We are in Control of how we Absorb History

Trethewey’s Native Guard poems shows the differences between a candid look at the history of the south, Trethewey's personal experiences in that environment and her feelings toward her mother. Trethewey’s poems in the text are each in some way references to one another. In the poem "Native Guard", the speaker takes a journal from the house of an imprisoned confederate and uses it to record his thoughts. The speaker writes over the previous owner's words and the cross-stitched look of the journal shows an embrace of both the past and the present. That we are all bound to something in the past while we build toward the future. How much control we have over history and how much history has control over us.

Trethewey talks about her own personal history in her poems. The first section of the book deals almost entirely with the death of her mother and how that affected her throughout her life. Poems like "What is Evidence" and "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971" Trethewey describes how her mother was physically abused and how it affected her. In the poem, "What is Evidence" Trethewey further explores the abuse her mother suffered. This is most clear in the lines "Only the landscape of her body - splintered clavicle, pierced temporal - her thin bones settling a bit each day, the way all things do." She is referring to her mother's buried body, showing all of the scars of abuse from when she was alive. In this way her mother is just like the members of the Native Guard buried on Ship Island. This book teaches that we are in control of how we absorb history, and that we are not a result of past events but the result of the way we interpret those events.