by Joy Harjo
No, I don’t know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I didn’t make this. I bought it at Bloomingdales.
Thank you. I like your hair too.
I don’t know if anyone knows whether or not Cher
is really Indian.
No, I didn’t make it rain tonight.
Yeah. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Spirituality. Uh-huh. Mother
Earth. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
No, I didn’t major in archery.
Yeah, a lot of us drink too much.
Some of us can’t drink enough.
This ain’t no stoic look.
This is my face.
Big Fun
I don’t care if you’re married I still love you
I don’t care if you’re married
After the party’s over
I will take you home in my One-Eyed Ford
Way yah hi yo, Way yah hi yo!
Modene!
The roller derby queen!
She’s Anishinabe,
that means Human Being!
That’s H for hungry!
And B for frijoles!
Frybread!
Tortillas!
Watermelon!
Pomona!
Take a sip of this
and a drag of that!
At the rancheria fiesta
it’s tit for tat!
Low riders and Levis
go fist in glove!
Give it a little pat
a push or a shove
Move it or lose it!
Take straight or bruise it!
Everyone
has her fun
when the sun
is all done
We’re all one
make a run
hide your gun
Hey!
I’m no nun!
’49 in the hills above
Ventura
Them Okies gotta drum
I’m from Oklahoma
I got no one to call my own
if you will be my honey
I will be your sugar pie, Way hi yah,
Way yah hey way yah hi yah!
We’re gonna sing all night
bring your blanket
or
be that way then!
AL HUNTER (1958–), Anishinaabe, is a member and former chief of the Rainy River First Nations. He is an experienced land claims negotiator and activist for Indigenous and environmental rights. In 2000, he led a 1,200-mile “Walk to Remember” around Lake Superior to spur future conservation efforts. Hunter has published three books of poetry through Kegedonce Press including Beautiful Razor: Love Poems and Other Lies, and his work has been widely anthologized.
Prayer Bowl
When the moon is turned upwards like a bowl waiting to be filled
We must fill it. We must fill it by honoring the spirits of creation
With songs of our joy and thanks, with foods created with our own hands,
Water for the thirsty, prayers for the people, prayers for the spirits,
Prayers for the Creator, prayers for ourselves, and the sacred instruments
That join us to the glory of this world, that join us to the glory of this world
And to the world beyond our sleep.
KARENNE WOOD (1960–2019), Monacan, was a poet and a linguistic anthropologist. She earned an MFA at George Mason University and a PhD in anthropology at the University of Virginia. Wood received a Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas for her first collection, Markings on Earth (2001), which was followed by Weaving the Boundary in 2016. She served on the Monacan Tribal Council and directed the Virginia Indian Programs at Virginia Humanities in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Chief Totopotamoi, 1654
after Miller Williams
This is to say we continued. As though continuing changed us.
As though continuing brought happiness as we had known.
On a dry field without cover, his skin blistered raw in the sun.
Not one among us came, as though he had no relations.
What did we say to our brother? How could we leave him alone
while soldiers guarded his corpse as though precious to them?
One of the women, in darkness, crept to the field where he died,
prayed for him, covered him up. Dust over what was not dust.
We would have ventured out with her if we had loved ourselves less.
We had to think of our children, and he was not coming back.
How could we live with the silence, live with our grief and our shame?
Death did not heal what he suffered. He was making demands.
We did not want him to be there, asking the question he asked us,
changing the sound of his name. He had embarrassed us.
This is the memory we carried, avoiding the thought that he remained
face down among the charred grasses, holding the earth with his hands.
Hard Times
A woman sits on a porch of weathered boards,
her skin the color and texture of the dried-apple dolls
that grandmothers gave to children years ago.
When asked about the past, she will not speak.
They were hard times.
Maybe she sits on the parched earth instead,
looks toward fields of rice, cotton, sugarcane, tobacco.
Maybe she wears a printed housedress or sarong
with hair covered or plaited, her face etched
in memories of joy snatched from her
in daylight and auctioned to strangers.
Her hands have scrubbed cities of floors, washed
the nameless dead, cooked food for armies, so little of it
hers; hands that failed to protect her or any of her children.
