Nila NorthSun Poet- Shoshone

Sometimes arch, sometimes serious, and sometimes wistful, Nila NorthSun's poetry fits uneasily within the
rubric of nature poetry. Yet, despite--or rather, perhaps because of--her skepticism toward the designation
"nature poet," she has managed to depict the built environments and expansive landscapes of the Great Basin
in a clear-eyed, unromantic, and highly incisive fashion. When she began publishing in the late 1970s, the
cultures and landscapes of Nevada had received minimal attention from American poets writing in English
beyond the genre of cowboy poetry.
Two decades later, NorthSun had established herself as a central chronicler of the region among her
contemporaries and was honored for her achievements with the Silver Pen Award by the Nevada Writers Hall
of Fame in 2000 and the Indigenous Heritage Award in literature in 2004.
An enrolled member of the Shoshone tribe, and also of Chippewa and Swedish descent, NorthSun was born
Cheri Nordwall in Schurz, Nevada, in 1951. Though raised largely in the San Francisco Bay area, she kept
strong ties in Nevada throughout her childhood, visiting maternal grandparents and relatives on the reservation
and attending powwows and other tribal events.
A traditional buckskin dancer of considerable skill, she was selected Bay Area Indian Princess and San Quentin
Indian Princess when their dance group performed for Native American inmates at the maximum-security
prison on a cultural education program. Her exposure to traditional culture was bolstered by the commitments
of her father, Adam Fortunate Eagle, a renowned activist and one of the more prominent figures in the 19691971 reclamation of Alcatraz Island by Indians of All Tribes.
In this period NorthSun moved to Missoula for university study, earning her undergraduate degree at the
University of Montana. After publishing in many small-press magazines, she took her first and only creativewriting workshop, studying with Richard Hugo and William Kittredge.
Yet, her major poetic influences in this period came from exemplars such as Charles Bukowski and Diane
Wakoski. It was their highly conversational, highly personal tone that NorthSun came to adopt as her own,
although in the service of a far different subject matter.
NorthSun was also at work forging a regional literary scene with her then-husband, Kirk Robertson. Together,
they co-edited the avant-garde magazine Scree and founded Duck Down Press, where NorthSun published her
first chapbook of poetry, Diet Pepsi & Nacho Cheese, in 1977.
Upon graduation, NorthSun returned to Nevada, where she resumed her residence on the Fallon PaiuteShoshone Reservation. Shortly thereafter, she began work on a monograph funded in part by Title IV of the
Indian Education Act of 1972. After the Drying Up of the Water: A Tribal History, published in 1977, included
oral testimonies, archival photographs, and general information about the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe and
their homelands within the Lahontan Basin. That it reads quite unlike a work of anthropology speaks more to
its strengths than to its weaknesses, and the fact of its existence is a testament to NorthSun's continuing
investment in her home place.
Even as she tried her hand at local history, her first poetry chapbook, Diet Pepsi & Nacho Cheese , also reads
like a local history of sorts, opening with a sequence of thirteen poems concerned with "what gramma said"
and "what grandpa said." This cycle of narratives based upon the experiences of her Shoshone grandparents
remains among her best-known work.
The quotidian subject matter of these early poems stands at odds with an experimental prosody, relying as it
does on both enjambment and the internal music of its many assonant and consonant rhymes. As a more
moderate practitioner of certain contemporary trends in the then-nascent Language Poetry, NorthSun
demonstrated a distinctive flair from the first for fusing usual subject matter with unusual techniques.
Like her politics, NorthSun's poetics proved an unpredictable mixture of the populist and the progressive. To
call her avant-garde does not quite do her style justice.
Diet Pepsi & Nacho Cheese
As a whole, Diet Pepsi & Nacho Cheese formed the basis of NorthSun's literary reputation over the next
several years. Extensive publishing in small-press journals, from Vagabond to Beyond Baroque, kept
NorthSun's name familiar in non-Native American literary circles. The poems published in this venue were
augmented by six new poems from a second chapbook, Coffee, Dust Devils, and Old Rodeo Bulls, published
in 1979, and sixteen new poems from a third chapbook, Small Bones, Little Eyes, published in 1981.

