoes by Jeff Evans, published in 1997.⁴⁷ One secondary source, however, is especially generative of the complex patterning developed across Sullivan’s sequence: We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific by David Lewis, originally published in 1972 and reissued in a second edition in 1994. Sullivan refers explicitly to this book in two poems positioned in the third section, “Waka 60: Dead Reckoning” and “Waka 67: from We the Navigators.” But the details of Lewis’s seminal investigation and first-hand account of extant Oceanic navigation techniques are implicit in many other poems. Although Sullivan does not name Lewis or his scientific study in his metacommentary, We, the Navigators is, in fact, an important guide for navigating the systems that structure the elaborate patterning of Star Waka.

Following the brief, four-part note, before the first of the numbered poems, Sullivan begins his poetic text with the unnumbered poem “He karakia timatanga” (“A beginning prayer” or “A prayer for beginning”), composed of thirty-two lines divided into sixteen two-line stanzas. The poem establishes a pattern of bilanguaging movements between Māori and English languages and between Māori and Pakeha (European) cultures that recur across the book. It also enlists powerful imagery that links the landscape of the (mythical) Polynesian homeland, Hawaiiki, to the landscape of the human body.⁴⁸ In addition, two features stand out as especially relevant to how the opening poem formally launches Sullivan’s core of one hundred numbered poems and, similar to Hedge Coke’s layered introductions, establishes a specific perspectival orientation for readers.

First, the poem links the genre announced in its title, karakia (chant or prayer), to the genre of tuki waka (a chant or song used to count time for paddlers). The poem’s opening phrase of English, “A prayer to,” repeats a total of four times in the first half of the thirty-two-line poem; a variation, “A prayer [. . .] / for,” follows in lines seventeen to eighteen, stanza nine, the first stanza of the second half of the poem. The italicized chant in Māori, “hoea hoea ra” (hoea = “to paddle,” “to row,” “to convey by waka”), then repeats four times in the second half of the poem. The poem ends with a second repetition of the phrase “a prayer for” in the final line.⁴⁹ Second, each repetition of the italicized paddling chant in Māori is preceded by a word or phrase in English. The series of associations created across these two-line stanzas moves readers through four elements that emerge as significant to Sullivan’s larger poetic sequence: “the chanted rhythms,” which emphasizes human agency; “storms,” which emphasizes uncontrollable natural forces; “a thousand years,” which emphasizes the passage of time (and, more specifically, Māori tenure in Aotearoa); and “fleet mothers of tales,” which emphasizes the relationship between technology—a group of waka—and the production of story, discourse, mediated experience. The four lines that follow the four stanzas of these elements and the repeated tuki waka end the poem with a bilanguaging emphasis on the potential “combination” of natural forces with human agency and technology that is necessary for successful voyaging:

I greet you in prayer oh star oh waka . . .

and pray for your combination here.

He karakia mo korua, e te waka, e te whetu o te ao nei.

Star and waka, a prayer for you both.⁵⁰

(2)

Taken together, the explicit metacommentary of the note and the more subtle metacommentary of the opening poem launch Sullivan’s core of one hundred numbered poems by positioning readers at sea level, either inside the waka with the crew or outside the waka at parallel points on the ocean or horizon. Like the crew and its observers, readers of Star Waka are oriented to look toward the sky and its guiding stars.

Discussions of Star Waka have focused on Sullivan’s exploration of the term waka itself, which indicates any kind of literal or figurative “vessel” but signifies most preeminently the ocean-voyaging “canoes” that brought Māori adventurers and settlers from central Polynesia to the large islands of Aotearoa.⁵¹ Over the course of his core sequence of one hundred poems, Sullivan reveals the expansiveness of the term’s potential meanings—those historical, those contemporary, and those imagined into possible futures—through multiple strategies: reworkings of relevant oral and literary traditions; citation and critique of authoritative representations of waka, their technologies, and their histories; and personal reflections on contemporary life in New Zealand, the broader Pacific, and a world increasingly interconnected by technology. Toward the end, in preparation for the final poems, Sullivan embeds a minisequence of twelve distinct personas.⁵² Although their combined effect is equally dramatic as that produced by the thirty-seven distinct personas of Blood Run, the twelve persona poems in Star Waka do not offer the most productive juxtaposition with Hedge Coke’s extensive structural patterning. Rather, it is Sullivan’s similar evocation of a worldview and spatial conceptual system that can be divided into upper, middle, and lower worlds that suggest the most provocative intersections with Hedge Coke’s schematic structuring of Blood Run.

