NOTESFROM THE LAST SONG
Watching Crow, Looking South . . .
The Manzano Mountains are just south of Albuquerque and formed a crucial part of my imagination during the genesis of these poems. I particularly remember cool fall mornings, stories of Isleta deer hunting told by my Isleta friends as we ate and participated during feast days and other family events. Deer songs thread the mountainside interweaving the paths of deer and can be heard especially in those magic golden and scarlet-leafed fall days.
Although this is the first poem in the collection, it was not the first poem I ever wrote. The first poem was of a singer/dancer telling the story of the animal he was hunting and as he tells and sings the story he becomes the animal. The poem was inspired by watching such an event.
for a hopi silversmith
For Phil Navasaya, a Hopi artist whose jewelry is characterized by a swift elegance and familiarity with rain clouds and prevailing winds. His family sustained me in my early years in Albuquerque when I was an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico. Phil’s mother Rita always treated me like a relative. Phil’s fiercely intelligent brother coached me in math my first year at the University of New Mexico, and his sister Anna is one of my oldest friends of that circle (along with Carmen Foghorn and Marley Shebala).
San Juan Pueblo and South Dakota . . .
I first presented this poem at the first native women’s literature conference in the mid-seventies in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation at what was then known as Navajo Community College. The poem was briefly interpreted by an audience member as a condemnation of Siouxs. Later we had a good laugh about it as this wasn’t the intention. We were all in it together in those years during our search for justice, for a means to justice and a relief for injustice. Okie’s, the legendary bar at the corner of University and Central in Albuquerque, was where many of us landed after those heavy meetings of discussions in which we had to face the devastation of history and what we were going to do about it. At Okie’s a pitcher of beer could relieve the intense pressure of being human in a time and place of much inhumanity.
Barbara Wells-Faucon was a brilliant and cutting observer of the comedy and tragedy of being Indian in the mid-seventies.
The Sandias are the mountains that define Albuquerque. They mark the point east, which is the direction of beginnings, and the road toward Oklahoma.
he told me his name was sitting bull
Sitting Bull or Tatanka Yotanka, Hunkpapa Sioux was one of the principal chiefs who negotiated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, a treaty that forced the United States to abandon several forts and respect the Lakota’s claim to the sacred Black Hills, or Paha Sapa. He came to power during an era of great turmoil and immense changes for his people and all native people on this continent. He was born in 1830 into a time in which the Sioux lived relatively free of European contact. By his death, in 1890, that world was nearly unrecognizable.
As a very young man Sitting Bull had killed a buffalo, counted coup on an enemy, and was initated into the Strong Heart Warrior Society. Soon after he naturally assumed leadership and was held in great respect throughout his whole life. He joined with other Sioux bands to defeat Custer in 1876 at Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull’s dreams foreshadowed the defeat of Custer. During a June 1876 Sundance, after thirty-six hours of dancing, Sitting Bull had a vision of the U.S. Army soldiers without ears falling into a Sioux village, upside down. The lack of ears signified ignorance of the truth, and the upside down positioning indicated their death. Gold was soon discovered in the Black Hills and the land was soon overrun by squatters digging for gold. In the 1870s he and a few hundred of his people took refuge in Canada. There he had visitors from around the world. In 1881 he returned to the United States and surrendered. He was taken to the Standing Rock Agency where he ridiculed efforts to sell Indian land. Although he adopted farming and sent his children to reservation schools he said, “I would rather die Indian than live a white man.” He endorsed the vision of the Paiute prophet Wevoka, a vision of restoration for native peoples. Sitting Bull was killed a few days before the massacre of ghost dancers at Wounded Knee as forty-three tribal police tried to arrest him (reference from The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography, Bruce E. Johansen and Donald A. Grinde Jr., Da Capo Press, New York, 1998).
Anadarko is a major town in southwestern Oklahoma. It marks the border of the Great Plains and many Indian nations of the southern Plains converge here, including the Kiowa, Commanche, Southern Cheyenne, and Apache.
Tahlequah is the capital of the Cherokee Nation west of the Mississippi located in northeastern Oklahoma. The Illinois River runs through it.
3 A.M.
Old Oraibi is a Hopi village on Third Mesa and is known as the most traditional village of the Hopi nation. The village has successfully resisted installation of electricity and the establishment of outside religions.
Acoma is a pueblo village located west of Albuquerque (or rather Albuquerque is located east of Acoma), a distance of about sixty miles.
Are You Still There?
Laguna is a Keresan pueblo reservation west of Albuquerque.
Mesita is one of many Laguna villages. Other villages include Seama, Paraje, Paguate, Encinal, New York, New Laguna, Old Laguna, and Philadelphia. The Rio Puerco runs through Laguna and is often the center of much activity as it has been for centuries. Many of the stories and poems of Leslie Silko take place here. Laguna is on the way to Acoma if you are coming from Albuquerque.
Conversations Between Here and Home
This was written before the institution of shelters for battered women. In those earlier years we made our own shelters, took each other in, nursed each other, laughed and cried together. One of the makeshift shelters we named “Heartbreak Hotel.”
NOTE—All of the poems here appeared in the subsequent publication, What Moon Drove Me to This?
FROM WHAT MOON DROVE ME TO THIS?
Four Horse Songs
I was made aware of horse songs by Simon Ortiz, who sings a song/poem about a man trying to make it home through the winter of his life. It was called either “Beauty Roanhorse” or “Buny Roanhorse.” Simon says in a correspondence of August 23, 2001: “I haven’t thought about it in a while. And I don’t remember all the words either. . . . You see when I first heard the story of a man with that name I heard the name as Beauty Roanhorse. So when the song came about (1976 or 77 or 78?), when I began to hum and sing it, it was ‘Beauty Roanhorse.’ Beauty Roanhorse, Beauty Roanhorse, I would say. But then I had heard wrong because I heard the correct pronounciation by the one who told me the story. ‘Buny’ or ‘Beaunie.’ Or however it might be spelled. Maybe like ‘Bewnie.’ The u sound like in new or puny.”
When I hear Navajo horse songs I see the beautiful multicolored lands of Dinetah and feel the ground shaking with the running of horses. I see a road of relatives from home all the way back to Monahwee and his black horse running the red roads of the southeast, through the lush homelands, feel the thrill of flying hard and fast on the back of a horse. Horses teach me about the power of vulnerability. They make swift connections between wind and blood.
These four horse songs don’t have the same quality of exhilaration and praise as the horse songs that inspire them. They take place in those black holes between despair and home. This area is treacherous and crisscrossed by bootleggers and railroad tracks and is characterized by the pain of failure and loss. Border towns perch here and depend on the business of the native people and on tourists brought in with the lure of native culture, but return the gift with terrible human rights abuses.
There Was a Dance, Sweetheart
Carmen Foghorn was a student at the University of New Mexico and a member of our politically active Indian student organization, the Kiva Club.
Central Avenue is the main street defining the center of Albuquerque and follows the historic Route 66.
Mount Taylor is one of the sacred mountains of the Navajo, and the mountain informing the shape of Acoma culture.
