Erasure

by Sophia Scampolino

According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, erasure is considered an “act of removing or destroying all signs of something.”[1] Erasure is used in poetry as a way to create new art through blacking out words, crossing out words, or any way the artist deems possible to cover or delete words. This new piece of art can represent something totally different. Poets choose to use erasure poetry to reveal a hidden, underlying meaning by critiquing a piece of art or creating their own. Erasure can also be seen in history through the context of settler colonialism and the goals that settlers wanted to achieve as they were colonizing lands. Settlers came to America and saw the Native people as “‘vanishing,’ standing on the edge of cultural extinction, and they seem themselves as the replacements.”[2] Settlers viewed themselves as the first civilizing inhabitants of the land and pushed the Native people out. Erasure has occurred throughout history as Indigenous lands, language, and culture are being lost as they are forced to assimilate into Western culture.

Cultural erasure has forced Indigenous people to assimilate into Western culture while leaving their Native indentity behind. Schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School were created for this reason. Young children were taken to these boarding schools and were forced to learn the Western culture to forget their Native background. The school’s curriculum was centered around cultural genocide which involved an Anglo-Saxon dress code, prohibition of Native languages and forms of recreation, as well as manual farm labor. Native children were faced with violent “whitewashing” by being forced to learn the settler narratives of their history.[3] The forced education from the settler perspective caused young, Native children to be stolen from their traditional culture and heritage. Erasure in this sense occurs literally, where Native children are being forced to assimilate into a different culture other than their own. Languages, traditions, and stories were lost due to the strict ban on all aspects of Native culture at schools such as the Carlisle Boarding School. As these ideas are now unable to be passed down to future generations, they become lost and erased from history, slowly erasing Native culture and history altogether, which is a major struggle today.

Forced assimilation is causing culture and language loss. This is due to the centuries of land dispossession and forced migration that settlers have caused on Indigenous peoples. Many young Native children, similar to Michael Chabitnoy’s story, are being sent to boarding schools and slowly lose their Indigenous identity. There are nearly 200 languages native to North America that are facing extinction. Before colonization, there were more than 300 languages that existed.[4] Being forced to speak English, Indigenous peoples lose their language. Now, native languages are on the verge of going extinct as a result of the settler colonialism that has occurred all this time. As a result of the violent consequences that Indigenous people faced speaking their native tongue at boarding schools, they stopped speaking their language and teaching their children the language altogether. This was out of fear that their children would be mistreated the same way they were if they did not speak English. Children do not understand the importance of their language since everyone around them speaks English. As years go on, fewer people speak their native languages as they are immersed into Western society. For some, knowing Indigenous languages allows Native Americans to stay connected with the cultural traditions of their tribes.[5] Losing languages causes oral traditions, such as storytelling, to not be passed down to the next generation, and become lost. These stories, being passed down orally, could have no written form and are intimately tied to the native language in which they are told. Stories that are unable to be passed down disconnects the younger generations to their culture and traditions. Ultimately, those who do not know the language are missing a part of their identity.

Abigail Chabitnoy also uses erasure literally and figuratively to express the erasure of Native American history in her book, How to Dress a Fish. She tells the story of Michael Chabitnoy, her grandfather, and his experience at the Carlisle Boarding School through the use of poetry. In some of her poems, she uses white-out, line-out, and black-out methods to erase parts of her poem. The new piece of art this creates tells the historical stories through the colonial voice while investigating her family background. At the beginning of the essay, she incorporates a picture of him dressed in Western-styled clothing, well groomed with short hair. In the picture, however, there was a tear. As Chabitnoy’s essay proceeds, the picture continues to reappear two more times but with each time, parts of it become whited out until only the tear is visible. Slowly erasing parts of the picture shows the forced assimilation that Michael Chabitnoy had to endure during his time at the Carlisle Boarding School. The erasure expresses Michael’s loss of indigenous identity and overall identity as he forcibly joined Western culture. Using erasure as a poetic method and metaphorically shows the cultural loss that Chabitnoy faces, generations later, as she works through her text to recover lost family history. Erasure poetry allows the inherent process of erasure to become more visible and conscious.