She believes that if she speaks, she might break apart,
the dust of her flying across stooped men
chained by their debt to the fields. She presses both lips
together, an effort to hold her own grief in her skin.
Maybe evening wears into night. The stars that connect us
gather like sisters around her. We hear, They were hard times,
across the continuous land of our women, until as sun
rises above the droning flies and the garrulous chickens,
a voice speaks in our old language, which we do not know.
We sift through a history with dust on our hands,
the empty rocker creaking in the breeze.
ERIC GANSWORTH (1965–), Onondaga, is a poet, playwright, novelist, and visual artist who was born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation. The author of five poetry collections, most recently a YA memoir-in-verse, Apple: Skin to the Core (2020), Gansworth has also received recognition for his nonfiction, visual art, and fiction, which has won both a PEN Oakland Award and an American Book Award. Gansworth is a Lowery Writer-in-Residence and a professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.
Eel
1
I don’t understand this kindergarten
assignment: “Draw Your Clan.”
The three letters live in abstraction.
A friend suggests mine looks like his, minus
legs, and that day I believe my clan is
a species of amputee Snipes, birds
forced to fly the skies forever, and I
wonder if we are meant to symbolize
endurance or something beyond
my five-year-old comprehension.
2
My mother explains we are not legless
birds and if she had a more worldly
vocabulary she would have suggested
we were ambiguous, not quite a fish,
more than a water snake, but she says
we are among the few. The last Tuscarora Eel
died out a generation ago, so we are left
Onond
aga Eels among the Tuscarora,
voiceless as well as legless.
3
I find an encyclopedia photo,
see jagged rows of razor teeth
in a mouth perpetually grinning
and when I show it to her, she says
clans are a system to keep track
of families, so we don’t inadvertently
marry our relatives, and that we have no
more affinity with eels than anyone else
on the reservation has with their animals.
4
“If I threw you in the dike,” she says
“you’d drown as fast as anyone else,” done
with this lesson. I remember older cousins,
swimming between my legs, and suddenly I am rising,
their hands grabbing my knees as my balls collide
with the backs of their necks, and they break
the surface, toss me into deeper water, probably
watching to make sure I surface, after they’ve had
some amusement at my struggle.
5
In wet darkness, I imagine opening
my eyes and mouth, taking water in,
filling my lungs, discovering gills
like Aquaman or Namor, the Sub-mariner.
Knowing I had better odds of dying, face down,
no voice to call out for help, I am
never quite brave enough to try it, not daring
enough, even, to open my eyes when my face breaks
the stillness of river water contained.
6
But I flip on my back, ears below the surface, listen
to mysteries, breathe shallowly at that level, and float,
wondering what it would be like to glide the depths
on fins, knowing if I were there, I would desire
legs and lungs, and then I fill my chest to capacity,
and dive, loving and begrudging the ache I find there,
the throbbing of my chest begging for release,
and I swim back up, eyes still closed, wondering how
long it will take to find the surface again.
JAMES THOMAS STEVENS (ARONHIÓTAS) (1966–), Akwesasne Mohawk, is the author of seven books of poetry as well as a collaborative poetry and translation project with Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard. His work has received many awards, including a Whiting Writers Award, and he was a finalist for the 2005 National Poetry Series. Stevens has taught at the State University of New York at Fredonia and at Haskell Indian Nations University and is currently an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
Tonawanda Swamps
As it would for a prow, the basin parts with your foot.
Never a marsh, of heron blue
but the single red feather
from the wing of some black bird, somewhere
a planked path winds above water,
the line of sky above this aching space.
Movement against the surface
is the page that accepts no ink.
A line running even
over alternating depths, organisms, algae,
a rotting leaf.
Walk naked before me
carrying a sheaf of sticks.
It’s the most honest thing a man can do.
As water would to accept you,
I part
a mouth, a marsh, or margin
is of containment,
the inside circuitous edge.
No line to follow out to ocean,
no river against an envelope
of trembling white ships.
Here I am landlock.
Give me your hand.
St. James Lake
On a footbridge
crossing
the lake toward
Horse Guards Road,
I stop to listen
as dim twitterings grow to a deafening roar.
This is how the body is,
suddenly aware of its own dull thud.
Knowing, how our own song
completes the chorus. How each preened park-goer
carries a specific yet woefully similar call,
Sanctuary.