Crows appear nearly everywhere. They are tricksters of a sort and very human in their crowness. I see them as the chorus, outlining and commenting on the unfolding drama of this world.
Crossing the Border
From an indigenous point of view, the border between Canada and the United States doesn’t exist. It is an imaginary line imposed by invader nations with governing laws that are arbitrary. Many tribal nations are slashed by the border. Among those affected in the north are the Mohawk and Anishnabe, and Yaqui and Tohono O’odham in the south. Crossing the border is always hazardous for Indians. We are singled out and searched, detained, and questioned.
Barney Bush is a Shawnee poet and writer. When I was in graduate school in Iowa City he was living and teaching in Milwaukee. I was lonely for Indian country as I was one of only seven Indian students at the University of Iowa. He heard about a Delaware powwow in Moravian Town—“just the other side of Detroit”—and called to ask, “Do you want me to pick you up on the way?” “Yes,” I said. “I’m dying here.” Of course, Iowa City is not technically “on the way” to the other side of Detroit, rather several hundred miles “out of the way.” And I was not technically “dying,” just lonely for Indians.
Richard Jack was Barney’s Menominee sidekick.
Someone Talking
The Man of Words speaks like the cricket refers to an image by N. Scott Momaday in his collection, The Way to Rainy Mountain: “Once I looked at the moon and caught sight of a strange thing. A cricket had perched upon the handrail, only a few inches away from me. My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal. A warm wind rose up and purled like the longing within me” (from The Way to Rainy Mountain, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1969, p. 12).
Noni Daylight is a fictional character who appeared in these early poems. First, the name Noni Daylight came forth as a cover for anonymity, then she invented herself as a full-fledged woman with a history and walked out of my poems. The last time I saw her was in the late seventies, when she appeared in a poem by Barney Bush. I never saw her again.
The poem “Someone Talking” has been revised. Among the revisions was the substitution of whiskey for the particular of Old Crow. There were too many proper nouns in the poem, a weakness of my earlier poems. I didn’t want to delete it as the original reference to Old Crow was a tribute to my friend Geary Hobson, a fellow writer and professor of mine at the University of New Mexico. I wish the tribute to remain, however, though the poem isn’t directly about him.
Fire
This poem is also a revised version. The original included too many proper nouns for such a small poem.
FROM SHE HAD SOME HORSES
Call It Fear
Goodluck is a common Navajo surname.
In the early 1970s the forty-nines in Albuquerque—which were the late-night reveries of Indians missing home and needing to sing to remember in the midst of cities and change—took place at the Juan Tabo campground area in the foothills of the Sandias. The park service stopped them there, chained off the area so we moved to the Volcano Cliffs area of Albuquerque on the west side of town. This area is characterized by sweeping volcanic flows toward the Rio Grande. From this vantage point you can see the lights of Albuquerque, the heart of the mountains, everything.
Anchorage
Audre Lorde was a warrior-poet who inspired many in her intense, well-lived life as a black, lesbian, human rights artist. The first I saw of her poetry was the book Coal (first published by W. W. Norton, New York, 1976), which jumped out at me off a bookshelf in the student bookstore in Iowa City. These were poems honoring her blackness and the poems provoked a shift within my own work. I had been struggling to find myself against the slant of European thought and form. “Anchorage” was inspired by her poem “Litany for Survival” from her collection, The Black Unicorn (first published by W. W. Norton, New York, 1978). I first heard her read the poem in Minneapolis in the very early eighties. That poem I consider the heart of her body of work. A spirit resides there. It feeds and continues to feed poetry.
On March 27, 1964, the second most powerful earthquake in recorded history devastated Anchorage. It registered 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasted approximately 4 to 6 minutes. More than a hundred people died, most of them from the tsunami that followed with huge waves of terrible power on the Pacific coast from Alaska all the way to Crescent City, California. The death toll could have been much worse had there been a denser population. It was the houses of the rich, I was told when I first visited Anchorage in April of 1984 as a guest of an Alaska native arts program, that tumbled into the ocean during that shaking of the earth.
Nora Dauenhauer is a fine Tlinget poet and translator of Tlinget literature. She now lives outside Juneau with her collaborator and husband, Richard Dauenhauer. Their first collaboration was a major inspiration. Because We Cherish You—Sealaska Elders Speak to the Future (Sealaska Heritage Foundation Press, Juneau, Alaska, 1981) was transcribed, translated, and edited by Nora and Richard. Nora Dauenhauer’s most recent book of poetry is Life Woven with Song (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2000).
Athabascan speakers encompass an extensive group from the Chipewyan, Kutchin, Carrier, and Sarsi peoples (in Canada), to the Tlinget (in Alaska), the Chasta-Costa (in Oregon), and the Hoopa (in California), to the Navajo (in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah) and the Apache (in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas).
In the late seventies or early eighties I visited Juneau and Anchorage, Alaska, as a visiting poet in one of the many national programs for taking poetry into the prisons. In Anchorage I was advanced $300 in cash of my travel monies to pay a deposit to Rent-A-Wreck for a refurbished police car, the only car I could rent because I didn’t own a credit card. I always tried to park it inconspicuously—so that none of the inmates would see the car and think I was an informer or police, though no one could probably see me, the car, or much of the outside at all.
In every prison and jail in which I was locked with inmates for the few hours of my workshops, stories and poems unraveled and with them tears, shame, desperation, and hope. Most of the prisoners were native and constituted a disproportionate number of the total prison population. Next were the black prisoners, and then the poor white men who’d come up north to work on the pipeline. They were in mostly for small crimes involving drugs and money. There I learned intimately the power of spoken and written word, how steel bars, fear, and oppression can be relieved by songs, poetry, and stories.
Nearly every inmate could recite literature from memory. Some recited their own poems, poems they memorized in school or their own poems kept tucked in their scarred hearts.
I’ll always remember Henry in the 6th Avenue jail in Anchorage. Every one of his outrageous stories was true, stories of impossible tests, escapes. Despite the bars he was still on the adventure of life and his spirit was buoyant, it shined. The last time I saw him he was called out to clean up the blood mess of his friend who had just attempted suicide. He bowed as he left us, pushing the mop and bucket the guard shoved to him. Henry’s heart was larger than that northern city and was what probably landed him in jail. He’d broken the law to help out a friend.
For Alva Benson . . .
Alva Benson was a fellow student at the University of New Mexico and a member of the politically active Indian student organization, the Kiva Club. She was deeply engaged in the major issues of those times, like the destruction of Black Mesa for coal, the mining of uranium, and the random and sadistic killings of native peoples in Navajoland and all over the country. I admired, too, the way she walked that difficult line of being half Navajo, half “biligaana” in a time when there were few breeds in the Navajo Nation. Graceful, I can still see her entering a meeting carrying her daughter, and then later with her daughter by her side as she passed out fliers and announcements for various political actions. Her life was taken suddenly by a freak accident that many say was not an accident, for there are no such events as accidents in our lives. We still miss her.