Dispossession also aids in the erasure of Native American culture and history. The settlements that colonizers created as they entered America displaced the Indigenous communities that were already in that space. Land continues to be taken from Native communities and they are forced to relocate to another confined area. The General Allotment Act of 1887 formally reallocated millions of acres from Indigenous to White control. The General Allotment Act “divided up Native land into individual parcels given to Native nuclear families. Anything ‘left over’ was sold off to white settlers and real estate investors.”[6] This law forced Native families to live in a small, allocated area of land while the government sold the rest of it off to settlers. Land that was originally Native land was treated as if it was free land and belonged to the government. This law shows that the government does not think of Indigenous people as human beings and can easily push them aside to make a profit off of their land. Roughly 100 million acres of Indigenous land was turned over to settler ownership in the following 50 years of the General Allotment Act.[7] The American settler state systematically erased Indigenous identity through taking away their land and forcing them to assimilate into American settler society.

This part of American history is not talked about enough. School curriculums only touch on the settler perspectives of American history while Native American history is left out. Indigenous perspectives and histories have been continuously marginalized and covered up to favor the way settler colonialism built itself up in the American settler colony.[8] Most of the time, Native American history is forgotten about due to the colonists who pushed them aside. People enact their own erasure of Native American history by forgetting the history and that Indigenous people still exist. In a poetry learning prompt on erasure, this same problem has occurred with poet, Leigh Sugar. Leigh Sugar discusses her plan for an erasure workshop but then realizes that she failed to include the “Native Land Acknowledgement” in her schedule. Sugar enacted her own erasure, even though she was trying to raise awareness of it. She acknowledged that she had reproduced what Whiteness has done to the Indigenous population for centuries.[9] Whiteness through the years is used as an erasing agent against an already erased culture.

Instead of thinking that erasure poetry reveals what might be hidden in a text, it can be seen as a form that consciously reveals that which is otherwise invisible. Being aware of erasure is important to not just poets, but to everyone. People tend to forget about the settler colonialism that occurred many centuries ago that began the displacement of Indigenous communities. This forgetfulness has caused Indigenous history to be forgotten, dominated by the settler colonist perspective. Forced assimilation into American society led to the slow loss of Native languages, cultures, and traditions. This cultural erasure is damaging to society as Americans forget that their lands were once Native lands. By being forced to learn settler customs, Indigenous tribes lose their sacred ground, where traditions are performed, and overall, lose their identity through cultural erasure.

Bibliography

Duhownik, Joe. “After Centuries of Erasure, Native Tribes Fight to Preserve Culture through Language.” Courthouse News Service, January 1, 2024. https://www.courthousenews.com/after-centuries-of-erasure-native-tribes-fight-to-preserve-culture-through-language/.

“Erasure.” Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. Accessed May 28, 2024. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/erasure.

Manjapra, Kris. Colonialism in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Smiles, Deondre. “Erasing Indigenous History, Then and Now.” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. Accessed May 22, 2024. https://origins.osu.edu/article/erasing-indigenous-history-then-and-now?language_content_entity=en#:~:text=Once%20the%20land%20was%20taken,trained%20to%20adopt%20settler%20customs.

Sugar, Leigh. “On Erasure .” Poetry Foundation. Accessed May 22, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158286/on-erasure.

[1] 1. “Erasure,” Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, accessed May 28, 2024, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/erasure.

[2] Kris Manjapra, Colonialism in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 47.

[3] Manjapra, 151.

[4] Joe Duhownik, “After Centuries of Erasure, Native Tribes Fight to Preserve Culture through Language,” Courthouse News Service, January 1, 2024, https://www.courthousenews.com/after-centuries-of-erasure-native-tribes-fight-to-preserve-culture-through-language/.

[5] Duhownik.

[6] Deondre Smiles, “Erasing Indigenous History, Then and Now,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, accessed May 22, 2024, https://origins.osu.edu/article/erasing-indigenous-history-then-and-now?language_content_entity=en#:~:text=Once%20the%20land%20was%20taken,trained%20to%20adopt%20settler%20customs.

[7] Smiles.

[8] Smiles.

[9] Leigh Sugar, “On Erasure ,” Poetry Foundation, accessed May 22, 2024, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158286/on-erasure.