Only the Indian people are the original people of America. Our roots are buried deep in the soils of America. We are the only people who have continued with the oldest beliefs of this country. We are the people who still yet speak the languages given to us by the Creator.
This is our homeland. We came from no other country.
We have always looked at ourselves as human beings . . .
Every tribe has a trail of tears. We wonder when it is going to end.
PHILLIP DEERE (1929–1985)
I lay my body down in another city, another hotel room. Once Louis Armstrong and his band stayed here. Later the hotel fell to trash. New money resurrected it. Under the red moon of justice, I dream with the king of jazz.
For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
Open the door, then close it behind you.
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
Give it back with gratitude.
If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.
Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.
Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
Do not hold regrets.
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Ask for forgiveness.
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.
Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
For any spark to make a song it must be transformed by pressure. There must be unspeakable need, muscle of belief, and wild, unknowable elements. I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.
In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone,
Until somebody got out of line.
We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind.
Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him;
He was lonely in this world.
So Rabbit thought to make a person.
And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see
What would happen,
The clay man stood up.
Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken.
The clay man obeyed.
Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn.
The clay man obeyed.
Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife.
The clay man obeyed.
Rabbit felt important and powerful.
The clay man felt important and powerful.
And once that clay man started he could not stop.
Once he took that chicken he wanted all the chickens.
And once he took that corn he wanted all the corn.
And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives.
He was insatiable.
Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold.
Then it was land and anything else he saw.
His wanting only made him want more.
Soon it was countries, and then it was trade.
The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.
Forests were being mowed down all over the world.
And Rabbit had no place to play.
Rabbit’s trick had backfired.
Rabbit tried to call the clay man back,
But when the clay man wouldn’t listen
Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears.
Listened to an alto sax player jamming on the street. He played a few jazz standards, mostly popular tunes the people would know who changed buses there. Nice tone. I walked from the hotel into the dusk of the city to listen closer, to speak with him. We shared names, gear info, and other stories of the saxophone road. He told me, “I’m making a living out of small hopes . . .” There’s something about a lone horn player blowing ballads at the corners of our lives.
Yes, that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government-issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved, my relative.
They were not my tears. I have a reservoir inside. They will be cried by my sons, my daughters if I can’t learn how to turn tears to stone.
Yes, that was me, standing in the back door of the house in the alley, with fresh corn and bread for the neighbors.
I did not foresee the flood of blood. How they would forget our friendship, would return to kill the babies and me.
Yes, that was me whirling on the dance floor. We made such a racket with all that joy. I loved the whole world in that silly music.
I did not realize the terrible dance in the staccato of bullets.
Yes. I smelled the burning grease of corpses. And like a fool I expected our words might rise up and jam the artillery in the hands of dictators.
We had to keep going. We sang our grief to clean the air of turbulent spirits.
Yes, I did see the terrible black clouds as I cooked dinner. And the messages of the dying spelled there in the ashy sunset. Every one addressed: “mother.”
There was nothing about it in the news. Everything was the same. Unemployment was up. Another queen crowned with flowers. Then there were the sports scores.
Yes, the distance was great between your country and mine. Yet our children played in the path between our houses.
No. We had no quarrel with each other.
Humans were created by mistake. Someone laughed and we came crawling out. That was the beginning of the story; we were hooked then. What a wild dilemma, how to make it to the stars, on a highway slick with fear—
Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.
And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.
When I woke up from a forty-year sleep, it was by a song. I could hear the drums in the village. I felt the sweat of ancestors in each palm. The singers were singing the world into place, even as it continued to fall apart. They were making songs to turn hatred into love.
Tonight I catch a cricket song.
Sung by a cricket who wants the attention of another—
My thinking slides in the wake of the cricket’s sweet
Longing. It’s lit by the full moon as it makes a path
Over the slick grass of the whitest dark,
I doubt the cricket cares his singing is swinging starlight
To the worry that has darkened my mind.
It is mating season.
They will find their way to each other by sound.
Time and how are the mysterious elements of any life.
I will find my way home to you.
MVSKOKE NATION, JUNE 23, 2013
After years you realize that your enemies are as familiar as your friends. You always encounter them in the world. Circumstances continue to pull you together even as you continue to pull apart. Sometimes you are forced by community laws to invite them to sit with you and eat. You are no fool. You make sure when they leave they take only what belongs to them.
Entering the Principality of O’ahu by Sky Roads
Somebody sang these clouds into being.
Tell me, who is your singer?
Does the song maker inhabit the story of the pig god digging
Cliffs, with an angry, passionate love?
Or sing knowledge beneath the misty cloak perched on the
Shoulders of the island spirit?
I want to know this song maker,
Who continues to make songs that lift the most humble spirits
To the grass houses of the heavens—
Songs that aren’t paid for
By the money and influence
Of rich, fat corporate gods.
Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.