The Indian Hospital is usually a clinic or several clinics attached to a hosptial administered by the Indian Health Service, a branch of the Public Health Service (PHS). These hospitals are often the only health care facility for native people and serve many with severely limited funds and personnel.
Mount Saint Helens is a young volcano in the Cascade Range in the State of Washington, and was once known as the “Fuji of America” because of her resemblence to the famous Japanese volcano. On May 18, 1980, she erupted for a continuous nine hours and devastated more than 150 square miles of rest and recreation area, killing countless animals and leaving sixty people dead or missing. (USGS, Science for a Changing World, Cascades Volcano Observatory, Vancouver, WA, CVO Website—Mount Saint Helens Volcano, WA)
The eruption had been predicted in Mvskoke and other tribal prophecies as the marker of an era that would be characterized by destruction and loss if the inhabitants of this continent didn’t change the current of thinking, and remember to honor the gift of life.
Gloria Bird comments in the introduction of Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, Contemporary Native Women’s Literature (W. W. Norton, New York, 1997, p. 24): “my aunt once, when we were looking at what was left of Mount Saint Helens, commented in English, ‘Poor thing.’ Later, I realized that she spoke of the mountain as a person. In our stories . . . our relationship to the mountains as characters . . . is one of human-to-human. What was contained in her simple comment on Mount Saint Helens, Loowit, was sympathy and concern for the well-being of another human being—none of which she has to explain.”
Loowit is a northwest tribal name for Mount Saint Helens.
Meridel LeSueur (1900–1996) was the inspiring novelist and poet of the American 1930s. She was one of the very few writers of the thirties to focus on women, women who lost jobs, faced starvation, who struggled for survival. She wrote from a place of great female power. Birth and fecundity of the earth and all life were her major themes. I met her in Albuquerque at a gathering and she took me in, became a mentor, and stood by me during my struggles to become a poet. After the eruption of Mount Saint Helens she told me about the meaning of harmonic motion while we were driving in a car between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. She characterized it as the tremor of the earth as she gives birth, speaking of the context of the volcanic action as a labor contraction, giving birth to another world.
The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window
There is no east side of Chicago.
A popular style of jeans in the late 1970s and early ’80s were Levi’s 501’s.
One of the U.S. programs to attempt to disappear native people was a program called Relocation. The goal was the disappearance of Indian people, the logic being that if Indian families moved to the cities for jobs, to live, that they would become acculturated, would forget their “Indianness.” The federal government pushed for relocation of Indians from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Under relocation programs in those years, many Indians looking for jobs and housing moved into cities such as Chicago, Dallas-Forth Worth, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Oklahoma City. Don Fixico has written the first ethnohistory of modern urban Indians titled, The Urban Indian Experience in America (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2000).
White Bear
This poem was inspired by a series of prophecies told by Phillip Deer, an esteemed Mvskoke tribal member. In one of the predictions, I recall the image of a white bear moving down from the north. There was much speculation as to what the white bear symbol meant. Some thought the white bear represented the countries of Russia or China taking over North America. Others believed the image was directly connected to the blowing of Mount Saint Helens and the white ash that covered the Pacific Northwest from the fury of the explosion.
New Orleans
Conti Street, Royal, and Decatur are streets in the French Quarter section of New Orleans.
The French Market is an open market and has been in operation since New Orleans began as a city in 1718.
Hernando DeSoto was the first European contact by the Mvskoke Creek tribe. He landed on the western coast of Florida in 1539, bringing with him wishes and dreams for riches, an attitude of entitlement (backed up with an army in armor, mounted on horses), and numerous diseases for which the Creeks had no immunity.
Usually it is just the Cherokee whose forced migration from east to west is recognized as “The Trail of Tears,” but there were many tribes forced west, including the Mvskoke Creeks. The removal took place in stages. Some groups were taken by a southern route through New Orleans, brought up the Mississippi River on steamboats to the Arkansas River. The Monmouth was one of the contracted boats. On July 31, 1836, it was being piloted recklessly by a drunk crew when it collided with the Trenton, another steamboat. The Monmouth broke up and sank, killing over three hundred of the migrating Creeks. Many of those who survived were badly scalded by hot water.
She Had Some Horses
This poem was inspired by Simon Ortiz’s poem/song for his daughter Rainy, “There Are Horses Everywhere.” (Simon Ortiz’s most recent book of poetry is After and Before the Lightning, from the University of Arizona Press, 1994, part of the Sun Tracks Series.)
Creek Stomp Dance songs are traditional Mvskoke songs that are a call and response form with rhythm (and meaning) provided by turtle shell rattles tied to the women dancers’ legs. Dancers move counterclockwise around the fire.
I Give You Back
This poem was inspired by Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival,” from The Black Unicorn (W. W. Norton, 1978).
FROM SECRETS FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD
If You Look with the Mind of the Swirling Earth
Shiprock or Naat’aani Neez is a large Navajo community in the northwest part of New Mexico. It is marked by a huge rock that appears to look like a ship. Naat-aanii means boss, chief, or leader. Neez means tall.
It Is an Honor
The book and many of my poems are influenced by Navajo philosophy and literature. This is an excerpt of the Navajo Night Chant song. N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa writer and artist, published it in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, House Made of Dawn (the most recent printing is the HarperCollins, New York, 1999 edition):
Tsegihi.
House made of dawn,
House made of evening light,
House made of dark cloud,
House made of male rain,
House made of dark mist,
House made of female rain,
House made of pollen,
House made of grasshoppers,
Dark cloud is at the door.
The trail out of its dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.
Male deity!
Your offering I make.
I have prepared a smoke for you.
Restore my feet for me.
Restore my legs for me.
Restore my body for me.
Restore my mind for me.
Restore my voice for me.
This very day take out your spell for me.
Your spell moves from me.
You have taken it away for me;
Far off it has gone.
Happily I recover.
Happily my interior becomes cool.
Happily I go forth.
My interior feeling cool, may I walk.
No longer sore, may I walk.
Impervious to pain, may I walk.
With lively feelings may I walk.
As it used to be long ago, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
Happily, with abundant dark clouds, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant showers, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk.
May it be beautiful before me,
May it be beautiful behind me,
May it be beautiful below me,
Maybe it be beautiful above me,
Maybe it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.
FROM IN MAD LOVE AND WAR
Grace
I attended graduate school in Iowa at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop during two of the worst winters of the century. The world slowed down with the freeze and the lack of sunlight was nearly devestating to this sun lover. I felt abandoned by the giver of life. Everything froze: the sky, exhaust from vehicles, my ability to write or dream and I didn’t always handle it well. I took myself and my complaints too seriously and let the dark take me down. In those bleak moments Darlene Wind always reminded me to laugh, and we had plenty to laugh about given history and how we ended up in Iowa City at Iva’s doorstep, trying to make it in this world. Iva Roy took us in, showed us around that country that belonged to her people, the Meskwaki, or the Fox. My children found family with hers, ran through the cornfields that are no longer there. She took us home to the Meskwaki Settlement where the people have maintained integrity of culture in the midst of cornfields and a European mind field. The excellent poet Ray Young Bear whose most recent book, The Rock Island Hiking Club (University of Iowa Press, 2001), is from the Settlement.
