"The Red Man's Greeting" Temporal Continuity
Even when describing settlers, Pokagon uses terms that convey how movement is not simply linear and unidirectional; it is a rolling, rotating thing that implies a return to the same point with difference. For Lisa Brooks, this rotation manifests in the form of a temporal spiral: “the spiral is embedded in place(s) but revolves through layers of generations, renewing itself with each new birth. It cannot be fixed but is constantly moving in three-dimensional, multilayered space. It allows for recurrence and return but also for transformation” (309). Thinking alongside Pexa and Brooks, Pokagon’s use of water systems implicitly engages this idea of recurrence and change, rooting this concept in the surrounding waterways of his homeland. This homeland, though, has been radically transformed by settler colonialism from the idyllic illustration entitled “Chicago in my Grandfather’s Day” to the site of the Chicago World’s Fair characterized by “these great Columbian show-buildings [that] stretch skyward” (2).
In imagining the connection between past and future in terms of water, the water cycle itself provides a method for rearticulating the ideas of vanishing and scattering that Pokagon notes. He likens overfishing to the way “morning dew [vanishes] before the rising sun” but vanishing does not quite accurately reflect what happens to dew in this scenario. Rather than disappearing forever, vanishing into nothing, the morning sun evaporates dew and transforms it into mist to rejoin other water particles in the air. Perhaps this phrase signals the protection obscurity offers; in light of settlers and fair attendees who could only understand “the production of modernity through purification of the landscape of Indians” positioning his peoples as vanishing despite their enduring existence suggests Pokagon’s awareness and negotiation of this colonial desire (O’Brien xx).
Applying a similar water view to the word scattered, which connotes a disorganization of pieces no longer connected to the whole, water particles do not become less watery when they are separated from a larger body. Despite their disjointedness, they retain their inherent watery qualities, awaiting the moment that reconstitution into a whole becomes possible, similarly to the way Brooks imagines the spiral as something that “allows for recurrence and return but also for transformation” (309).