Though some of these early poems eventually resurfaced in anthologies, all three volumes quickly fell out of
print and into obscurity; they prove quite difficult to find. Over the course of the 1980s, even as NorthSun
continued to write, her publishing activity slowed to fulfilling requests for inclusion in college textbooks and
anthologies such as New Worlds of Literature (1989), published by Norton, and the Critical Thinking series,
published by ERIC, thereby creating a continued interest in her work by college students and professors. But
her earlier work was kept in check because of a continuing dual copyright agreement held by Robertson, whom
she had divorced by then.
Stepping Stones
During these years NorthSun began working at Stepping Stones, an emergency shelter for Native American
children and teenagers from across the state of Nevada and from as far away as Washington State. Commuting
from Reno to Fallon, traveling more than one hundred miles each day, NorthSun found regular opportunities to
meditate on a particular swath of Nevada landscape. While many poems emerged from this experience, the
wear and tear of daily travel also proved an impediment to her literary productivity. Of her compositional
practice during this period, NorthSun explained that "driving 70 miles an hour down the freeway, trying to
scratch out a line or two on envelopes and napkins is not always convenient but happens anyway."
Although NorthSun has been identified by some with the critical construct known as the "Native American
Renaissance" of the 1970s and 1980s, which encompasses such luminaries as Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, N.
Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch, NorthSun has expressed doubts with respect to the
validity of such a construct, finding little to link such writers beyond their diffuse tribal heritages.
To the extent that the construct is useful, NorthSun is better situated as a second-wave figure akin to
Gwendolyn Brooks or Ted Berrigan (within the New Negro Movement and the New York School,
respectively), bringing an additional wave of momentum on the heels of an already ascendant literary
movement. While of the same generation as other, more visible writers such as Erdrich and Harjo, NorthSun's
own work has taken longer to gain a wide readership beyond certain pockets of interest, as, for instance, in
Germany, where her poetry is regularly studied at the university level.
Closer to home, NorthSun began to gain more notice beginning in 1992, at the Returning the Gift Festival, a
major gathering of Native North American writers. Held on the quincentenary of European colonization, the
event, organized by Joseph Bruchac, drew nearly four hundred participants to the University of Oklahoma at
Norman. It was there that Sherman Alexie, then only twenty-six and on the verge of a rapid rise to fame,
approached NorthSun as a humble fan, offering to take on the responsibility of assembling, arranging, and
editing a retrospective manuscript from the many nooks and crannies of NorthSun's scattered literary output.
Faced with the predicament of including or excluding earlier work that detailed a lifestyle out of step with her
later career as a social worker, NorthSun decided to represent her life and her life's work in all their stages.
Notwithstanding a handful of alterations, she sent the collection to press as Alexie had prepared it. The
resulting volume, A Snake in Her Mouth: Poems 1974-1996 , published by West End Press in 1997, received
considerable acclaim. In the wake of this success, NorthSun has remained active as a poet, contributing to
various periodicals and participating in events such as the Taos Poetry Circus.
One of NorthSun's recurring themes has centered on the constant difficulties of negotiating the conflicting
pulls of a traditional tribal identity and a contemporary American identity. On the one hand, "up & out"
presents a nostalgic and pragmatic argument favoring the spare simplicity of reservation life over the riches
and poverty of the city. Other poems about sweat lodges and social workers provide a sense of day-to-day life
on the reservation, offering a picture of cultural quasi-autonomy.
Yet, at the same time, "99 things to do before you die" mocks the typical checklist of urban fantasies even as it
indulges in them. At one pole, NorthSun describes what she seems to want, and at the other pole, what she
seems to want to want--two poles that are constantly shifting. The enduring space between, with its
irreconcilable cultural chasm, proves the void NorthSun straddles between the poles she terms as "the way &
the way things are."
Among other difficulties, NorthSun's cultural double consciousness entails a divided sense of home--for while
Fallon is dear to her as a place with deep familial roots, she also proves alienated by its slim prospects and its
cultural and geographical aridity.While this alienation is often presented in class terms rather than in ethnic or
racial terms, in other instances NorthSun implicitly gestures toward the fraught intercultural dynamics of
reservation life. She presents this conflict with supreme craft in the poem "black dog," which, like J. M.
Coetzee's novel Disgrace (1999), explores the tensions between canine and master as a means of indirect

commentary on the tensions between colonized and colonizer.

