October 17, 2024

Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre in her new collection, House of Grace, House of Blood. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations. Today we ask Low five questions about her book.

What inspired you to write this collection?

I have a double life as a scholar (should I digress about my Mercury in Gemini?), which leads me to write critical works about literature and Plains Indian ledger art. So I have spent many months of my life in Footnote Land, and those original versions, as close as possible to the historic events, have so much textured information—even when recorded by European settler descendants. The Gnadenhutten massacre, which I researched for my memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival,  resonated with many people of the time, from Tecumseh to Benjamin Franklin. To keep focus on one family in the memoir, I cut this incident. Every Lenape person I know remembers Gnadenhutten, and few others. I want to make this event part of the conversation about genocide in North America and genocide as a predicament of human experience, along with a conversation about actions toward reconciliation.

These poems weave historical voices and primary sources into the lyric, first-person perspective in a mode sometimes called “documentary poetics” or “archival poetry.” What are some of the challenges—or opportunities—that come with working in this mode?

The complicated history of East Coast Native peoples, especially Lenapes and related nations, leaves behind many archival artifacts, which include: texts about massacres, alliances, marriages, enslavements, destructions, ordinary farm life, military service, scouting, and trading. These moments all create a factual narrative of Delawares, who were the first Indigenous people to trade with the English on the island of Manhattan. This book pushes back at the image of primitive “Indians” selling New York City’s site for a few beads. By foregrounding the back stories—using oral and written histories—I want to uncover the apocryphal and vital presence of Native people. With Gnadenhutten archives, I found myself interacting in present time with the texts, so I created verse forms to engage in intertextual and inter-chronological dialogues. These were couplets woven from a document line alternated with my response. It was a ghost-like call-and-response. One text was a transcription of a massacre survivor’s granddaughter’s account. This was so moving to hear the story from the Delaware point of view. American lyrical poetry is so elastic. With researched information about Pennsylvania-sponsored scalp taking, I used a ledger format to make a point not possible in prose lines. The American poetic tradition can hold all this, plus lyrical words about faith and courage.

Where and how did you do the research for this book? Which sources were particularly important to this collection?

Research began with my uncle and brother—about the family’s occluded Native heritage. Delaware elders have shared information with me orally and some documents. The paper trail includes local Ohio histories, Moravian archives, military records, and maps. My husband Tom Weso, Menominee, used to say the land is the first place to start with Native narratives, and indeed the maps tell so much about this event and the history of Delawares in general. Maps confirm the diaspora. In text and visual maps, I trace the timeline of the Gnadenhutten massacre and then expand the horizontal line into one with depth—all the details that were happening in the same place and time moment by moment. The unfolding consequences, including intergenerational trauma, continue today.

Importantly, this work moves past the Gnadenhutten Massacre and into its aftermath, following the speaker’s childhood memories, visiting monuments, and ending with the wonderful poem “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County, Kansas,” which feels like both a celebration and a memorial. Why was it important for you to merge the historical with the contemporary moment?

This is a time when awareness of factual, not settler colonial fictions, are evolving. House of Grace, House of Blood contributes to this turn toward truth. I want better understanding of the Lenape and East Coast histories; I also want better understanding of how eradication of populations—human, animal, plants—is part of human experience and how to address it. The local newspaper reports that Governor Newsom of California recently signed a state bill that requires teaching of the Indigenous genocide during Gold Rush times and also Indigenous contributions. This is a great moment in California. My plan with my book is not to simply say, “J’accuse” / “I accuse you.” Telling the truth about the brutality of that massacre is embedded within themes of shared family ties, healings of the earth, spiritual ways, the arts, power of language, and hope. Through the years elders have taught these values as ways to survive as individuals and as communities. This healing is for all of us.

What are you working on now?

Research is taking me to deeper sources for the slavery of Delaware and other related peoples, who were taken from their lands to the Caribbean cane fields. Something is known about the Pequot slaves traded to the West Indies in the 1630s. Little remains, however, about the history of up to 50,000 Indigenous people of mainland United States sent to this forced labor. Erasure of historic facts like Native plantation slavery distort understanding of the eastern tribal nations, especially. I’m also working toward another study of Northern Cheyenne ledger art texts regarding the Fort Robinson Breakout of 1879, connected to my book co-authored with Ramon Powers, Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors (University of Nebraska, 2021).

Denise Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her recent books include Shadow Light: Poems, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, and A Casino Bestiary. Her Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors won a Kansas Notable Book Award. She founded the creative writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University and is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. She has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage. www.deniselow.net.