You, singing beautifully in churches and town squares.
Us, humming in harmony once
beneath arched vaults above the Isère.
I can never think far from the heart.
Nearing Birdcage Walk,
I envision the intricate cage of your ribs at night.
Imagine the frightened flocks we carry:
Grey Wagtail
Swan
Shoveler
Pelican
Raven
Golden Eye
Oh plucking Zeus. Oh Ganymede. Oh frightened furies flying breakneck
in our chests.
How it all becomes fantastical, here.
All elephants and castles, chalk farms and canaries. All mile ends and
mudchutes. All circus.
Birdkeep of a brain,
there must be someone
watching out
for the heart.
Between that Charybdian eye and Buckingham,
we near Duck Island, and of a sudden
it appears.
The birdkeeper’s cottage.
Its thatched roof hanging
impossibly heavy.
How idyllic, how monstrous
that responsibility for these many birds.
I could live here, I say.
I could live here too.
I hear, with, take flight. Its gently upturned wings lifting from water.
Turning to go to sleep at night, you offer your sore shoulder,
and in the strain of muscle beneath my thumbs, I note its avian blade.
KIMBERLY WENSAUT (1971–), Potawatomi, is a member of the PaperBirch Poets in Wisconsin and is a linguist with a focus on her tribe’s Bodwéwadmimwen language. She has been published in Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community (Minnesota Historical Society Press) and in 1995 established the first tribal newspaper for her nation, the Potawatomi Traveling Times.
Prodigal Daughter
Once, when I came home
after sixty days on the road,
my mother said, Oh–
the prodigal daughter has returned.
Prodigal, prodigious, prodigy.
In my blood is a way of life.
Migration and distance bridge the gap
in our seasonal souls.
Winter camp, summer camp
kept those villages on the move.
Or maybe it is because
no one remembered
to save my cord at birth.
That sturdy life line
which delivered me whole
into this world, anchored me
to the generations.
They used to do this. Kept it
in a finely beaded pouch
as one would keep a thing
of immense worth. If this was not done,
they said the child would be foolish
or would always be searching.
Maybe it is the thunders
who breathed life into my body.
They are forever wanting
to lift me high and carry me away.
Once, I thought I could settle
into the arms of pine, hemlock,
spruce and icy river.
But this has not happened yet.
Home is elusive.
It shapeshifts with the currents
of my heart and its will.
Home is a trickster changing
according to the medicine
of the season and its lesson.
I was weary, this last ride home.
Every fiber ready to surrender.
Sage and a small courage
begged my continuance.
There is frost on my doorway,
and leaves unswept.
There are
miles to dream
before I meet the morning again.
STEVE PACHECO (1975–), Mdewakanton Dakota. From the Lower Sioux Indian Community in southwestern Minnesota, Pacheco is a coauthor of Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008) and a past guest editor for the literary journal Yellow Medicine Review. He has worked as a guidance counselor and advocate and is currently an asssistant professor at Southwest Minnesota State University.
History
Cousin, how useless now
are the dirt road days
when we whirled roundhouse
kicks at one another with our bare feet,
and how we listened to our fathers
kindle the fire water in the kitchen
gives us January memories
of times we spent in the gravel pit
playing war with plastic Army men
only tells half the history
of the little lives we razed.
Your first winter home
snowfall arrived early.
The multihued hills of the rez
turned the same color brown
as your camouflage fatigues.
I thought it was coincidence.
Maybe the snow flourished
to welcome you like a kindred spirit.
Maybe, tahansi, it was our time
for history to surround us.
LAURA DA’ (1979–), Eastern Shawnee, is a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, where she teaches and writes. She studied creative writing at the University of Washington and at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 2015, she was named both a Made at Hugo House fellow and a Jack Straw fellow. She is the author of Instruments of the True Measure (2018) and Tributaries (2016), which won an American Book Award.
Nationhood
I am a citizen of two nations: Shawnee and American. I have one son who is a citizen of three. Before he was born, I learned that, like all infants, he would need to experience a change of heart at birth in order to survive. When a baby successfully breathes in through the lungs, the heart changes from parallel flow to serial flow and the shunt between the right and left atriums closes. Our new bodies obliterate old frontiers.