In the Oceanic context, these three worlds correspond to the positions of Sullivan’s key terms “star,” “waka,” and “ocean.” The poem “Waka 16: Kua wheturangitia koe” (You have appeared above the horizon), for instance, which is the first of the two “waka” poems that “break” into the section of Roman numbering, indicates Oceanic systems of star navigation in its title and, in its closing lines, directs attention to the two earthly locations where stars—which in Polynesian understandings represent not only guiding lights but also guiding ancestors—can still be seen clearly in contemporary times, despite the presence of “machines / [that] lighten blackness” and cause “many stars / [to be] lost in the lightning.” These locations for sighting stars, removed from the threat of light pollution, are designated on land as “from [the] tops of pa”—that is, from fortified Māori villages, which often include earthworks built atop hills or mountains—and at sea as “from [the] middle of ocean,” “from these places stars / meant to be seen can be” (20).⁵³ Similar to Hedge Coke’s description, voiced by Ceremonial Mound, of the civic and spiritual purposes of raised platforms of earth, Sullivan indicates that carved waka located in the “middle of ocean” are positioned in a “middle” place that makes possible significant contact between worlds above and below.

Much of the power of Sullivan’s book-length sequence, similar to that of Hedge Coke’s Blood Run, derives not exclusively from its explicit content but also from its manipulations of poetic form and its high level of structural patterning. Sullivan’s attention to lineation is signaled in the explicit metacommentary of his opening note. But he pays careful attention, as well, to line grouping, indentation, intra- and interlinear white space, punctuation, capitalization, and size and style of typeface within individual poems and across the sequence. These aspects of poetic form, however, do not map easily onto the specific numerical alignments that are significant in Hedge Coke’s own sequence; in line with Sullivan’s commentary, these aspects of form map, instead, onto the technologies and traditions of Oceanic voyaging, especially the systems for Oceanic navigation described in detail in Lewis’s We, the Navigators.

Lewis’s study is driven, in large part, by the two questions that have dominated debates over how to conceptualize and how to value Oceanic voyaging. First, were exploration and settlement “intentional” (as Indigenous traditions assert) or merely “accidental” (as many Western researchers and settler-invaders have assumed)? And second, were voyaging routes “repeatable” (again, as Indigenous traditions assert) or merely the result of “luck” or “guesswork” (again, as many Western researchers and settler-invaders have assumed)?⁵⁴ Lewis’s experiences in the 1960s convinced him—and persuaded many of his readers—of the validity of Indigenous claims. In Star Waka, Sullivan follows Lewis’s lead by evoking the critical concepts of intention and repetition that Lewis examined in his several experiments at sea with contemporary Oceanic navigators, as well as by evoking the critical observation of the regularity of oceanic and celestial movements by which Oceanic peoples navigated the open sea.⁵⁵ Beyond the explicit content of individual poems, Sullivan evokes such regularity more implicitly through regularized variation in the number and length of lines within poems and of stanzaic patterning within, between, and among poems across the sequence.

In several poems Sullivan’s lineation and especially his stanzaic patterning are suggestive of the concept of whakapapa (genealogy) as a Māori and Polynesian epistemology, a technology for organizing knowledge into genealogical “lines.” Whakapapa, as discussed in chapter 4, can be translated into English as both “to recite in proper order” and “to place in layers, one upon another.” These definitions, as well as whakapapa’s less explicit connotation of positioning humans and other entities within webs of narrative interconnections, are evoked in poem “xx: a whakapapa construction.” Sullivan enlarges the amount of white space between the eighteen lines of the poem so that they separate into eighteen distinct stanzas or genealogical “layers,” iconically rendering the organizational methodology of whakapapa on the page. This visual arrangement enhances the semantic impact of the poem and reinforces its primary theme that whakapapa continues to operate as a viable technology for ordering all knowledge.

Most striking in this regard, Sullivan’s core of one hundred poems, divided into three sections through the use of three systems of numbering, includes three poems that are distinctly visual—that is, three poems composed as much (or more) for the eye as for the ear. In poem “Waka 29: waka taua” (“war canoe,” the second of the two waka poems that break into the early section of Roman numbering), and in the untitled “51” and “53,” the visual arrangement of the brief linguistic text of each poem can be apprehended in its own terms, as a meaningful image, prior to as well as in conjunction with each text’s potential semantic meaning or meanings. Similar to several of Hedge Coke’s persona poems written in the collective voice of The Mounds, the arrangement of each of Sullivan’s three visual poems is recognizably figurative and arguably mimetic. More precisely, the linguistic text of each of the three visual poems is arranged into a distinct combination of two primary geometric figures: straight lines and curved arcs. In this way, Sullivan’s three visual poems draw attention to themselves not only individually, since they stand out from the ninety-seven core poems arranged in standard verse patterns of single or double columns, but also collectively, similar to Hedge Coke’s The Mounds poems, since their figures appear related to each other both structurally and thematically. The three visual poems in Star Waka thus form a provocative subset, another minisequence, within Sullivan’s larger sequence of one hundred poems. On their own the visual figures of the three poems represent key aspects of the book’s exploration of waka technology within the context of Polynesian voyaging, especially concepts related to intentional and repeatable Oceanic navigation. Taken together, the three figures demonstrate the flexibility and situated versatility of this Indigenous technology, and they argue for its effectiveness in keeping Indigenous voyagers intact and on course at open sea even when buffeted by unexpected storms.

