by Debra Vidali
July 1, 2023
*Parts II and III awarded 2023 Ethnographic Poetry Prize
by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.
An ethnopoetry statement is at the end.
Part I
The Port of Albany
is a NAGPRA1 crime scene.
So scream the six train tracks
hurtling to meet me
as I drive a road
not meant for cars.
So whisper the old white estates,
buried along thick banks
of Norman’s Kill.2
So worries the lone worker,
a pale, crumpled man,
haunted by the emptiness
of stacked shipping containers.
Bloodless, he smokes
at the dusty dead end,
taking a lunch break
until 3:00 pm.
The Port of Albany
is a NAGPRA crime scene
unknown to Albany
or NAGPRA.
Towering mounds of scrap metal
taunt scattered broken boats
and rusted machine parts.
Knots of inert silos
and nameless warehouses
deny any contact with water.
Industrial exhaustion
blocks every memory
that the river is fluent in
Kanien’kéha and Nederlands.3
___________
Part II
Knowing signatories
agreed to row
side by side
four hundred and ten
years ago,
the river and I
refuse erasure
and all industrial
exhaustion of life.
We rebuild relations
not graves, beginnings
that invite repair
and not 911
calls to NAGPRA.
Knowing signatories
agreed to row
side by side
four hundred and ten
years ago,
the river and I
refuse erasure
and all industrial
exhaustion of life.
We rebuild relations
not graves, beginnings
that invite repair
and not 911
calls to NAGPRA.
Knowing signatories
agreed to row
side by side
four hundred and ten
years ago,
the river and I
refuse erasure
and all industrial
exhaustion of life.
We rebuild relations
not graves, beginnings
that invite repair
and not 911
calls to NAGPRA.
___________
Part III
W A M P U M
BE A D 1 8 9,
9 th R O W
21st COLUMN,
2 n d B O A T,
P U R PL E ,
CO M M ITS
MY F A MILY,
BINDING US
W I TH EVERY
SI GN AT ORY
INPERPETUITY.
CEN T UR IE S
OF READINGS
AND TRA VE L,
W A R F A R E
A N D DECEIT,
CELEBRATIONS
AND AMNESI A
B U R N INTO
THIS TWOROW
C O N T R ACT.
WITH BROKEN
AND VANISHED
S I N E W,
VIOLATED RIVER,
LOST BE A D S
AND SHREDDED
F A M I L IE S ,
I W I LL FIND
NEW MUSCLES
& SUSTENANCE
T O J O I N
OUR R E PAIRS.
Ethnopoetry Statement
Two Row Repair tracks a journey of attempted recovery and repair. Along the way, it names relationships, responsibilities, and historical hauntings that reverberate through the present. Treaties, the Hudson River, a wampum belt, settler violence, industrial exhaustion, my family, decolonial praxis, and four centuries guide the ethnographic texture. The journey is part of my research on Indigenous sovereignty and allyship in Haudenosaunee territories and New York State. This work is informed by my own history as a settler with Dutch ancestors dating back ten generations on this continent. I write as traveler, witness, descendant, signatory, collaborator, and rebuilder.
The title and form of Two Row Repair is inspired by the first major agreement between Haudenosaunee and Dutch, believed to have been made in 1613 as a commitment to peaceful coexistence in the Hudson Valley.4 Known as the Kaswenta relation, this pact is encoded in the Two Row Wampum, a woven document of purple and white shell beads representing two rows of people moving through the river of life. The Two Row Wampum is a foundational treaty extending into the present. It conveys expected relations between Haudenosaunee and people of European descent to co-exist in peace, respect, and friendship, and in common stewardship for all orders of life, including rivers, plants, animals, and earth itself.
Part I of Two Row Repair travels to one agreement-making location, the site of Dutch Fort Nassau, a seventeenth century settlement along the Hudson River near Albany, New York5 I follow a road defined by a small creek, Normans Kill (Tawasentha in Mohawk), the only visible trace of prior Haudenosaunee routes. I arrive as close as I can to the Hudson River and witness a crime screen: the industrial port of Albany which obscures and buries recognition of enduring promises, or future possibilities. Part II enunciates a renewal of the 1613 contract which “refuses erasure and all industrial exhaustion of life.” The two rows streaming down the page mirror the Two Row Wampum belt as held vertically during public readings. In my rendering, the reading also flows horizontally from left to right. In this way, each side takes turns adding words to build a unified promise. Part III imagines my Dutch Van Keuren ancestors as one purple bead in the right row. I place myself in the agreement, trying to repair and move forward with my own pledge.
Notes
Image in Part III: Two Row Wampum Belt (Gä•sweñta’, Guswhenta or Kaswhenta). CC Six Nations Library.
Parts II and III of this trilogy were awarded First Place in the 38th annual Society for Humanistic Anthropology Ethnographic Poetry Competition in 2023. The trilogy was first published in 2024 in Anthropology and Humanism, 49(1): 57–62. This blog retains the original formatting of the trilogy, which was not possible to reproduce in AH.
For a discussion of the politics and form activated through this experimental poetic trilogy, and the “radical and more forcefully present form of citation” that occurs through the poem’s formatting choices, see: Cook, Ian M., Çiçek İlengiz, Fiona Murphy, Julia Offen, Johann Sander Puustusmaa, Eva Van Roekel, Richard Thornton & Susan Wardell. May 2025. Beyond the Footnote: Citation as Disruption in Creative Anthropology. Allegra Lab.
- Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a federal law established in 1990. ↩︎
- A kill is a body of water, most commonly a creek. The word originates from Middle Dutch kille (‘riverbed’ or ‘water channel’). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_(body_of_water) ↩︎
- Mohawk and Dutch. ↩︎
- Oren Lyons (1986) “Indian Self-Government in the Haudenosaunee Constitution,” Nordic Journal of International Law 55(1):117-121; Onondaga Nation (n.d.) “Two Row Wampum – Gaswéñdah.” ↩︎
- Jon Parmenter (2013) “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History,” Journal of Early American History 3(1):82-109. ↩︎