Jonah Weiss
Although he is well known throughout the Washington University arena as Professor Emeritus of English and author of many books and poems, Carter Revard is known in his hometown as Nom-Pe-Wa-The. He was raised on an Osage reservation in Oklahoma and attended the one-room Buck Creek school until the eighth grade. He now travels throughout the country and lectures on Winning the Dust Bowl, his memoirs in poetry and prose form released last February.
Having grown up in a mixed family with six brothers and sisters, Carter trained greyhounds to help support the family. He describes his own mixed ethnic background, or what he calls red-and-white heritage, in a poem entitled “Birch Canoe:” “Red men embraced/ my body’s whiteness/ cutting into me/ carved it free…”
In 1948, Revard won a year’s full-scholarship to the University of Tulsa from a radio quiz show. He received a Rhodes scholarship at age 21 in 1952. That same year in his hometown of Pawhuska, he was given a naming ceremony. His grandmother, Mrs. Josephine Jump, chose his name, which means “fear-inspiring” in Osage.
Revard earned his MA from Oxford and his Ph.D. in English from Yale in 1959. He taught at Amherst briefly before coming to WU in 1961. He was named an “Outstanding Young Man in America” in 1966. As a professor, Revard focused on Medieval English Literature, linguistics and American Indian literature. In his current capacity of Professor Emeritus (which he achieved during the academic year of 1996-1997), Revard is invited by universities to give lectures on American Indian literature. For someone who is ‘retired’ from academic life, Revard maintains a busy schedule that anyone at any age would find trying. Just arranging an interview with him proved difficult. Within a week he had gone from St. Louis to Kent State University in Ohio to the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa and he didn’t seem to mind at all.
Revard knows the history of the Osage and his own family like the back of his hand. Talking to him is like attending a history lecture, only more personal. One of his ancestors, Joseph Revard, was killed in Salina, Oklahoma at a trading post during warfare between the Osage and Cherokee tribes. Today, there is a monument in remembrance of the tragedy. To Native Americans, he says that poetry “matters like hell.” In one of his poems, “Close Encounters,” Revard writes, “And so I sang/ how the white sails of Columbus, of/ Cortez and the Pilgrims brought/ this krypton iris here and made/ the desert bloom…” Through his Native American roots, Revard’s history can be traced back to St. Louis, where the Osage once lived before they were driven out by what he describes as “ethnic cleansing when a slave-owner purchased land from a dictator” in 1803. “When I came here from Amherst,” Revard says of his move to St. Louis, or what used to be his people’s land, “I had a place with a different name.”
Revard taught at WU during the tumult of the ’60’s and the ’70s. He admits that during the early years of the Vietnam War, he thought it was futile. Initially, he failed to join his colleague, David Haddas, in silent peace demonstrations underneath the gingko trees. However, Revard was blocks away in California when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and from then on, he realized the futility and brutality of the war. After that tragedy, he saw “the most horrifying misuses of American power” unfold. At WU, Revard sympathized and fought for the rights of the protesting students. In fact, when Howard Mechanic was arrested for allegedly throwing a cherry-bomb during a demonstration, Revard and other professors collaborated to raise money for bail. Although Revard didn’t even know Mechanic, he put his house up for Mechanic’s bail, and when Mechanic fled, at least 70 faculty members raised money to help save it. Mechanic was on the run until January 2001, when President Clinton finally pardoned him. Revard, who almost lost his home for a complete stranger, didn’t blame Mechanic for running. The cherry-bomb incident took place on the same day as the shootings at Kent State; as he says, “The police wanted to nail someone and stop the protests and dissent, and Howard looked just right.”
Revard marvels at the world through his poetry and many books. He bases his writings on a broad background of his Native American heritage, as well as on his experiences in the many other places he has lived. In An Eagle Nation, he includes “Dragon-Watching in St. Louis” and “Outside in St. Louis.” Ironically, Revard wrote a poem years ago entitled “A Response to Terrorists.” In one of Revard’s essays, “Another Damned Dry Lecture by Some Obscure Writer,” he says, “most human beings do not develop their sense of how miraculous the world is until they are about to die.” He writes, “those of you who have had a rib broken, and lived to heal, may later notice how wonderful it is to breathe without pain…”