Where Hedge Coke’s multiply interrelated configurations of basic numerical units and primes evoke the schematic nature of a mapped, cosmically aligned, and “nested” Indigenous city, Sullivan’s three-part visual intertext distills several of his book’s activist assertions and predominant themes into iconic geometric figures that evoke primary tools for Indigenous open-water navigation. Through spacing and parallel syntax, for example, the eleven words that comprise the brief text of “Waka 29: waka taua” (war canoe) are composed into five discernible lines, which are arranged in the upper half of the page as a sine wave form (a pair of side-by-side, inverted, continuous arcs) situated above a diagonal straight line.⁵⁶ These figures “float” above the white space of the lower half of the page (see Figure 12).

The iconic geometric form of the sine wave is printed in a font larger than that used in the ninety-seven nonvisual poems in the book’s core. The form is composed of the poem’s first four lines, with the first and second lines, “A taniwha / brushes the sides,” arranged as the “upper,” convex arc of the sine wave, and the third and fourth lines, “uenuku / touches the eyes,” arranged as the corresponding “lower,” concave arc. The fifth line, “waka pitches,” is printed in a font that is noticeably larger than that used in the first four, and it is arranged as a diagonal straight line running at a forty-five degree angle below the second, concave arc. The diagonal line is positioned so that it points to and perhaps suggests an intersection with the word “uenuku” in the third line.

The poem’s arrangement as a sine wave (two arcs) and a diagonal straight line creates a highly abstracted visual figure of a swell or rolling ocean wave “pitching” a single-hulled waka. Sullivan thus places the viewer/reader at sea level, as though aboard a second vessel, watching the waka’s “pitched” encounter with waves. The sine wave also can suggest other forms of regular movement, such as sound, potentially playing on an alternate meaning of “pitches,” and light, potentially playing on the Polynesian figure of Uenuku, a man whom the gods transformed into a rainbow—that is, a man transformed into light passing through droplets of rain, mist, spray, dew, or other forms of water—and whose name has come to mean rainbow, itself an iconic arc.⁵⁷ Within the context of Oceanic voyaging, the sine wave form can suggest, as well, the sinuous body of a taniwha, a water-dwelling creature that is understood both as a “spirit” able to assume multiple physical manifestations and as a fantastic sea or freshwater “monster.” In either conception a taniwha is often described as a protective guardian, which underlines Sullivan’s suggestion that the waka is under control and protected rather than in peril. Orbell emphasizes this aspect of taniwha in A Concise Encyclopedia of Māori Myth and Legend:

Taniwha: Spirits in the water. These beings live in the ocean and the inland waters, and some can move through the earth. Most are associated with humans, because every people have a taniwha of their own. Many famous taniwha arrived from Hawaiki, generally as guardians of ancestral waka, then settled down in Aotearoa with the descendents of the crew of the vessel they had escorted. (149)

In “Waka 29” the expected relative positioning of taniwha and uenuku is inverted in the visual poem’s mimetic figure of a waka “pitching” at sea. The taniwha, a spirit-creature associated with water (and thus with the abstracted position below), forms a segment of the convex arc of the sine wave (positioning it above), while uenuku, a transformed person-spirit and an optical phenomenon associated with the sky (and thus with the abstracted position above), forms a segment of the concave arc of the sine wave (positioning it below). According to some Māori traditions, the spirit of the transformed Uenuku was brought to Aotearoa on board the Tainui waka within a sacred stone.⁵⁸ Sullivan’s inversion of expected above and below positions draws additional attention to the action depicted by the textual figure: the upward “pitch” of the waka appears to have been caused by the rising taniwha “brush[ing] the [waka’s] sides,” which in turn has resulted in uenuku descending to “touch[ ] the eyes” of the waka crew and/or sea-level observers. Rather than a scene of oceanic calamity as might be imagined by Western researchers or settler-invaders—a small vessel attacked by fierce creatures or wracked by the waves of a menacing storm—the verbs in these lines indicate the gentle “brush” of a guardian companion and the light “touch” of a guardian spirit. That the waka figured in the poem points directly toward uenuku, the man become a rainbow become a traveling spirit, may indicate an emphasis on the theme of voyaging as both continuity (carrying the Polynesian past into the Māori future) and transformation (literally changing worlds and becoming a distinct people). Less expectedly, perhaps, the potential intersection of waka and uenuku may invoke the biblical story of the Great Flood, a connection that exposes potential in the poem for multiple levels of visual and aural punning and for bilanguaging between Māori and English linguistic elements and Māori and Pakeha cultures. As related in the book of Genesis, God creates the rainbow (an arc) as the sign (read sine) of His promise to Noah and his family aboard the ark (a primal waka) that never again will He send a deluge (read above-and-below-inverting, waka-pitching sine wave) to destroy creation. The “touch” of uenuku, in other words, signals vitality and survival.