I got out of Iowa as soon as I got my degree and headed back to New Mexico and the sun, stopping as always in Oklahoma. It wasn’t until 1994 when I returned to speak and perform for the Iowa Summer Writers’ Program that I went back to the city that had tested me, with cold, with loneliness, with self-doubt. When I landed at the Cedar Rapids Airport I called home to check my messages. There was an urgent message from Darlene. I hadn’t heard from Darlene in a long while, too long. The message was short, sorrowful. Iva Roy had died suddenly and her body had been sent back to Iowa and would I meet her there for Iva’s wake, the burial? Strange that in all the several thousand days since I left Iowa I return on the one day, the day of Iva’s final return. But no coincidence. There is no such thing as coincidence. There is a meaning to the pattern no matter how convoluted.
I prepared myself and drove out to the Settlement to pay my respects to Iva’s family, then drove to the funeral home in Tama for another farewell. Iva’s body had been dressed in traditional clothes for her journey. I’d only seen her in her modest dress of T-shirt and jeans, or her shawl at powwows. Any money always went for rent and food and getting the children what they needed, and then their children, not for new clothes. I spoke to her, giving her my thank-yous for all the kindnesses, the good times, and then prayed for her journey to the place in which she would not have to struggle so hard for her life. I know I will see her again.
James Welch is a major Blackfeet writer and poet from Montana. His first book of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40 (Harper & Row, New York, 1971), and his first novel, Winter in the Blood (Harper & Row, New York, 1974), inspired me early in my writing career. My first meeting with Jim was in Amsterdam in 1980 for the One World Poetry Festival. It was an amazing event, with poets in from everywhere in the world including Jamaica and Africa. Most inspiring was to meet Okot p’Bitek from Uganda whose lyric poem, Song of Lawino (East Africa Publishing House, Nairobi, Kenya, 1969), is a world classic. He died shortly after that festival. Watching Linton Kwesi Johnson, the dub poet from Jamaica perform in the Milkweg made me think of rhythm in poetry differently. Rhythm starts from the inside, from the heart of the human, the planet, the solar system, the universe. It’s coherence; it’s the core.
Jim and I hooked up. We were interviewed together and I admit we were very irreverent and did not act the part of the Indians the press had romanticized. Jim did not have hair down his back or feathers and beads, but looked rather scholarly and sheepish, and I was dressed like any twenty-something poet on the fringes of the world. We escaped. It was Jim’s birthday. We had dinner with Allen Ginsberg and his entourage, then walked one end of Amsterdam to another, from the red-light district to the lobby of the hotel from which we had to call a taxi because no one dared to pick us up on the street in that nearly dawn hour. I’ve always enjoyed Jim’s hangback wit, his appreciation of beauty and symmetry of humans and stories.
I wrote the first draft on the back of an envelope while flying back from a writing conference in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where Jim and I had read together. We’d all gotten a little crazy on mescal the night before, convinced the sponsor to swallow the worm, claimed it was an old Blackfeet/Creek tradition and we would be offended if he refused the worm. He did so heartily. This poem is dedicated to Jim because as I flew over Iowa the whole state was white with snow and I recalled the time I did in Iowa and the winters of Jim’s world and how a laconic humor makes the slide a little easier.
Coyote and Rabbit are trickster figures, that is, the prototypes for humans. Bob Thomas, a wise and witty Cherokee professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, told me once over biscuits that Rabbit is neither male nor female, rather an androgynous figure who walks the edge.
Leech Lake is a reservation in Minnesota of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.
Deer Dancer
The Buffalo Calf Woman appeared to the Lakota at a time when they needed to know how to live. John Fire Lame Deer says in Seeker of Visions, The Life of a Sioux Medicine Man (an autobiography cowritten with Richard Erdoes, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1972) that in those times “They knew nothing. The Buffalo Woman put her sacred mind into their minds.” She appeared to the Lakota in both a human form, as a beautiful woman, and as a buffalo. She brought to them the sacred pipe, corn, wasna (or pemmican), wild turnip and taught the people many things, showed them the right way to live. When she left she said she would return every generation cycle. The birth of the white buffalo in Janesville, Wisconsin, on August 20, 1994, is understood by many as the return as promised of White Buffalo Woman. Arvol Looking Horse, the caretaker of the White Buffalo Calf Woman pipe in this generation, said as he prepared for a ceremony at the Janesville farm shortly after the birth of the calf, “The prophesies are being fulfilled. . . . We are starting to see a coming together of people going back to their natural ways” (from “Looking Horse Family Keepers of Original Lakota Sacred Pipe,” by Neal White, Beloit Daily News, September 13, 1994).
There are many stories of the face of Jesus appearing in a tortilla. The first I knew occurred in a small town in northern New Mexico, near Chacon where my friend, the poet Leo Romero, was born. The face of Jesus appeared on a burned tortilla meant for breakfast. It was considered a miracle and many people from all over New Mexico, even Mexico, made pilgrimages to see the Christ image in the tortilla. Many miracle cures were attributed to the sight.
In the introduction of Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort’s anthology Through the Eye of the Deer (Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, California, 1999), the editors remind us that the traditional Mvskoke Deer Woman “is the spirit we are warned about as children, the spirit that bewitches those who are suseptible to her sexual favors and who can be enticed away from family and clan into misuse of sexual energy” (p. xi).
The way it was told to me it was on the night of a blizzard that a mysterious young Indian woman in a red dress suddenly appeared in the Milwaukee Indian bar. When the popular country western tune sung by Kenny Rogers came on she stood on a table and peeled off her clothes, dancing with memory to the sad ballad of a man bemoaning the fact that his beloved Lucille left him with four hungry children and crops in the field. She had the sudden attention of the tatters of men playing pool who could not believe the vision. Then, went the story that as the song neared the end many of them ran over to the jukebox and fed it with quarters, punching in C-12 LUCILLE. Lucille over and over again all night, until way past closing time. The song is still playing in that bar way up north. I always wondered what happened to her, after her dance on the sticky, worn table in the bar, a dance driven by heartache on a night when the whole town had closed for the storm and only fools went out in it. Did she make it to where she was going? Did someone lend a hand or was she ambushed by other desperate ones after the dance? Did she go home? I’ve kept a place in my heart for her. There are tall stands of pine trees near a clear, deep lake. It is early in the morning and she is safe.
For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash . . .
In February 1976, an unidentified body of a young woman was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The official autopsy attributed death to exposure and alcohol. The FBI agent present at the autopsy ordered her hands severed and sent to Washington for fingerprinting. John Trudell, one of the leaders of the American Indian Movement, rightly called this mutilation an act of war. Her unnamed body was buried. When Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a young Micmac woman who was an active American Indian Movement member, was discovered missing by her friends and relatives, a second autopsy was demanded. It was then discovered she had been killed by a bullet fired at close range to the back of her head. She had not died of exposure and there was no alcohol in her blood. Her killer or killers have yet to be identified.
