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Heid E. Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) poemeo “Pre-Occupied” begins with Langston Hughes reciting an excerpt from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in which he says “I’ve known rivers:/ Ancient, dusky rivers./ My soul has grown deep like the rivers” (0:13- 0:19). These stanzas open against a backdrop of St. Anthony’s Falls in the Twin Cities and Hughes’ refrain repeats as an undercurrent for the rest of the film. Just as this refrain is an auditory motif, the visual motif of a spiral proliferates throughout the poemeo. Its first enactments appears with the manipulation of the opening stanzas “river river river/ I never never never/ etched your spiral icon in limestone” (0:25- 0:37). These words create a spiral on a rusted door while the camera parallels this structure as it rotates alongside the words. Bernardin explains that “in its structure and significance, the spiral in Ojibwe territories communicates the dynamic copresence, or simultaneity of past and present time” (44). Copresence and simultaneity are vital aspects for Erdrich’s poemeo and allow her to reference specific geographic spaces such as the Twin Cities, Alcatraz, and Wall Street in this contemporary moment, the 20th century, and precontact America.
For Erdrich, the river is what allows this simultaneity to exist. As spirals proliferate against a cosmic blue background that then transforms into the shape of the river, still populated with white glowing particles (stars? souls?), Erdrich says “river river river Our river/ Map of the Milky Way/ reflection of stars/ whence all life commenced” (2:13-2:22). Expanding the temporal scale to consider the beginning of all life and expanding the geographic scope to a planetary one, Erdrich ruptures normative ideas about the interconnectivity of time and place. There is no distance between the moment of planetary origin and the contemporary in which people are “simply distracted by sulfide emissions tar sands pipelines foster/care polar bears hydro-fracking” (1:48- 1:56). These stanzas overlay an artistic rendition of an oversaturated highway in the Twin Cities, bisected by an image that depicts the motion of the river and its banks devoid of skyscrapers, highways, and artificial light. Demanding viewers to consider the multilayered occupations of space and time, Erdrich relies on the river to ground this temporal copresence.
Referencing the Occupy movement, the poemeo shuffles backwards and forwards in time, reimagining the Twin Cities’ Occupy movement that “pitched their tents on cement/ near your banks” in Indigenous terms by overlaying traditional wigwams on top of colorful plastic tents that housed the Occupy protestors (0:40). The persistence of the riverbank makes this temporal simultaneity possible.
Elsewhere in the poemeo, questions about occupation similarly transcend the distinction between past and present. In Max Fleischer’s Superman animation, the “Mad Scientist we comprehend as indigenous/ [who] has lost his signifiers (no braids, no blanket)” tells Clark Kent “…I still say Manhattan/ rightfully belongs to my people” to which Clark Kent responds “Possibly but just what/ do you expect us to do about it?” (3:08-3:12). Answering Superman, Erdrich says : “Occupy Occupy Worked for the 99/ Occupy Re-occupy Alcatraz and Wounded Knee” (3:12-3:20). In shifting the temporal register to reposition settler colonialism as an enduring occupation, Erdrich tests the word “occupy” against the Occupy Movement, the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, and the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973. For these latter Indigenous movements, “occupy” is not quite the right articulation. Rather the imperative is to “re-occupy” spaces that were originally inhabited by Indigenous people, reclaimed as such in the wake of settler colonialism, and in these examples, brutally contained by the settler nation-state. Erdrich asserts Indigenous peoples’ claim to this land prior to and in the wake of European contact. With this simultaneous temporality, Erdrich emphasizes the irony of the Occupy Movement as one that is situated on colonized land.
In this moment, Erdrich also rearticulates who constitutes the one percent and ninety-nine percent. While class is the significant division for the Occupy Movement, Erdrich recontextualizes these statistics in terms of Indigenous peoples’ survivance. In “Notes of Pre-Occupied Digression” at the end of the poemeo, Erdrich notes that “descendants of the Indigenous population of the U.S. remain just a tad less than 1% of the population according to the 2010 census. If you add Native Hawaiians to the total we are 1.1% of the population. So, we are, more or less, the original 1% as well as the original 100%” (3:58- 4:10). Erdrich recontextualizes the Occupy Movement to criticize both the space in which this movement inhabited and the parameters for whom the movement speaks. She asserts a temporal and spatial continuity from precontact America to the present, centering around the banks of St. Anthony’s Falls and urges her viewers to map the injustices that the Occupy Movement articulates back onto the settler colonial occupation of Indigenous space.