We Were There When Jazz Was Invented
I have lived 19,404 midnights, some of them in the quaver of fish dreams
And some without any memory at all, just the flash of the jump
From a night rainbow, to an island of fire and flowers—such a holy
Leap between forgetting and jazz. How long has it been since I called you back?
After Albuquerque with my baby in diapers on my hip; it was a difficult birth,
I was just past girlhood slammed into motherhood. What a bear.
Beyond the door of my tongue is a rail and I’m leaning over to watch bears
Catch salmon in their teeth. That realm isn’t anywhere near Los Angeles. If I dream
It all back then I reconstruct that song buried in the muscle of urgency. I’m bereft
In the lost nation of debtors. Wey yo hey, wey yo hey yah hey. Pepper jumped
And some of us went with him to the stomp. All night, beyond midnight, back
Up into the sky, holy.
It was a holy mess, wholly of our folly, drawn of ashes around the hole
Of our undoing. Back there the ceremonial fire was disassembled, broken and bare, like chord breaks forgetting to blossom. Around midnight, I turn my back
And watch prayers take root beneath the moon. Not that dreams
Have anything to do with it exactly. I get jumpy
In the aftermath of a disturbed music. I carried that baby up the river, gave birth
To nothing but the blues in buckskin and silk. Get back, I said, and what bird
Have you chosen to follow in your final years of solitude? Go ahead, jump holy
Said the bear prophet. Wey ya hah. Wey ya hah. All the way down to the jamming
Flowers and potholes. There has to be a saxophone somewhere, some notes bear
Little resemblance to the grown child. Now I’ve got to be dreaming.
Take me back
Or don’t take me back to Tulsa. I can only marry the music; the outlook’s bleak
Without it. I mean it. And then I don’t. Too many questions mar the answer. Breath
Is the one. And two. And. Dream sweet prophet of sound, dream
Mvskoke acrobat of disruption. It’s nearing midnight and something holy
Is always coming around. Take love for instance, and the bare
Perfect neck of a woman who’s given up everything for the forbidden leap
To your arms as you lean over the railing to hear the music hopping at the jump
Pull of the line. She will never be here again in the break of the phrase back
Before this maverick music was invented. It’s the midnight hour and sweet dark love bares
It all. I can hear it again; the blue moon caving in to tears of muscle and blood. Birth
Of the new day begins less than one second after. It’s that exact, this science of the holy.
So that’s where it is, this incubation of broken dreams.
It took forever for that bear of a horn player to negotiate the impossible jump.
Weh yo hey Weh yo hah, those water spirits will carry that girl all the way back
To the stomp grounds where jazz was born. It’s midnight. How holy.
This is only one of many worlds. Worlds are beings, each with their own themes, rules, and ways of doing. Humans in this world fall too easily to war, are quick to take offense, and claim ownership. “What drama,” said crow, dodging traffic as he wrestled a piece of road kill.
Nizhoniigo no hey nay
Nizhoniigo no hey way nay
Nizhoniigo no hey nay
Nizhoniigo no hey way nay
How do we get out of here?
Smoke hole crowded with too much thinking
Too many seers
We call it real.
What are we doing in this mess of forgetfulness?
Ruled by sharp things, baby girls in stiletto heels
Beloved ones doing street time
We call it real; we call it real.
What are we doing napping, through war?
We’ve lost our place in the order of kindness
Children are killing children
We call it real.
How do we get out of here?
Smoke hole crowded with too much thinking
Too many seers
And prophets of prosperity
We call it real.
What are we doing forgetting love?
Under mountains of trash, a river on fire
We can’t be bought, forced, or destroyed.
Just what is real?
How do we get out of here?
Smoke hole crowded with too much thinking
Too many seers
And prophets of prosperity
We call it real.
Nizhoniigo no hey nay
Nizhoniigo no hey way nay
Nizhoniigo no hey nay
Nizhoniigo no hey way nay
When I blow my horn, I depend on the assistance of the winds. I depend on love. I hear my saxophone ancestors beginning with Lester Young, Ben Webster, John Coltrane to Jim Pepper, and hear the ancient guardian of the grounds calling out in each direction with a conch shell. We are all here, they tell me, still singing about where we have been and where we are going.
Beautiful Baby, Beautiful Child (a lullaby)
Hokosucē herosē. Estuce herosē.
Beautiful baby, beautiful child.
Hokosucē herosē, Estuce herosē.
The sky is your blanket; the earth is your cradle.
Sutvt vccetv cēnakēt os. Ekvnv cen topv hakes.
Your mother rocks you close to her heart.
Ceckē ēfekkē temposen ce haneces.
Your father holds up the sky.
Cerkē sutv hvlwen kvwapes.
Beautiful baby, beautiful child.
Hokosucē herosē, Estuce herosē.
MVSKOVE TRANSLATION
BY ROSEMARY MCCOMBS MAXEY