Bird
Charlie Parker was also known as Bird or Yardbird. Yardbird is another word for chicken and Parker loved to eat chicken. Bird was for Parker’s tendency to fly, to run either in his life or on his horn. He revolutionized jazz with harmonic possibilities and an amazing rhythmic syntax. He was bebop, a movement of jazz characterized by dazzling improvisation of complex harmonic and rhythmic idioms.
The Catalinas and Rincons are two of the mountain ranges that surround Tucson, Arizona.
The Real Revolution Is Love
Managua is the capital of Nicaragua.
Yerbabuenas are drinks made with healthy portions each of rum, fresh mint, sugar, and water. I first had one in Nicaragua around 1986 at the International Poetry Festival hosted by the liberation theologist priest and poet Ernesto Cardinale.
Diane Burns is an Anishnabe poet from Wisconsin who lives in New York City. Her first book of poetry Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II Publications, New York, 1981) is a classic of contemporary American Indian poetry.
I saw a vision of a wild-haired Puerto Rican dressed all in black carrying a painted black suitcase with some kind of non sequitur splashed in white ink across it. I thought: I am imagining things, imagining humans and I was and I was not. It was Managua and we were all checking into the festival, a poetry festival in Nicaragua. The vision was real and I met Pedro Pietri, a Puerto Rican–American poet from New York City. He appeared to be acting but he wasn’t acting. The comic import of life was there in his large, compassionate eyes, in every gesture—all born from his heart. I immediately loved him, as did everyone: other poets, kids, dogs, the sun, the moon.
A few mornings later the poetry delegation scrambled to be up at dawn though we had partied most of the night. Our ride, a flatbed truck headed for the coffee plantation in Matagalpa, was waiting and we couldn’t find Pedro, just his shoes. Of course, this led to all kinds of speculation and we reluctantly left without him. When we returned later that afternoon, there he was fresh and crisp from a shower, from lounging and making friends at the market with the locals. He told our dusty and exhausted crew what happened. In the early morning hours after the yerbabuena party he had fallen asleep on the couch of what he thought was our suite, the poets’ suite. When he woke up the next morning he sat down at the table with the other guests—a delegation of visiting Russian diplomats stiffly having breakfast. He wondered where we were and why this strange group was suddenly there at our communal table. He sat with them, smiling as he drank his coffee and ate his bread. He didn’t understand why they kept staring at him until he saw himself in the mirror later. His hair was straight up and he had forgotten to put on any clothes.
The poem “The Real Revolution Is Love” was revised after several musical performances with my first band, Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice.
Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On
Louis Oliver or Little Coon was born April 9, 1904, in Coweta, Creek Nation, Indian Territory, and was of the Raccoon Clan. He was also the oldest and most earnest student in a one-day workshop of Creek and Cherokee students I taught in the late seventies at the Flaming Rainbow University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. After the class he approached me with a stack of poetry he had been writing on his own for years, poems dependent on European verse forms. My workshop was the first time he realized that he could abandon the strict metrics and patterns of European forms and take up more organic forms, forms that fit his Muscogean subject matter. Shortly thereafter he met native poets: Carroll Arnett, Cherokee; Barney Bush, Shawnee; Lance Henson, Cheyenne; and Joseph Bruchac, Abnaki, and began writing the wise and witty poetry that would comprise his published work. The Horned Snake was published in 1982 (Cross-Cultural Communications, Merick, New York) when he was seventy-eight years old. His last book was Chasers of the Sun: Creek Indian Thoughts (Greenfield Review Press, Greenfield Center, New York, 1991).
Santa Fe
The DeVargas Hotel has been reborn as the Hotel St. Francis and sits at the corner of Don Gaspar and Water Streets in Santa Fe.
There are sacred places on this earth, places that generate power, hold and even protect power. People are drawn to these places, including “power” companies that translate power into economic terms. Assisi is one of these places, the home of St. Francis. I was familiar with St. Francis because as a high school student at Indian school I often walked by the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe and read the plaque under the statue of St. Francis. I learned that he is considered by Catholics as the patron saint of animals, that he lived between the years of 1182 and 1226, and was the cofounder of the Franciscan Order. He was born into a wealthy family but denounced his father’s wealth in 1206. Francis then began to live as a hermit and lived a simple lifestyle, a lifestyle that included love and respect for all life. He composed a famous poem, “Canticle of Brother Sun,” in which he praises the Sun and Moon and Stars as living beings, as well as Wind and Air. He saw love (God) in all living things, which was quite heretical in those days, even in these days.
The power of that love as it revealed itself in St. Francis is still in Assisi. I was stunned to feel it there when I visited in 1998. I didn’t expect it. It is a palpable power, especially in the small chapel built by him and his followers, and in the fields and trees of the countryside. It is still there, transforming the world. That love blew me open. In Assisi was the first time I ever felt such love in a church. And it wasn’t about the church at all, it came from the countryside on which the church was built, from the sun, the moon, the connection of all life including the plants and animals. This is my understanding of the meaning of power, of St. Francis.
Desire
This poem could not have been written without Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (from Collected Poems. Copyright ©1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York).
The Book of Myths
The island of Manhattan was purchased by the Dutch from a delegation of hunters who were just passing through the area in pursuit of deer, for $24 worth of trade goods. They were not the lands’ owners. The indigenous people at that time had no concept of ownership of land.
Nadema Agard, a Cherokee, Lakota, and Powhatan artist lives near Inwood Park, the site where the Dutch purchased the island. She was told by a very elderly Indian woman some twenty years ago that Indian people were still living in the park in the early twentieth century. Indians also had squatting rights in Central Park, before it became Central Park in 1859.
Hunter College is a liberal arts college on the Upper East Side of New York City. Audre Lorde had a presidentially appointed position there as a poet-in-residence in the 1980s.
Helen of Troy in Greek mythology was considered the most beautiful woman in the world in fifth century B.C. Greece. She was the daughter of the god Zeus and of Leda, wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta. Helen’s beauty was the direct cause of the Trojan War.
Marilyn Monroe is an American goddess. The actress’s blonde, pouting looks and accentuated figure became the standard of Euro-American female erotic power in the mid-twentieth century.
Transformations
Once in the very early eighties I stayed at the house of two friends in Santa Fe as I prepared for a solo journey around the United States. Early one morning while I was up writing I saw a moving shadow in one of the bedrooms and got up to check it out. My friend was still sleeping in the half-light of early morning. Standing next to her was her other-self, a shadow self who was urgently trying to get the attention of the sleeping self. It made sense given the condition of her life as a woman caught between two lovers.
Eagle Poem
The Salt River or Rio Salado flows through Tempe, Arizona. Josiah Moore, an O’odam and Pima educator, leader, and friend, told me that the river was an historical gathering place for his people. He remembered when the banks were lined with cottonwoods. He remembered horses and wagons lined up along the river, enjoying the cool oasis. When he told me this in the early eighties the river had been dammed and was kept in Lake Roosevelt. What remained was a winding dusty ditch that became an angry river after the urgent rainstorms that arrived every rainy season. Now, I’ve heard, there is water again because the City of Tempe businesses wanted the water to flow again through the city.