Persistence rears its head in other moments of the poemeo, especially when a portrait of Erdrich by her sister frames Erdrich as, in Bernardin’s words “the Land O’Lakes butter girl: twin braids, buckskin, headband” (47). This caricature of Erdrich says “no time no hours no decade no millennia./ No I cannot dump cans of creamed corn/ and turkey on noodles and offer forth/ sustenance again” (1:26- 1:37). While Erdrich herself did not exist in this historical moment when Indigenous peoples first offered of sustenance to colonizers, this does not preclude her from refusing to make this gesture “again” as contemporary settlers expect and require sustenance from Indigenous peoples: “bake a casserole—send pizza—make soup for the 99%” (1:07-1:11). Here, the endurance of settler colonialism is conveyed both audially and visually. The continuity of settler occupation on Indigenous lands is framed in terms of the pervasive Thanksgiving myth. Situated in a library where two bookshelves frame her, Erdrich poses as an overwrought stereotype of an Indigenous person relegated to a space of research and archives, rather than as a being who exists in the world today. Hence Erdrich troubles Western ideas of linear temporality that has always wishfully imagined Indigenous peoples on the brink of extinction, relegated to museum spaces and archival statuses (Obrien).
Despite forging temporal simultaneity between precontact America, resistance movements in the 20th century, and contemporary movements, and despite the planetary geographic scale of the poemeo, Erdrich grounds this repositioned worldview as a “water view” in the sense Yazzie and Baldy articulate. These scholars offer “a worldview [that] is ‘water view’ a view from the river not a view of the river” (2). For Erdrich, a water view is not only a view “from the river” but it is a view from a specific river, the Mississippi. As the video propels downward from the Milky Way through the Earth’s atmosphere, passing through clouds and hovering above partitioned farmlands, Erdrich says “river in the middle Mississippi/ not the East Coast Hudson where this all started” (2:29- 2:37). Erdrich refuses to amend her narrative, her position of history and space, to accommodate the settler colonial figuration of time and space which imagines the beginning of their nation-state in the East Coast, in the Hudson specifically, where boats docked upon American shores. For Erdrich, the centering force of this poemeo and of life itself is the Mississippi River. Just as the myth of Thanksgiving reimagines history in terms designed by settlers, repositioning the East Coast as a geographic center only makes sense if Europe is an extension of this space, something Erdrich refuses.
With this negotiation of time, Erdrich oscillates between atemporality “no time no hours no decade no millennia” and temporal copresence “all time all hours all decades all millennia” (1:26- 1:29; 3:36- 3:40). How are these seemingly oppositional articulations of time possible for Erdrich? Perhaps the answer lies in the word “digression” since it demands that viewers negotiate what to categorize as a digression when considering temporal copresence. Immediately after claiming that she has “too much time,” Erdrich returns to the river: “flow flow flow both ways story-history-story/ there’s a river that considers us after all” (3:26- 3:35). Emphasizing the “story” contained within history, the prefix “his” flashes on and off the screen; the question of what constitutes truth, and what truth gets recorded as history, comes into focus. The emphasis on “story” here brings the poemeo back to “digression”; for settlers, Indigenous peoples’ history and survivance is a digression for their nation building mythos; for Erdrich, digressions constitute the stories categorized as history because of temporal copresence.
While “flow[ing] both ways” evokes Bernardin’s idea of simultaneity, Erdrich shifts the meaning of “flow[ing] both ways” to encompass the interrelationality between humans and rivers when she notes “there’s a river that considers us after all.” In this move, Erdrich manifests two facets of critical relationality: “(1) as temporality for linking to the past and moving toward the future, and… (3) an ontological relationship to ancestral lands and their human and other-than-human occupants” (Pexa 22). Linguistically this interrelationality is articulated much later in the poemeo than the visual significations of it, first appearing as animated stars rising from St. Anthony’s Falls and in other iterations throughout the work. Concluding the poetic voice-over, the poemeo returns to the rusted door upon which the stanzas “river river river/ I never never never” spirals around and Erdrich notes “—but that is not to say I won’t ever” (3:42- 3:52). Erdrich turns around “never,” repeating it thrice. Yet this repetition does not confine her—it does not foreclose the possibility that in the future, the never transforms, repeats with difference, linguistically without the letter ‘n’ and creates the potential for “ever” to exist.