Sullivan’s poem “51” similarly evokes ideas of “above” and “below” worlds. Here, the two arcs and diagonal straight line of “Waka 29” are reconfigured into the iconic geometric figure of a circle bisected into upper and lower halves by a horizontal straight line (see Figure 13). Similar to “Waka 29,” “51” is printed in a font that is larger than that of the core’s ninety-seven nonvisual poems. Also similar to “Waka 29,” eleven words comprise its brief text; these are composed into three lines, which are arranged into the figure of a split, open circle. Although the figure is literally two-dimensional, its open arrangement is suggestive of three-dimensionality. Centered on the vertical axis of the page and positioned slightly above center of the horizontal axis, the figure of the open, bisected circle appears to “float” within (white) space like a celestial orb. The first line, “Uenuku Bird Flight,” is arranged as the upper, convex arc of the implied circle/orb. The second line, “Waka Light Dark Shift,” is arranged as a horizontal straight line that runs through the center of the implied circle/orb, measuring its full diameter. And the third line, “Leaf Ocean Ocean Mist,” is arranged as the lower, concave arc. The arcs that should form the left and right sides of the implied circle/orb are blank white space, their shapes suggested by the mirrored curves of the upper and lower arcs and by the beginning and end points of the bisecting center line.

A number of interpretations are possible for the geometric figure created in “51.” Viewed from a cosmic perspective, as noted, the figure of a bisected, open circle is suggestive of a celestial orb, a planet or globe.⁵⁹ In this interpretation the bisecting center line functions as an equator, whereas the upper and lower arcs suggest a planet’s northern and southern poles. Viewed as an abstract model for our own, watery planet—perhaps especially as an abstract model for our world conceived from the perspective of Oceania—the bisecting line becomes a horizon dividing the dome of the sky from the bowl of the sea. The line “Waka Light Dark Shift” supports the idea of a horizon line and evokes, as well, versions of the Māori story of creation in which Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother, are separated from their marital embrace by their son Tāne, god of forests and birds and father of humankind, who pushes the cosmic parents apart, allowing light to stream into the world, which becomes te ao mārama, “the world of light.”⁶⁰ And viewed from above, from an aerial perspective, the bisected circle can suggest the figure of a compass, itself an abstract model for our world. This compass need not be conceived as the magnetic variety but as a star compass, wind compass, solar compass, or compass based on currents, all of which are part of Oceanic systems for open-water navigation investigated and confirmed by Lewis in We, the Navigators and all of which Sullivan evokes within other poems in the Star Waka sequence.⁶¹

In addition to reconfiguring the two arcs and single straight line of “Waka 29,” “51” repeats two words from the earlier poem: “Uenuku” and “Waka.” As in the first configuration, in the second these Māori words are positioned in close proximity to each other, suggesting their significant relationship. In “51,” Uenuku, the man transformed into a rainbow, is restored to the expected above position within the convex arc; moreover, he is aligned in this sky world with the phrase “Bird Flight.” If we return to the biblical story of the Great Flood, we can note that the use of “arcs” in both poems suggests an aural pun on “ark,” the waka Noah constructs and then captains in order to save his family—and the world’s animals—from the deluge.⁶² The rainbow becomes God’s perennial promise of no future flood of devastating proportions. The specific sign for Noah and his crew that the waters have receded and dry land again exists—the sign that, indeed, there has been a “shift” in worldly circumstances—is not the rainbow, however, but rather the dove that returns to the ark bearing an olive branch in “leaf.” In poem “51” we can correlate these details from the biblical story with the phrase “Bird Flight,” positioned alongside the iconic rainbow in the convex “upper” arc, and “Leaf,” positioned directly across the circle from “Bird Flight” in the concave “lower” arc. In this reading, Sullivan’s figure of the bisected circle represents the immediately postdiluvian moment, man as vital survivor still aboard the sacred vessel, his “shifted” world washed new and made full of potential for new life.⁶³

Sullivan’s arrangements of “Uenuku,” “Bird Flight,” and “Leaf” along the arcs of the visual poem’s implied circle/orb do not require interpretation within the context of biblical allusion. The positioning of “Bird Flight” across the circle from “Leaf” is equally suggestive of Māori mythology (as Orbell emphasizes, Tāne is god of both forests—and thus leaves—and birds) and of Oceanic systems of voyaging, especially techniques for open-water navigation during daylight.⁶⁴ At sea both birds in flight and leaves carried by currents can be read as signs indicating the presence and position of nearby land. In We, the Navigators, Lewis points out that navigating on the open ocean during daylight hours—when stars and other celestial bodies with predictable paths across the sky are no longer visible—requires the processing of multiple kinds of available data (84, 99). Leaves and other drift objects can signal the presence of land (211), and the flight paths of various bird species at morning and evening—at the “Light Dark Shift” of dawn and dusk—can indicate the specific position of a nearby land mass (163).⁶⁵ In poem “51” Uenuku is positioned directly across the implied circle/orb from the word “Mist.” Within the context of voyaging, both meteorological phenomena indicate varying levels of visibility at sea. But the specific pairing also can invoke the full story of Uenuku’s transformation: because of his overwhelming love for Hine-pūkohurangi, the Celestial Mist Maiden, the Polynesian gods took pity on Uenuku in his old age (when he had become physically bent like an arc) and allowed him to join the Mist in the sky world as the rainbow.⁶⁶ Thus, all four elements balanced on intersecting axes that cross the visual poem’s geometric figure of an implied circle or orb—Uenuku, Bird Flight, Leaf, and Mist—can be read within a specifically Oceanic as well as a specifically biblical context. Like “Waka 29,” “51” demonstrates Sullivan’s playful and productive bilanguaging across Māori and English languages and Indigenous Polynesian and Western settler cultures.