FROM THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY
The Creation Story
There are many versions of the creation story. In one Mvskoke version the ground opened up and the people came out. The Wind Clan people were the first to emerge. Henry Marsey Harjo, my great-grandfather was of the Wind Clan; my great-grandmother Katie Monahwee of the Tiger Clan. Because clan association traditionally comes through the mother, my father’s mother was the Tiger Clan. She passed this clan on to him, and I am associated with this clan.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
The inspiration for “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” is a classic, an Iroquois creation story of the same name. A pregnant woman falls (or is pushed, depending on the version) through the hole beneath the Great Tree. She falls and falls until birds assist her, carry her to the back of the Sea Turtle. On Sea Turtle’s back she grows roots and plants she has carried from the Sky World. This is the beginning of this world as we know it (www.crystalinks.com/iroquois.html).
There were many stories of children like Johnny who ran away from Indian boarding school and froze to death or lost their feet to the cold. Laura Tohe’s award-winning collection of poems, No Parole Today (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1999), addresses the Indian school experience.
I once traveled far above the earth for a different perspective. It is possible to travel this way without the complications of NASA. This beloved planet we call home was covered with an elastic web of light. I watched in awe as it shimmered, stretched, dimmed, and shined, shaped by the collective effort of all life within it. Dissonance attracted more dissonance. Harmony attracted harmony. I saw revolutions, droughts, famines, and the births of new nations. The most humble kindnesses made the brightest lights. Nothing was wasted.
The Flood
Embedded in Muscogee tribal memory is the tie snake or estakwvnayv, a large blue watersnake who can transform himself. He represents the power of the Lower World.
A Postcolonial Tale
This poem was rewritten to be performed. When the band was rehearsing it, a chorus was added and I rearranged the poem to go with a song form based on a northern style Plains powwow song.
The Myth of Blackbirds
Countless treks have been made and are still being made by Indian delegations to the capital of the “biligaana-white-man-wacichu-este-hvtke- haole,” or Washington, D.C., to discuss business on a nation to nation basis.
Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century
The Igbo are a west African tribal people.
One of the world’s largest airports is O’Hare, west of Chicago.
Tallahasee Grounds or Tvlvhasse is a ceremonial grounds of the upper Creeks, reestablished in Indian Territory.
Promise of Blue Horses
All time is simultaneous. It is layered and may appear in the shape of a coiled snake or in waves like the ocean. The inside is the outside.
The Place the Musician Became a Bear
I heard about Jim Pepper years before I ever met him during one of my trips to perform poetry in New York, and he invited me, a beginning sax player, to his apartment in Brooklyn. We listened to the sax gods of Ben Webster, Cannonball Adderly, and his other inspirations and influences, talked Oklahoma and home, and then he’d disappear for his fix, the subway beneath his apartment building shaking the world like a huge underground snake. He’d return with a smile and we’d keep listening. Deeper and deeper.
Jim was a fine jazz tenor and soprano jazz saxophonist and, at the urging of Don Cherry and other musicians with whom he played, had begun constructing a music that married the traditional elements of jazz with Muscogean and Plains tribal musics.
I’ve always believed us Creeks had something to do with the origin of jazz. It only makes sense. When the west Africans were forced here they were brought to the traditional lands of the Muscogee peoples and, of course, there were interactions between Africans and Muscogees.
So, it wasn’t so strange for Jim to pick up a saxophone and find his way to jazz.
When he died I knew he had gone to the Milky Way and had left us his gift of music—I think of him at the ceremonial grounds when I see the fire climb, turn to stars.
Or when I walk the streets of New York City and hear the music of the subways.
Fishing
Night crawlers are earthworms used for fishing bait.
A few weeks before he died I wrote my friend the Muscogee poet, Louis Oliver, a promise I would go fishing with him in Oklahoma that summer. Fishing to Louis was a holy communion. The struggle of the universe is exemplified in the sport. It’s possible to find the right answer to every question with the right pole, the right place in the river.
As I mailed the letter I had a strange feeling the letter would never reach him. That cloud of illogic hovered over me for a few days. When I was informed of his death, I knew I had to keep that promise.
This is how I kept it.
Promise
The spring before my granddaughter Krista’s birth I was a passenger on a plane approaching Tucson. We ran into storm clouds and were told to expect violent turbulence. I understood the rain clouds were there at the request of the earth, to bring rain. I requested mercy, that the plane be guided down gently. They gathered not long after for Krista’s birth. I knew they were with us, blessing her.
The Dawn Appears with Butterflies
I was on my way to Tuba City, located in northern Arizona in the heartland of Hopi and Navajo country. I’d made plans to stop at Second Mesa in Hopiland to see some friends of mine whose daughter was going to take part in the Butterfly Dance, her first dance.
I stopped first at Rosanda’s mother’s house for exact directions, as I had been told. She told me to come in; she had some bad news. Rosanda’s husband had died quite suddenly of a condition that had been in remission. Because he had so looked forward to his daughter’s participation in the Butterfly Dance the family decided to go ahead with her part in it. They knew that he would be able to see her anyway, that his spirit was much like a butterfly.
The next few days unfolded with grief as well as laughter as the family prepared for the burial and release of this man who had lived respectfully. They told stories, fed visitors, they remembered him by sharing.
The afternoon before his burial Rosanda went to pick out the shirt in which to bury him. She brought a couple of them into the living room to show me.
“What do you think of this one?” she asked. “I bought this shirt for him three years ago. It’s my favorite and he would never wear it.”
We laughed, thinking of him wearing the shirt she loved, the shirt he refused to wear, through eternity.
I’m sure he laughed with us. That’s the way he was.
FROM A MAP TO THE NEXT WORLD
Songline of Dawn
The original use of the word songline refers to the Australian Aboriginal concept of enforcing relationship to the land, to each other, to ancestors via the mapping of meaning with songs and narratives. Bruce Chatwin suggested in The Songlines (Penguin, New York, 1987) that the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score, where a musical phrase is like a map reference.
All has been sung into existence. Every sunrise is sung and makes a continuous dawning all over the world. I am connected to my daughters and son by thought, by heart just as they are connected to their children, and so on and so on. Eventually we all connect: humans, animals, plants, planets, universes, deity.
There is a small wetlands just off I-25 in Albuquerque, north of an exit just past I-40. It is a small pond of cattails and grasses not much larger than three or four junked cars. During my last visit there was reconstruction of that part of the highway and the wetlands may have been destroyed by the earthmovers. The morning sun always lingered there in fall and spring, in the company of migrating birds.
A Map to the Next World
In the months before the birth of my third granddaughter Desiray, a Navajo deity appeared to a blind woman who lived far away from the cities in a distant part of the reservation. This was an unusual occurrence, something unheard of in recent history. Such visits come about historically only in times of terrible stress, when the people have lost their way. The deity explained that the people were in danger, and that unless they kept up the traditions that made them particularly Navajo, a complex and beautiful system of prayer and thanksgiving, they would suffer the loss of what makes them powerful in this world.
