The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780819501820)

Archiving stories of dissonance and curating connection inside the imagined museum

This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, Wenstrup's poems weave together the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved colonial violence in "an authorial reckoning//with what remains." Outside the Museum of Unnatural Histories Ggugguyni, the Dena'ina Raven, and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets--or as The Curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Every artifact contains competing stories, while some display cases are left empty.

Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. There, The Curator questions the space between her familial history and colonial constructs of authenticity. In particular, the poems explore how women experience embodiment when they are seen through filters of race, gender, and class: "Always, I've known I embody that which harms me." At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard.

Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos to imagine a future that exists despite the series of disasters and apocalypses documented inside the museum. Eventually it begins to dawn on us that this museum may not be separable from the world, and that there may be no exit from its unnatural histories, composed of beauty and foil wrappers, wilderness and contaminated waters. Here, it is up to each one to "decide/who you must become."

[Sample Poem]

Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking Lot

I watch her crow. Not as a crow crows
but as herself. She's not here for the art.
She's here for the minivans that devour

diaper bags, car seats, children. She waits
for the doors to retract and expel fruit,
Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.

She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps.
Like me, she won't appear human here.
While her legs bring her from one delicious

scrap to another, I work my own inventory.
Once my parents named me Swift Raven--
a real Indian Princess name.

I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black
braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly,
more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curve

calling for carrion. I'm not here for the art.
I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair
earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beak

ready to unbind carapace from quiver.
Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger
lurching from one disaster to another.

See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath.
While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story.
Once, my grandfather said, a long time ago

there was a raven. He opened a door
and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut.
What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I heard: once

he closed the door and it was night. Today
I'm telling you this story instead: my mouth
is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,

my mouth is my body holding open the door.
Witness my body create day. See how the light
appraises my collection. See how the sunlight
exposes how shadow bleached everything white.