Oceanic voyaging is the apparent context for the second reconfiguration of arcs and straight lines that Sullivan creates in his third visual poem, “53” (see Figure 14). The fourteen words of this poem’s linguistic text are composed into ten discernible lines, which are arranged into a complex figure of three small circular “islands” and four horizontal entities that “float” in the sea either between or near them. Similar to the geometric figures created in “Waka 29” and “51,” the six lines that comprise the three “islands” in “53” are printed in a font that is larger than that of the ninety-seven nonvisual poems in the book’s core. The four horizontal lines that create the figure’s four floating entities, however, are printed in the smaller font used in the majority of the text. Also similar to “Waka 29” and “51,” the visual figure created in “53” is positioned in the upper half of the page, above an expanse of white space. The overall effect of the figure is to suggest an overhead view of an abstracted Oceania, an aerial map depicting a range of entities—an object, a creature, and two human personae—situated at various locations within a “sea of islands.”⁶⁷

Each of the three island figures is composed of a tightly closed, two-line circle; each of these lines consists of a single word, “island,” which is bowed into a small arc. Unlike the arcs that form the sine wave in “Waka 29” or the bisected circle in “51,” these one-word arcs are set on the diagonal, with the effect of deemphasizing their separateness and emphasizing, instead, the complete circle of the “repeating” island-island. If we read the figure of the aerial map from top to bottom, the text of the poem begins with the first two-line “island / island,” set to the left of center, followed by the first one-word horizontal straight line, the persona “no-man,” which sits close by to the right of the first island, at roughly center page. The second two-line “island / island” then sits to the right of and below “no-man.” Next, the second one-word horizontal straight line, the creature “whale,” is positioned below and to the left of the second island. The third two-line “island / island” sits close by, below and to the left of “whale,” positioned almost directly beneath the first island. The third one-word horizontal straight line, the persona “Robert,” sits to the right of the third island. And finally, the longer, five-word fourth horizontal straight line, the described object “carved shaped loved floating totara,” sits directly below the third line, so that the word “shaped” aligns directly below “Robert.”

This figurative “map” of an object, a creature, and two personae floating in a sea of three islands evokes numerous specific puns, allusions, and internal and extratextual references. Perhaps most obvious is the first island’s and first persona’s pun on Donne’s often-quoted line “no man is an island, entire of itself” from his 1623 “Meditation 17.”⁶⁸ This line may also allude to adventurer Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops; the clever Greek, who speaks in Star Waka as one of the twelve personae near the end of the sequence, fooled the one-eyed giant by claiming his name was “no man.” The proximity of the creature “whale” to the third island can suggest Whale Island, also known as Moutohora (sometimes rendered Motuhora), located in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, off the coast and visible from the town of Whakatane, whose name records an important event from the era of Polynesian voyaging to Aotearoa.⁶⁹ For bilingual readers this association can evoke not only one of the Māori words for whale, tohorā (specifically, the southern right whale) but also the Māori words for “island,” motu, which means “isolated,” “cut off,” “separated,” and moutere (or motutere), which suggests, as well, the condition of drifting, floating, or swimming (tere = “to drift,” “to float,” “to swim,” “to flow”). Although Whale Island/Moutohora has a long history of Māori occupancy and use, within recent history it has been protected, through a partnership between its customary Māori caretakers and the New Zealand government, as a refuge for indigenous wildlife. Perhaps this “floating” “whale / island / island” (two arcs) represents a bicultural reconfiguration of the biblical “arks” and Indigenous “arcs” evoked in “Waka 29” and “51.” Bilingual and bicultural readers may think of the story of the famous Māori ancestor Paikea, whose waka was destroyed and who then traveled to Aotearoa on the back of a whale, and they may note, too, that whales (such as Paikea’s) can be understood as manifestations of taniwha. According to Orbell, “On the ocean, taniwha often appear in the form of a whale or large shark” (150). Thus, “53’s” reconfiguration of the arcs and straight line of “Waka 29” can be read as repeating and reconfiguring this element, as well.

The most intriguing specific feature of the figure of the aerial map in “53” is the persona “Robert,” whose name implies the author Sullivan. His positioning directly above the word “shaped” in the final line, which describes the object of a “carved shaped loved floating totara,” strongly suggests that the persona and the object are meant to be viewed—and read—as a single unit. The totara is a tree native to Aotearoa often used in carving and in the making of waka; moreover, totara can be used figuratively to indicate a waka. “Robert” is thus positioned as aboard this vessel. In his opening note, Sullivan states that “this sequence [of poems] is like a waka,” and indeed, many individual poems support this idea explicitly or implicitly. The position of “Robert” directly above “shaped” suggests his specific role in the production of this totara, this waka, this sequence of poems: not “creating” the sequence out of nothing, like some originary cosmic force, but rather “shaping” material found within communal, familial, and personal histories. We may note here, as well, that the sequence of four adjectives that precede totara in the final line include three completed actions—“carved,” “shaped,” “loved”—and one action that is continuous—“floating.” We have arrived, once again, at the theme of vital survival.