After this visit many people made pilgrimages to the old woman’s hogan to see the place the deity stood, to hear the story once again and talk about it with each other. We who heard the story in Albuquerque talked about it, pondered it as we watched the kids’ basketball games, ate dinner together, or dressed for work. We considered the meaning and timing of the appearance of this shimmering one, and wondered how it will continue to mean in this world apparently driven into craziness by violence and greed.
The End
Perhaps there is a current called “the end” and we catch the wave of it by luck, karma, or some other means of logic. Each process has a cycle. The end is one part of the cycle and it recurs according to the spin. The night of the poem the end slithered through the unconciousness of the city. It appeared in the dark vaguely as a giant lizard, close to the Mvskoke description of a tie snake, a monster from the waters of the deep conscious. It whipped around, knocking dreamers into nightmares, dragging us through our fears at the deepest point of the night.
Why does evil exist? I ask the question we all continue to ask. And why does evil often sit in the chairs of rulers, presiding over history, over human and other lives they are charged to protect? We are the ones who give these people power. Andrew Jackson became president after receiving high war honors by the U.S. government. He was responsible for the killing of Mvskoke women and children who resisted being forced from their homelands.
Why is it leaders are chosen according to the ability to acquire power and money, not because of their outstanding gifts of service, compassion, and love for the community?
Destruction is the part of any process, like weeding, and we need to constantly hone ourselves to be made strong, not to rule and destroy but to continue toward a beautiful sense of meaning and order. There is an exact address of compassion and in this place even Pol Pot and Andrew Jackson will one day open their eyes. But it is sometimes difficult to translate this knowing into the here and now where men like Pol Pot and Andrew Jackson are honored for their acts and are perceived as powerful, and women raising children are not.
Songs from the House of Death . . .
I imagine someone walking through the ruins of my house, years later when I am gone and anyone who knew me and my family and nation is gone and there are only speculations as to what happened to us. The shells and shards of memory are searched for meaning. Did we flee from an enemy, or die of famine or floods? I think back to the ruins of a house in Chaco Canyon, Anasazi ruins near Crownpoint, New Mexico. The winds are cool and steady and through the years they have eroded the adobe. There is no protection from the sun and rain. Tourists quickly pass through ruins. The clouds, too, walk on. Everything keeps moving. Even me, moved by my thoughts through the house, through time. I converse with my own death, which is already leaving a track behind me, like the ruins of this house.
The Path to the Milky Way Leads Through Los Angeles
Okmulgee is the capital of the Creek Nation west of the Mississippi. It is said that my family once owned most of the town. And there’s a story told me by my Aunt Lois Harjo who talked of the appearance of the first traffic light in town. She and her mother and sisters stood at the corner waiting for the signal to cross. When the light turned green they tentatively started across, then the light turned yellow. “My mother was so nervous,” she said, “she turned around and slapped your grandmother.” I think about this every time I drive through Okmulgee and pass by that traffic light that still dangles above the street. It is probably the original one.
The Power of Never
Our drama and dance troupe from the Institute of American Indian Arts toured the Pacific Northwest, including the theater under the Space Needle in June 1968. The show was called Deep Roots, Tall Cedar. It featured the plays of Monica Charles, Klallam playwright, and choreography by Rosalie Jones, Blackfeet. We were directed by Roland Meinholtz. He taught us all aspects of stagecraft and treated us as professionals. We responded in turn.
Hold Up
I follow my friend Greg from the truck up the sidewalk. I can smell the water of the Pacific in the air. Two young boys approach on the sidewalk. Greg greets the boys with familiar terms, as one would speak to young relatives on the road: “Hello brothers.” Next I hear in response from a young male voice: “I am going to kill you.” I step back in slow motion and cannot believe I am hearing this. A tree rustling with empathy blocks my view. I feel as if I am dreaming this until the second boy is suddenly holding a gun to my head and tells me to give him everything. Now they are no longer boys. They are harbingers of death, holding our lives in their childish, dangerous hands.
I imagine a karate kick, the gun flying up as the boy sprawls disabled on the ground and I turn to take on his partner, but I also know in my lizard brain that this could trigger a panic that could kill my friend and/or myself. I split into several tracks of awareness. I can hear the spin of the earth, literally. The urge to live surges through the trees, each blade of grass, each particular flower and leaf surrouding us.
My death is a huge thing, too large to argue with but I do comment that it is a little earlier than we agreed on. And death says nothing but nods its head. Also, I note to death, I do not want to die without honor, here on the streets of this city by the hands of children. I think of the twin monster slayer stories of the Navajo. Perhaps the monsters are disguised as these two baby thieves. Or maybe in their eyes we are the monsters, the ones who appear to have money because of the neighborhood they found us in. I think of my babies but I have to turn my heart the other way or I will dissolve into grief. Yet I know this is not the natural end of the story, not the way our linked destiny had it in mind, and still I know that everything can turn, unnaturally, sudden.
The boy with the gun at my head almost shoots me with his cheap gun because he is terrified. Strange to find a child in the face of a monster and I want to ask him, “Where is your father, your mother?” but that wise voice in me says, “Be quiet!”
Then the boy backs up, his gun pointed at my heart. I can hear Greg’s voice in the dark, and see the boys backing off, their guns still aimed at us to keep us back. They turn to walk off into the twisted maw of the glittering city, counting our money, our possessions as bounty. Only then do I hear the pounding of my heart. Only then do I feel the tremble of Greg’s life as we hold each other up.
Returning from the Enemy
“Grandmother Spider [my italics] appears in many forms in tribal narratives. She is woman as Creatrix, giver of life, guide, nurturer, and protector” (Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort, Through the Eye of the Deer, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1999, p. xiv).
The use of smallpox infected blankets was a form of chemical warfare employed to destroy native peoples in North America. The idea apparently came from Lord Amherst who in a letter of orders to Colonel Bouquet in July of 1763 said, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” Bouquet replied that he would try and use infected blankets as a means of introducing the disease among the Indians, but was wary of the effects it would have on his own men. In his book, The Conspiracy of Pontiac (vol. 2, Bison Edition, The Library of America, New York, 1991, also edited by William P. Taylor), Francis Parkman also states that there is no evidence that Bouquet ever used the smallpox plan, although an epidemic raged among the Ohio Indians “a few months after” the above correspondance.
Ghost crabs live on sandy beaches of the Atlantic coast of North America and can be quite large. They are also very musical and are both percussionists and singers. A ghost crab came to give me a message in New Smyrna Beach outside a fish-and-chips place located between the beach and the river. The crab was quite wise and in one glance I saw the beginning and end of an era of emotional turmoil. I’ll always remember his dignity as he turned and disappeared into the waving sea grass.
The Ceremony
My band was performing two shows a day a the Cultural Olympiad at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when the bomb exploded near the stage we had played on just a few hours before. And as in any explosion the impact makes concentric circles of an infinite number out into the world. Everything changed. I went home and broke up a relationship. I was dying. I had been dying for a long time.
