Poet and historian Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, in a photograph handed down to Bernice Forrest.

“I was spellbound. I couldn’t even breathe,” Forrest says of the handwritten note inside the book. “It was a back-to-the-future moment: from 1899, it felt like she was writing to me.”

Born in the winter of 1869 to parents both of mixed Black and Montaukett tribal descent, the writer and historian then known simply as Olivia Ward spent the majority of her early life serially uprooted: from Long Island, her father moved the family to Providence in the early 1870s before giving his youngest daughter away to be raised by her maternal aunt. It was while attending high school in Rhode Island that young Olivia developed her passion for the pen, as well as a keen eye for the undercurrents of the civil rights movement that were already swirling in the late 19th century. Consorting with the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the Harlem Renaissance–era writer split her adult career between advocating for the rights of African Americans and working furiously to preserve her Indigenous heritage back on Long Island, in the role of historian for the Montaukett tribe. 

A doublet of marriages lengthened the poet’s name and lineage considerably; by the early 1900s Bush-Banks boasted three children and numerous grandchildren, though her relationships with her progeny were not trouble-free. Most notably, Bush-Banks’s estrangement from Rosamund, her eldest daughter and Forrest’s grandmother, is widely thought to be the stimulus behind one of her most famous poems, “Regret.” The final lines, “Tears of deep regret could not unsay / The thoughtless word I spoke that day,” are considered a reference to the fact that Rosamund died as a young woman, before the two could reconcile. 

The discovery of Bush-Bank’s letter and poems transformed Forrest. She got her PhD at Tulane, eventually finding herself inescapably drawn back to her great-grandmother’s work and the revelations it held for her own mixed identity.

This note, part of a gift to the Hay in June 1899 by Katharine H. Austin of Providence, went unread for 75 years. Then the author’s great-granddaughter checked it out.Photo: Erik Gould

“At that time, I had no intention of pursuing genealogical research and Indigenous ethnohistory in southeastern New England,” says Forrest, an associate professor of history emerita at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “But life possesses a cyclical rhythm, and mine ultimately revolved around my maternal Indigenous heritage and the complexities of navigating multiple ‘cultural identities.’” Amid other research endeavors, Forrest devoted herself to compiling all of Bush-Banks’s poems together into a single anthology, whose first edition was published in 1991. Despite feeling intimately tied to her great-grandmother’s work, Forrest elected not to disclose her connection to Bush-Banks when the collection was initially published because she “knew the work must stand or fall by itself.”

And stand it did, both among the records of prominent institutions like the New York State Capitol—where Bush-Banks was honored in a 2012 exhibit entitled “New York’s Women Leading the Way”—and within Forrest’s relationship to her own family and its Afro-Indigenous and Scottish origins. Cradling her copy of The Collected Works, left thumb absently perusing its pages, Forrest recalls her first encounter with racial discrimination, as a fourth-grader playing tetherball on the school playground. The shock and dismay return to her face as she describes the little white girl that came up to her with “the most vicious look in her face” and declared Forrest a “light-eyed bitch.”