If we read the aerial map of “53” only in terms of these specific pairings—which potentially move us through ancient Greek and British voyaging, Polynesian migration, and Māori poetic production—we will have missed the overall effect of the visual poem’s complex figure. That there are three small “islands” in the figure (rather than two or four or some other number) can be read as corresponding to the three main islands of Aotearoa: Te Ika A Maui (the North Island), Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island), and Rangiura (Stewart Island). The three islands are not arranged on the page into the relative positions of the islands of Aotearoa, however, but rather into the shape of a triangle. This triangle might suggest, in highly abstract terms, the so-called Polynesian triangle, the points of which indicate the northernmost, easternmost, and southernmost extents of Polynesian migration and settlement: the islands of Hawai’i, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and Aotearoa. The positioning of the various floating entities, however, especially of “Robert” and the “totara,” suggest that such a reading is at best partial. Rather than a specific map, the figure may point attention, instead, to the Oceanic navigation system described in We, the Navigators as “dead reckoning.” Dead reckoning refers to a system of provisional positioning—a system of conceptual models for visualizing one’s position on the open sea—by which a navigator takes account of currents, winds, storms, and other factors that may have thrown his waka off its intended course (see Lewis, chapter 4).⁷⁰ In this reading, the visual poem “53” and, perhaps, the visual poem “51,” as well, functions to conceptualize and visualize the poetic sequence thus far in order to take critical measurement of its location and, if necessary, to reorient Star Waka at roughly the midpoint of its core of one hundred poems and 2,001 lines.

The precise midpoint of Star Waka can be measured in more than one way, depending on whether one counts poems or lines. In terms of the declared core of one hundred poems, the midpoint occurs in the white space between poems “50” and “51,” whereas if we take into account the 101 poems listed in the table of contents (the enumerated core plus the unnumbered opening poem, “He karakia timatanga”), the midpoint occurs at poem “50”: fifty poems precede it, and fifty follow. A further complication, however, is the additional unnumbered poem printed on the back cover of Star Waka, “A Cover Sail,” which brings the total to 102. If this final poem is included, the midpoint now occurs in the white space between poems “51” and “52.” Sullivan announces in his opening note that precisely 2,001 lines appear between his book’s covers. (Recall that this number includes the lines that compose the one hundred core poems plus the lines of the unnumbered opening poem.) Based on Sullivan’s 2,001 lines, the midpoint of Star Waka occurs at line eighteen in poem “52”: 1,000 lines precede this line, and 1,000 lines follow.

Poem “52” is situated between the visual poems “51” and “53” with their iconic figures of a waka positioned within a planetary orb or compass and a waka positioned among other floating entities within a sea of islands. In the more conventionally lyric poem “52,” the speaker explicitly positions himself in relation to Karetu, his mother’s home village near the Bay of Islands in the north of Aotearoa’s North Island.⁷¹ In a subtle pun on the Oceanic navigational technique of dead reckoning, the speaker asserts that his maternal homeland was “planted” in him by his mother’s “stories” of deceased elders and ancestors. It is this oral tradition, appropriated into the speaker’s sense of self through years of listening, absorbing, remembering, and retelling—this reckoning of the dead—that insures his repeated reorientation toward the whanau (extended family) and his repeated return to the homeland.⁷² The structure of the poem supports and enhances this message in the way that it subtly emphasizes the concepts of centering and balance. The thirty lines of the poem, which correspond to Sullivan’s age at the time of writing, are divided into seven stanzas of unequal lengths.⁷³ These can be arranged into at least two related symmetries. The first symmetry emphasizes two halves to the poem and divides the stanzas into two sets, each with a total of fifteen lines: a first set of five stanzas divided into line groupings of four, three, three, two, and three and a second set of two stanzas divided into line groupings of twelve and three. The second symmetry emphasizes a more complex four-part organization. In the first half of the poem, a set of four stanzas totaling twelve lines, divided into groupings of four, three, three, and two, is followed by a single stanza of three lines, for a total of fifteen; this pattern is repeated with variation in the second half of the poem, where a single stanza of twelve lines is followed by a single stanza of three lines, again for a total of fifteen.

This second symmetry, especially, emphasizes the poem’s thematic content and movement. The first set of twelve lines, organized as four stanzas, introduces the theme of visiting the familial and tribal home of Karetu; the three-line stanza that immediately follows then introduces the theme of the significant relationship between belonging to a place and having heard and appropriated its stories as one’s own: “but my mother is from Karetu / and that is how I know the place / through all the stories she’s told me.” The second set of twelve lines, organized as a single stanza, joins these themes in its first ten lines by briefly cataloging the stories told by the speaker’s mother, each of which is marked by the prepositions “like” or “about,” and then reemphasizes the conjunction of the themes in its final two lines: “that’s why I go back because of my mother / who planted Karetu in me.” The final three-line stanza links the poem to the book’s larger themes related to waka and tribal ancestors but also links directly to the three-line stanza at the end of the first half of the poem: “not just because of my ancestors / buried in the cemetery and the cave nearby / whose waka navigated to the soil there.” These lines could directly follow the earlier three, without the intervening catalog of stories, and still make sense. The speaker resists a biological essentialism and asserts the importance of cultural memory and oral traditions in defining personal identity.