I walked back through the house we had made together of hopes and dreams and as I gathered up my belongings to move out I made a ceremony for leaving. I went to every room and thanked it for the good times, for what I learned during the worst. I talked to the plants, smelled clothes, and touched the things that would no longer be intimate to me. It was not easy and I had to stop within the circle many times. I imagine when I die I will perform the same ceremony. My spirit, though anxious to leave the body of slow earth movement and pain, will turn briefly to acknowledge the husk it is leaving behind. Then it will go.
Protocol
Pikake is the jasmine flower.
Maile is a fragrant vine used to make leis for special occasions.
Tobacco is a sacred plant of the Mvskoke and for many other tribes. Plants have viability and purpose, just as anything created in this universe. There’s a story told of how the plant came to the Mvskoke. A young couple who had just been married lie down together on their way back to the young warrior’s encampment to make their home. Later, when the young man passed by the place, as he was savoring sweet memories, he saw a pretty little plant growing there. He tended it and every time he passed he stopped and took care of it. When it matured he took some of the good-smelling leaves from the plant. At his campfire there one night he was told by the creating spirit to put the leaves into the fire. The leaves smelled even better. He took them back to the old men of the tribe and told them the story of the plant. One of the men crumbled some of the leaves then smoked them in a hollowed-out corncob. The aroma swirled around the encampment, gave a sweet smell. The people agreed that the leaves were good and have used them ever since.
The Creeks valued the tobacco plant so highly they made it a warrior and gave it the war name hitci.
The tobacco cultivated by the Mvskoke was not the tobacco known today, rather of the Nicotiana rustica, a plant native to the central Andes (from Southern Indians Myths and Legends, compiled and edited by Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens, Beechwood Books, Leeds, Alabama, 1985, p. 68).
Morning Song
Since the first published edition of A Map to the Next World, this poem has become a song with repeated phrases to accommodate melody.
NEW POEMS, 1999–2001
In Praise of Earth
This poem was written as a commission from the Racine Chorus, in collaboration with Brent Michael Davids, the Mohegan composer and musician. The performed commission was titled, “She Is One of Us.” It was first performed in October 2000.
Stickball is a game played among the Mvskoke with lacrosse-like sticks and a ball. It is called the “little brother of war” because it is meant to replace all-out war and was often used for resolution of disputes in Mvskoke communities.
Earth and Sun are capitalized as they are entities with spirit and soul and are known by many proper names.
Letter (with songline) to the Breathmaker
Hesaketvmese or Maker of Breath represents the wind spirit. Jean Hill Chaudhauri and Joyotpaul Chaudhauri, in their book A Sacred Path, the Way of the Muscogee Creeks (UCLA Indian Studies Center, 2001), make the point that the Christians turned Hesaketvmese into the Christian God, when he was just an assistant to Ibofanga, the ultimate and singular universal spirit.
Plumeria is also known by the name of frangipani. It is a fragrant flowering tree in Hawai’i that is often used in the making of leis. The name frangipani comes from Muzio Frangipani, a sixteenth-century Italian marquis. While living in Paris he created a perfume for scenting gloves based on bitter almonds, which is similar to the smell of red jasmine flowers (www.burkesbackyard.com.au/facts/2000/hawaii_36.html).
At the beginning of the season of the 2000 elections, the Washington State Republican Party overwhelmingly passed a resolution to terminate Indian tribal governments. This resolution called for the government to “immediately take whatever steps necessary to terminate all non-republican forms of government on Indian reservations.” This extremist resolution was headed by the sponsor, John Fleming, a Skagit County delegate and non-Indian resident of an Indian reservation. He adamantly insisted that if American Indians resist, “the U.S. Army and the Air Force and the Marines and the National Guard are going to have to battle back.”
This poem was an experiment to include this racist and hateful event in a poem, to see what would happen. Could the poem contain it? Destroy the poison? The first drafts name the Republican Party and the resolution. Eventually the direct references fell away. And history went on. The resolution did not become a plank in the national Republican Party but the hatefulness that wrote the resolution still chokes. Andrew Jackson is still here, as is Hernando de Soto, Cotton Mather, and all the rest of those who believe in the superiority of one people over another, one set of gods over another.
There is communication between planets, stars, and other heavenly bodies. All is alive, near and far, and we communicate by light, by senses, by all of the layers beyond the senses.
I Am Not Ready to Die Yet
Poi is a staple of the Hawaiian diet. It is made by pounding the taro root and is unique to the Hawaiian people.
Naming
Vanessa, Toshi and Tamarin Chee, and Krista Chico are granddaughters who are part of the Tvlvhasse Ceremonial grounds and take part in the women’s ribbon dance. This is a children’s poem.
Equinox
This poem is for Gregory Sarris.
Ah, Ah
Outrigger canoe paddling is a racing tradition of the Polynesians. I paddled the 2000 outrigger canoe season for Anuenue Canoe Club, the renowned Nappy Napoleon’s club in Waikiki, Hawai’i. I began the paddling season of 2001 with the Marina Del Rey Canoe Club in southern California but traveling kept me away from too many practices and I had to reluctantly drop out from what is an excellent canoe club. There are outrigger racing clubs all over the Pacific and the North American Pacific coast. There is now even an outrigger canoe club in Italy.
Morning Prayers
The phrase Carry us all to the top of the mountain is derived from the Dr. Martin Luther King speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered in support of the striking sanitation workers at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assissinated.
The Everlasting
Ingrid Washinawatok was shot to death along with Terence Freitas and Lahena’e Gay near the Columbia/Venezuelan border after they were kidnapped on February 25, 1999. They were in the country at the request of the U’wa people of Columbia who have been fighting the Occidental Petroleum Company’s plans to drill oil on ancestral U’wa lands.
The U’wa people issued a statement August 10, 1988, that said: “Today we feel that we’re fighting a large and strong spirit that wants to beat us or force us to submit to a law contrary to that which Sira (God) established and wrote in our hearts, even before there was the sun and the moon. When faced with such a thing, we are left with no alternative than to continue fighting on the side of the sky and earth and spirits or else disappear when the irrationality of the invader violates the most sacred of our laws.”
And If I Awaken in Los Angeles
The voice of jazz singer Billie Holiday carries centuries of grief. Her phrasing was impeccable, a balance between chains and flight.
It’s Raining in Honolulu
The second overthrow refers to the Cayetano v. Rice decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Hawai’i’s practice of allowing only the beneficiaries of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), indigenous Hawaiians, to vote for OHA trustees.
OHA is a semi-autonomous trust designated to function as the primary agency for the betterment of the Native Hawaiian people and was created by popular vote of all Hawai’i’s citizens.
Rushing the Pali
Pali means cliff in Hawaiian. The Pali is the name of the cliff over which Kamehameha’s warriors pushed the O’ahu warriors in order to take over O’ahu and unite the islands by violence. It was pivotal battle in uniting the islands. The Pali is also the name of the highway that runs from H-1 in Honolulu over the Ko’olau’s toward Kailua.
Kewalo is the name of a basin and surfing area on the south shore of O’ahu. Outcasts intended for sacrifice were once drowned here (Place Names of Hawaii, Pukui and Elbert and Mookini, University of Hawaii Press, 1974).
All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.