Mary Tallmountain

2 Pages 521 Words

Mary Tallmountain is considered one of the greatest writers amongst the Native American community. Although she really didn’t gain much recognition nationally until the early 1980’s when she won the Pushcart Prize. She is mostly known as a spiritual and cultural writer for instance the poem, “There Is No Word for Goodbye.” In this poem she shows the conversation between an Athabaskan girl and her aunt. The girl is trying to find out how to say goodbye in Athabaskan.
The aunt in the poem seems to be very old and wise. You see this when the girl was looking into her net of wrinkles and her wise eyes. Her wrinkles symbolizes her old age which also symbolizes knowledge. Her “Wise black pools of her eyes”(Tallmountain 177-178) symbolizes her immeasurable depth of wisdom.
She is old, and at this point the niece asks her how to say goodbye in Athabaskan. The aunt says, “Ah, nothing…we just say, Tlaa. That means see you.”(Tallmountain 178) What exactly did the aunt mean? Do the Athabaskans’ not like the word goodbye, or do they imply that they feel no sense of separation when they depart from each other? Maybe they do not miss the person they are distant from. Perhaps they simply have faith that they will eventually be reunited. This is when Tallmountain’s spiritual part of the poem comes into play:
We always think you’re coming back,
but if you don’t,
we’ll see you someplace else.
You understand.
There is no word for goodbye.(24-28)
At this point Tallmountain is giving the impression that the aunt might be in poor health, and could be dieing. When the aunt says, “We’ll see you someplace else,”(Tallmountain 178) she may possibly be talking about heaven. In addition, when she tells her niece that they never really leave each other, she is giving a suggestion that she will always be there if not physically, then spiritually or in her memories. At this moment t...