Like many other tribally affiliated writers of her generation, NorthSun has been skeptical of the suffocating
theatrics of traditionalism. Nevertheless, since she is equally skeptical of wholesale assimilation, she has
retained an ambivalent perspective with respect to both traditional and mainstream ways of life.One of the best
examples of such ambivalence occurs in her well-known poem "moving camp too far," described by Paula
Gunn Allen as a mourning song in the face of cultural extinction. In this poem NorthSun strikes a note of selfreproach--not so much at her failure to connect with the old traditions as at her folly in conforming to the new
trends.
Though she cannot return to the hunt, her access to the index of tradition (for example, eagles, powwows,
buffalo meat, and Indian music) comes only through her access to an index of alienation (such as plastic cups,
mobile homes, burger stands, and rock 'n roll). "I can't take part in all of these modern things," NorthSun
exclaims, only to conclude regretfully that "unfortunately / I do."
More than any other aspect of life, diet proves the mode of consumption most indicative of NorthSun's
predicament, tenuously poised between the traditional and the modern. If commodities like those outlined in
Diet Pepsi & Nacho Cheese are obviously unhealthy, they are at the same time the most readily available
means of subsistence. Whereas the traditional ethic of labor-saving simplicity once informed a diet of hunting
and gathering, as opposed to agriculture, the contemporary equivalent of such hunting and gathering leads to a
diet full of frozen and processed food.
Thus, even while NorthSun seems to bristle at the enduring disconnect between food and its sources,
suggesting a banality of eating in which foods are primarily commodities and only secondarily sources of
sustenance, she also seems quite comfortable in acknowledging that tribal tastes might, in fact, run closer to
cheeseburgers and wontons than to more-labor-intensive forms of traditional cuisine.
Many of NorthSun's poems can seem almost benignly suburban, with their honeymoons and their breastfeedings and their child-rearings. Yet, her spaces of domesticity and leisure are more likely to be dusty trailers
and truck stops than fancy houses and hotels by the sea. And with her unflattering portraits of unorthodox
relatives and her unstinting preoccupation with violence, NorthSun makes clear to the reader that hers is not
merely a mundane model of middle-class morality. The poems collected in A Snake in Her Mouth prove
especially attuned to the vagaries of death in its many guises, with poems of aging, overdose, murder, and
suffocation.
In part, NorthSun's sharp attention to decline and mortality may be situated with reference to the constant
reminders of decay and death that so saturate the Nevada landscape. An environment long neglected by
European American colonizing forces, in the later decades of the twentieth century Nevada came to function as
a federal dumping ground. Hosting nuclear test ranges, top-secret military bases, and radioactive waste
depositories, large portions of Nevada have proven off-limits to civilians and all but exempt from
environmental standards that tend to apply more rigidly in other locales.
Nevada
A difficult landscape, so majestic, so minimal, and so mistreated, Nevada provides for NorthSun a curious
setting of simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Nowhere is this dual point of view more apparent than in her
poem titled "nevada," which must rank among the most accurate and unflinching native portraits of any
American desert environment. This model of simultaneous attraction and repulsion spans beyond NorthSun's
more-focused portrayals of landscape, also replicating itself in poems that depict local figures within the desert
environment, as with "barrel-racer cowboy-chaser," "reservation girls," and "the tribal cop."
By treating the given and the made as part and parcel of an overarching desert environment, NorthSun's poems
may at first glance seem unconcerned with nature poetry as traditionally understood. This reaction could not be
otherwise, for the Nevadan landscape is itself so thoroughly strange and unfamiliar with respect to traditional
European understandings of nature that any nature poetry about the Nevadan landscape will of necessity read
as thoroughly strange to those more familiar with the nature writing of the European tradition.
With minimal material from which to craft a more conventionally bucolic or pastoral poetry, NorthSun's
sensitivity to landscape manifests itself in reflections on the dynamic between the natural and the built, in
musings on the conflict between the logic of late capitalism and the logic of ecological sustainability, and in
considerations upon the profound unhomeliness of the American Southwest, with its absurd incongruities of
desert and highway.
Rest Stop