Line eighteen of poem “52,” the precise midpoint of Star Waka’s 2,001 lines, is part of the catalog of specific stories told by the mother and now recalled in the speaker’s own voice: “about Nanny Pu who lived to be over a hundred.”⁷⁴ The line begins with the preposition “about,” linking it to the mother’s stories. It ends with the phrase “over a hundred,” the grandmother’s age, which also can refer to the number of poems in the Star Waka sequence. Between “about” and “over a hundred,” the line’s reference to Nanny Pu can suggest the well-known whakataukī (saying, proverb) ka pu te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi (the old net lies in a heap, the new net goes fishing). The whakataukī indicates how the younger generation takes up the responsibilities of its elders and carries the community forward through its own actions. In “52,” readers witness the thirty-year-old speaker taking up his mother’s role as the teller of the family stories that link them all to the ancestral homeland at Karetu. It is yet another iteration of the themes of continuance and vital survival. Although the book is organized around elements of historic Polynesian voyaging and migration, “star,” “waka,” and “ocean,” the precise midpoint of the sequence returns the speaker—and readers—to the settled land of Aotearoa and to the stories that shore up contemporary identities defined as Māori.

Flanking the precise midpoint of Star Waka, Sullivan’s poems “51” and “53” manifest Oceanic navigational techniques for visualizing the position of the waka at sea so that necessary corrections can be made to keep the vessel on course. An additional technique for handling these “waka pitches” is demonstrated in the poem “Waka 74: Sea anchor,” positioned roughly three-quarters of the way through the sequence.⁷⁵ Sullivan writes:

In storms the waka would lower

a sea anchor halfway to help control

the vessel. In a way this poem

is a sea anchor. We are waiting

for a storm to pass, one preventing

control of the narrative.⁷⁶

(83)

Having regained control in poems “Waka 75” and “Waka 76,” Sullivan’s speaker moves first toward the minisequence of persona poems (wakas 84 to 90 and 92 to 96) and then on to the final four poems in the core of one hundred. “Waka 97” returns to the potent combination of a prayer for the waka crew paired with the italicized tuki waka—“hoea hoea ra,” again repeated four times—created in “He karakia timatanga,” the unnumbered opening poem. “Waka 98” allows the speaker’s own waka, this sequence of poems, to respond to the vexed question, “when will you stop tasting the wind?” In an italicized voice the waka replies, “when the wind relinquishes its salt taste / then like my ancient cousins I will turn to stone / and stay here forever” (108). “Waka 99” explicitly links the “resurrection” of ancient waka turned to stone and otherwise rendered dormant with the “resurrection” of the Māori nation, a theme that has been developed across the sequence.⁷⁷ “Waka 100,” the final poem in Sullivan’s core and one of its longest at sixty-eight lines divided into eleven stanzas, then closes the sequence by positioning the book’s meditation on waka of the past, present, and possible future within distinctive European and Māori conceptions of time.

The first half of Sullivan’s “Waka 100” functions similarly to Hedge Coke’s opening narrative poem, “Before Next Dawning,” in its panoramic overview of Indigenous–settler contact—here, in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the opening seven lines, Sullivan reorients orthodox contact history from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European technology of the bark to the transhistoric Oceanic technology of the waka, emphasizing Indigenous rather than settler agency and creating an account that is distinctly Māori:

Stroke past line 1642

into European time.

Stroke past 1769

and the introduction of the West.

Stroke on the approach to 1835

and formal Northern Maori sovereignty.

Stroke into the New World and stop.⁷⁸

(110)

The second half of “Waka 100,” however, functions more similarly to Hedge Coke’s closing narrative poem, “When the Animals Leave This Place,” in its prophetic look toward the possibility of future worlds:

And you, Urizen, Jupiter, Io Matua Kore,

holder of the compasses—

wind compass, solar compass,

compass encompassing known

currents, breather of the first breath

in every living creature,

guide the waka between islands,

between years and eyes of the Pacific

out of mythologies to consciousness.⁷⁹

But in contrast to Hedge Coke’s vision of the River’s highly localized cycle of world renewal and the reclamation of specific geographic sites, Sullivan’s “Waka 100,” whose number indicates the new century, imagines a Māori world extending beyond known conceptions of both time and space. When Sullivan writes in the seventh stanza that “we ask our ancestors to wake, / [. . .] our ancestors of a culture / that has held its breath / through the age of Dominion,” it is in preparation not for the reclamation of specific territory but rather for his speaker’s exhortations for temporal and spatial expansion. In the first six lines of the eleventh and closing stanza of “Waka 100,” Sullivan’s speaker exhorts “you stars, the ancestors” to “burn brilliantly” on waka from the present and the past. But in the seventh and final line (line sixty-eight of the poem “Waka 100” and line 2,001 of the larger sequence), the speaker exhorts these same stars and ancestors to “burn on waka past the end of the light” (112). The final phrase indicates time and space beyond te ao mārama, “the world of light,” the known configuration of our contemporary world situated between Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother. This vision of Indigenous culture and technology continues far beyond the local. This vision of Oceanic voyaging extends beyond the Earth’s sea of islands into the cosmos and into futures unknown.⁸⁰

Vital Indigenous survival, and the possibilities of other voyages, indeed.

