In traditional Native American cultures, poems (more properly called "songs") were usually created for tribal occasions such as initiation rites, healings ceremonies, and planting or hunting rituals. The songs could also be used to pass on tribal history, standards of ethical conduct, and religious beliefs to other members of the tribe. Usually the songs were rhythmically chanted or sung in a tribal context to drums or musical accompaniment.
To tribal singers, words could magically connect them with the supernatural forces in all of nature. Rather than describing a present-tense scene, the singers often projected themselves into the future by "visualizing" the outcome they hoped to produce or by identifying with, for example, the rain cloud or the buffalo irresistibly attracted (hopefully) to the singer's powerful song-words.
Economy of language was also common in traditional Native American oral poetry, as can be seen in this superb two-line poem "Spring Song" (Chippewa):
As my eyes search the prairie
I feel the summer in the spring.
The precision of tersely worded images like this one can sometimes remind modern readers of imagist poetry or a Japanese haiku, but in a performance context, those lines--repeated over an extended period of time--would have a very different effect as the speaker invoked and anticipated the warmth and fullness of summer after a winter of hardship.
The commonly-used parallelisms and repetitions of similar or contrasting phrases often create the effect of "rhyming thoughts" rather than the rhyming sounds of western non-Indian poetry, according to Spinden (cited in A. Grove Day, The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indian, 1951). What may sometimes seem like unnecessary repetition to non-Indian readers can become, in the context of performed tribal ceremonies, a powerful and mesmerizing technique.
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