In "rest stop," which simply refuses to romanticize such a highly unromantic environment, NorthSun grounds
her depiction less in any depth of place than in that narrow desire for transit on which so many of Nevada's
locales predicate their existence. Writing more generally from a landscape in which "nothing is green / & i'm
not so sure what / a nature poem is anyway," NorthSun's attempts to write in the pastoral tradition are
continuously deferred to the spectacles of bourgeois leisure, as in the aptly titled "euell gibbons eating a corn
dog." Nevada, unable to produce of its own bounty, finds itself as a landscape strictly relegated to
consumption.
Yet, at her most trenchant, NorthSun manages to generate fecundity from bareness, providing a twisted echo of
the pastoral tradition, although in a thoroughly ironic way. Thus, in "vacation sights," when a truck wreck on a
two-lane highway leads to the gruesome immolation of a flock of sheep, the pastoral returns, but with a
vengeance.
For sheep lost amidst the greener pastures of the countryside, one should read sheep lost amidst the
conflagrations of the interstate; for the itinerant shepherd bedecked in robe and sandals, bolstered by a staff,
one should read the itinerant trucker bedecked in blue jeans and boots, bolstered by eighteen wheels and a CB
radio.
As the line of descent from more-ancient pastoral styles to this most postmodern pastoral style is perhaps
somewhat opaque, NorthSun's work may seem to some readers to be little more than a set of random snapshots
from the perspective of a random observer. So, as the sheep suffer their holocaust, NorthSun leaves the reader,
like the dying flock, "maybe wondering / what the hell is happening?" Yet, such puzzlement applies not only to
this single, surreal, tragic instance but also to the more-fundamental economic bases that conjure such horrific
events into being.
Arlee Powwow and Crow Fair "78"
NorthSun, by no means confined to doom-and-gloom depictions of the environment, is less still confined to a
narrow orbit within her own region of Nevada. Poems such as "arlee powwow" and "crow fair '78" show
NorthSun traveling north to the gentler pastures of Montana. In such moments, rather than focusing more
exclusively on the land, she once again fuses a sense of place with a sense of its population, casting the eye of
one more accustomed to emptiness across a much fuller complement of social and vegetal abundance.
Further poems on other landscapes may be forthcoming, as NorthSun has recently relocated to northern
California. Nevertheless, her future efforts will be unlikely to undo her primary affiliation as a poet of Nevada.
From the sparse landscape the veins of which now pulse with thin development, NorthSun's perspective on the
natural world, the conservation movement and its attendant environmental issues remain complicated and
conflicted. "Lost in the woods," among her most successful nature poems, questions the ultimate value of a
concept like nature in a society that does not value the concept of nature.
Ecology, whether global or tribal, is itself an all-too-endangered perspective--one that NorthSun, in the face of
a largely indifferent world, ultimately struggles as much to endorse as to abandon.
If, finally, not a wholly environmental poet, can Nila NorthSun truly be reckoned as a nature poet? For that
matter, can she even be considered a poet of landscape, or a poet of locales?
At moments she is, perhaps in spite of herself, all of these things, but above all she is a poet of life--one who
stands out from the crowd for her rare ability to capture the rhythms of a region whose poetry has long since
been written, but is yet to be translated to a large readership. As for nature poetry in English, Nevada's canon is
as yet almost as sparse as its canyons. NorthSun stands in rare company, with poetry that proves fine company
indeed.
References
Erdrich, H. E. Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers On Community (Native Voices). 2002.

Intrator, S. M. Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach. 2003.
Works by northSun
northSun, Nila. Diet pepsi & nacho cheese : poems. 1977.
northSun, Nila. Small bones, little eyes : poems. 1981.

northSun, Nila. A snake in her mouth : poems 1974-96. 1997.