Hedge Coke’s and Sullivan’s book-length sequences of poems disrupt the typical coding, within dominant discourses, of construction and trade, exploration and migration, and intentional system and complex and repeatable pattern as “superior” activities that distinguish (civilized) “settlers” from (savage) “Natives.” Similar to the star map in Ceremony, the earthworks in Blood Run and the waka in Star Waka represent Indigenous technologies that aid in resistance to various “destroyers” and that guide users toward Indigenous resurgence.

The particular emphasis Hedge Coke and Sullivan place on Indigenous technologies for settlement is also not without precedent. Twenty-five years before Silko published her novel Ceremony and a half century before Hedge Coke and Sullivan published their turn-of-the-twenty-first-century sequences of poems, a prominent U.S. American Indian intellectual and a prominent New Zealand Māori intellectual each published a nonfiction book of history and anthropology similarly focused on revealing the complex patterns of Indigenous exploration, migration, trade, and settlement. They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian by D’Arcy McNickle and The Coming of the Maori by Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) were both published in 1949, in the wake of the demographic upheavals of World War II and on the eve of the many social changes that would continue to accelerate for Indigenous peoples in the United States and in Aotearoa across the decade of the 1950s.⁸¹ Moreover, McNickle and Buck produced their substantial works not exclusively for specialist scholars but rather for broader audiences of educated readers, including educated Indigenous readers.⁸² Like the early twenty-first-century “creative” and “imaginative” works produced by Hedge Coke and Sullivan, these mid-twentieth-century “scientific” and “factual” works were meant to be widely accessible.

As expected within their fields of expertise, McNickle and Buck each surveys scientific evidence and analyzes historical data. Each demonstrates as well, however, an explicit literariness: storytelling conventions and imaginative techniques that build interest and drama; a subjective, insider’s perspective; a narrative voice that is often surprisingly personal.⁸³ Perhaps most striking is the coincidence that each Indigenous intellectual anchors the magisterial title of his work with a different form of the verb to come. There is a potentially sharp distinction to be drawn between the declarative sense of completion created by McNickle’s simple past tense, They Came Here First, and the dynamic sense of process created by Buck’s gerund, The Coming of the Maori. Each author’s invocation of epic, however, which is explicit in McNickle but equally present in the grand syntax offered by Buck, suggests a shared commitment to not simply recount the historical settlement of Indigenous peoples but to record in detail how they became a distinct people and, thus, to herald the heroic founding of distinctive Indigenous nations.⁸⁴ This is a commitment Hedge Coke and Sullivan will advance, too, a half century later.

My point is not to argue that McNickle’s and Buck’s works of nonfiction prose provide direct antecedents for the poetry produced by Hedge Coke and Sullivan, as tempting as that argument is for establishing a continuity of Indigenous intellectual traditions and artistic practices across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. There are too many differences in the personal visions, experiences, and commitments of the four writers, too many differences in their historical, social, and political contexts, too many differences in the scope and emphases of their respective careers. Rather, my point is that despite these significant differences, McNickle’s and Buck’s works of history and anthropology share with Hedge Coke’s and Sullivan’s dramatic sequences of poems an implicit interest in defining Indigenous identities as the result of ancient and ongoing processes of making, trading, moving—in a word, of be-coming or coming into being. The “literary” aspects of the earlier set of works, especially—what their contemporary reviewers called the “speculative” and “imaginative” sections of McNickle’s and Buck’s factual studies—work similarly to Hedge Coke’s and Sullivan’s efforts to decolonize dominant, orthodox scholarship on Indigenous technologies and settlement by actively revivifying the Indigenous past and by linking that vital past to an ongoing Indigenous present and to possible Indigenous futures. This emphasis, this strong belief in the persistence and resurgence of Indigenous peoples and cultures within the context of contemporary politics, represents a significant continuity of Indigenous intellectual traditions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

One can only speculate that had they lived to see the “new worlds” of the twenty-first century and the second millennium, McNickle and Buck would have heralded Hedge Coke’s and Sullivan’s efforts to defy orthodox scholarship and to disrupt dominant metaphors that continue, in our own era, to ignore Indigenous knowledges and to subsume and erase Indigenous histories within settler constructions. Like their younger counterparts, McNickle and Buck responded to the settler’s situated nostalgia of “So lamentable” with the defiant exclamation, “what was!”