Ondaadiziwag Cu Cunainn Miinawaa Wenabozho/The Births of Cu Culainn and Wenabozho

Abstract

A ncient, old, middle, and modern are relative terms that have taken on specific meanings in medieval, literary, and linguistic studies. Similarly, the terms pagan and civilized have been applied to world literature inways that assume an evolutionary trajectory of humanity and the superiority of the present. This poem attempts to destabilize these assumptions by offering a reading of twopre-Christian heroes whose stories are both related to parts of the Northern Hemisphere where the land and a source of freshwater have inspired ceremony for many centuries. Irish Cu Chulain1 and Ojibwe Wenabozho2 invite a form of Socratic anamnesis that is much more than ethnographic or anthropologic nostalgia. In these stories, humans are reminded of the elemental knowledge contained in certain places and the power of relational narratives to recontextualize life on earth. Both characters trace their narrative origin to oral stories kept by communal retelling that eventually made the transition to texts edited by colonial erasure, religious syncretism, and changing rhetorical style. Using poetry and translation as forms of methodology, I provide a close reading that imagines these two stories as kin in amorphous ways. By retelling these stories in a language that is endangered, I invite others to consider a radically inclusive definition of medieval that can lead to multidimensional, transglobal, i/Indigenous futures.3