Thomas Edward Davis

An American Spirit Thomas Edward Davis

An American Spirit is an epic poem that is built around the 1975 Menominee Warrior Society takeover of the Alexian Brothers Novitiate near Gresham, Wisconsin. The takeover made international news at the time and was one of the major protests against American society generated out of the AIMS movement of the 1970s. The epic itself contains multiple stories. There is the story of the takeover itself, but also companion stories that encompass the rise of the Posse Comitatus, a right wing Christian right militia, a religious cult whose compound is located near the Novitiate's grounds, a secondary protest that leads to the burning of farms and houses, incidents in the nearby town of Shawano, and mythological events rising from both Menominee culture and Christianity. The interrelated stories build and build toward a conflagration that contains mystical truths, triumph, love, courage, madness, and tragedy, all swirling around and around as the poem explodes into an epic climax. The poem is an exploration as well as a meditation upon Twenty-first century America and its diverse populations. Written before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the more recent rise of white supremacist movements in the United States, it also exists as a chilling prophecy that no reader will forget. As the former Chair of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin--Green Bay expressed it after spending a summer reading the manuscript, "it's a story that invaded my dreams."