Tom Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

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Homage to Helen Maynor Scheirbeck

 

I used to tell the story of how Helen,

when I was so young I hardly knew who I was,

would call us to DC during the effort to get

 the Indian Education Act drafted and passed

and work us until 1 or 2 in the morning

and then get disgusted when, bleary-eyed,

we stopped making sense.

She’d tell us it was obvious we couldn’t concentrate

anymore and might as well go to bed.

Then she would be knocking on our doors at 7:30 a.m.

to make sure we knew our assignments

even though she lived over an hour away.

 

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck  became one of the 20th Century’s

most significant Indian leaders,

showing no fear, and occasionally no sense,

talking her way into a job at the Washington office of Senator Sam Ervin,

getting the Bible- and Constitution-quoting racist,

who helped bring President Richard Nixon down and became a national hero,

to support the only desegregation legislation he ever supported, the Indian Civil Rights Act.

 

She got her fire from her father.

 

In 1957 and 1958, the Ku Klux Klan staged two cross burnings

in the yards of Indians as a threat, and on Saturday nights, sent caravans

of black sedans through Robeson County, home of the Lumbee Indians.

 

Then Klan leader James “Catfish” Cole, fiery radio evangelist,

planned a rally at Hayes Millpond, after promising the Master

of all Klan Masters he would strengthen the Klan in North Carolina.

Fearing armed resistance from the Lumbee community,

local and federal officials tried to persuade Cole to hold the rally elsewhere,

but Cole was a messenger of the Lord.

On the night of January 18, 1958, as Cole began to speak to fifty Klansmen,

after the thousands he’d invited failed to show up, a Lumbee man shot out

the light bulb near Cole’s head, and hundreds of Indians fired weapons into the air.

Klansmen fled into the dark pond and woods.

 

Later Cole was arrested for inciting a riot. 

He appeared before Lacy Maynor, Helen's father,

the sole Indian judge in Robeson County,

and was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.

 

Lacy Maynor refused to let threats keep him from driving the Klan

from Eastern North Carolina even though Black people were hanged, drowned, burned,

or dragged behind pickup trucks as examples,

and the Klan had decided purity meant purity,

and Indians were not white.

God didn’t like them.

Grand Dragon Catfish Cole said so.

 

And now Judge Maynor, Grand Dragon Catfish Cole,

and even Helen Maynor Scheirbeck are gone.

 

And those of us who remember do not know how to mourn what has passed

since in our mourning we too are passing

through days and events that sweep emotions and thoughts

into the river of individual histories, written and unwritten,

that eventually  flow into the terrible emptiness of loss.

 

Helen would say that none of what she accomplished was done alone,

that she was just a bit player. “A little old Indian grandma

from North Carolina,” she’d call herself.

 

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck died in Maryland in a nursing home—

not famous like she should have been,

her legacy left inside those who knew her.

 

We walk through our days and wonder where time goes.

We walk through our days and grow a past

and remember those who have made a difference in our lives,

who transformed our world in ways that last.

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Thomas Davis has spent his career in education as the President or Chief Academic Officer of five different tribal colleges or universities.  He also was important in the founding of both the College of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium.  He has published two books of poetry, two epic poems, seven novels, and a book of nonfiction.  His literary honors include the Edna Ferber Fiction Award and an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association.  He and his wife, Ethel Mortenson Davis, are the proprietors of Four Windows Press and are also the current Poet Laureates in Door County, Wisconsin.  [For more on Helen Scheirbeck, click here.]

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Helen Maynor Scheirbeck (in blue jacket, holding cup) and colleagues at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, early aughts.

Comments

[Robert McDowell]

Thank you for this tribute to a magnificent woman. I thought of Wilma Mankiller and so many women who change our lives every day, though they ae past and passing, as we are, as Tom Davis reminds us. The work is communal. It is always communal, and it goes on every day, forever. Blessings to Helen Maynor Scheirbeck & those who stood with her.

[Sr. Leslie]

What a beautiful…painful but beautiful poem!…I am grateful for the introduction of Helen Maynor Scheirbeck - such an inspiration..It is her voice, her father’s, Mariann Budde and others…it is these voices that gives hope and helps us to do whatever it is we are each called to do for justice and mercy…As Ruth Stone used to say, “Poetry Saves Lives!”…Thank you Terence and thank you Tom…

[Howard Bass]

Thank you, Tom, and thank you, Terence. It was an honor to be part of Helen's team at NMAI (and great to see the group photo).

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Leslie. Helen was my boss & became my dear friend. She was a very special person.

[lally]

what a poignant and insightful poem, perfectly crafted, a tribute to the subject and to the poet and to terence who picked it out of the tons of great poems being published every day (we can see him in the group photo peaking out from the background)

[Terence Winch]

Michael:  You caught me! Yes---Helen was my boss and then became a close friend. I'm grateful to Tom Davis for writing this tribute to her.

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

Very moving. Thank you.

[Clarinda]

Thank you. How very much this has taught me

[Bernard Welt]

I'm glad to see this and hope to see a lot more. We could use some American epic poetry. I am reading Pekka Hämäläinen's Indigenous Continent and it's enlightening but hardly poetic. It's good to hear Native American history told in a Native American way.

[Eileen Reich]

What a beautiful poem and tribute to a fantastic woman.

[David Beaudouin]

I love poems that weave history, individual or at-large, into their fabric—pertinent here as it reveals the deep fissure of racism in American culture toward its First People. Then, Tom’s coda in the final quatrain lifts this poem skyward. Thanks, Tom & Terence!

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, David.

[susan Campbell]

She was a lovely woman — grace, strength and wisdom. She is missed.