by Joy Harjo
And uncle sharpens his harpoon. But
he’s gone fishing. A debt will be paid
today you see. A debt will be paid.
An eye for an eye. That is the way
he sees it.
I wait until sunset. By the attic.
Top of the stairs. I wait. For tomorrow
comes needling light at blades of grass begging
to feel freedom’s scarred feet.
ROBERT DAVIS HOFFMAN (1955–), Tlingit, is a poet, carver, and multi-media artist. Davis considers himself a neo-traditionalist Tlingit artist and storyteller, working in both non-traditional and traditional modes. His collection of poetry, Soul Catcher, was published in 1986.
At the Door of the Native Studies Director
In this place years ago
they educated old language out of you,
put you in line, in uniform, on your own two feet.
They pointed you in the right direction but
still you squint at that other place,
that country hidden within a country.
You chase bear, deer. You hunt seal. You fish.
This is what you know. This is how you move,
leaving only a trace of yourself.
Each time you come back
you have no way to tell about this.
Years later you meet their qualifications–
native scholar.
They give you a job, a corner office.
Now you’re instructed to remember
old language, bring back faded legend,
anything that’s left.
They keep looking in on you, sideways.
You don’t fit here, you no longer fit there.
You got sick. They still talk of it,
the cheap wine on your breath
as you utter in restless sleep
what I sketch at your bedside.
Tonight, father, I wrap you in a different blanket,
the dances come easier, I carve them for you.
This way you move through me.
ELIZABETH WOODY (1959–), Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, a poet and an illustrator, was born in Ganado, Arizona. After attending the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, she received her BA from Evergreen State College and her master’s in public administration from Portland State University. She is the recipient of several awards and accolades; her first book of poetry, Hand into Stone, received the American Book Award, and she was named the Poet Laureate of Oregon for 2016–18.
Weaving
for Margaret Jim-Pennah and Gladys McDonald
Weaving baskets you twine the strands into four parts.
Then, another four. The four directions many times.
Pairs of fibers spiral around smaller and smaller sets of threads.
Then, one each time. Spirals hold all this design
airtight and pure. This is our house, over and over.
Our little sisters, Khoush, Sowitk, Piaxi, Wakamu,
the roots will rest inside.
We will be together in this basket.
We will be together in this life.
Translation of Blood Quantum
31/32 Warm Springs–Wasco–Yakama–Pit River–Navajo
1/32 Other Tribal Roll number 1553
THIRTY-SECOND PARTS OF A HUMAN BEING
SUN MOON EVENING STAR AT DAWN CLOUDS RAINBOW CEDAR
LANGUAGE COLORS AND SACRIFICE LOVE THE GREAT FLOOD
THE TORTOISE CARRIES THE PARROT HUMMINGBIRD TRILLIUM
THE CROW RAVEN COYOTE THE CONDOR JAGUAR GRIZZLY
TIMBER WOLF SIDEWINDER THE BAT CORN TOBACCO SAGE
MUSIC DEATH CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE SPIDERWEB
RESURRECTED PROPHETS
RECURRENT POWER OF CREATION IS FUELED BY SONG
Like the lava, we have always been indomitable in flowing
purposes. A perpetuity of Ne-shy-Chus means we are rooted
in ancestral domain and are Free, with any other power
reserved in the truce of treaty, 1855, or any other time.
We kept peace. Preserved and existed through our Songs,
Dances, Longhouses, and the noninterruption of giving Thanks
and observances of the Natural laws of Creating by the Land
itself. The Nusoox are as inseparable from the flow of these
cycles. Our Sovereignty is permeated, in its possession
of our individual rights, by acknowledgment of good
for the whole
and this includes the freedom of the Creator in these teachings
given to and practiced by The People. We are watched over
by the mountains, not Man, not Monarchy,
or any other manifestations
of intimidation by misguided delusions of supremacy
over the Land or beings animate or inanimate.
SHERMAN ALEXIE (1966–), Spokane, is an award-winning and nationally recognized poet, novelist, and short-story writer, whose honors include an American Book Award, the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Alexie founded Longhouse Media, a nonprofit organization that teaches Native American youth how to use media for cultural expression and social change.
The Summer of Black Widows
The spiders appeared suddenly
after that summer rainstorm.
Some people still insist the spiders fell with the rain
while others believe the spiders grew from the damp soil like weeds with eight thin roots.
The elders knew the spiders
carried stories in their stomachs.
We tucked our pants into our boots when we walked through the fields of fallow stories.
An Indian girl opened the closet door and a story fell into her hair.
We lived in the shadow of a story trapped in the ceiling lamp.
The husk of a story museumed on the windowsill.
Before sleep we shook our blankets and stories fell to the floor.
A story floated in a glass of water left on the kitchen table.
We opened doors slowly and listened for stories.
The stories rose on hind legs and offered their red bellies to the most beautiful Indians.
Stories in our cereal boxes.
Stories in our firewood.
Stories in the pockets of our coats.
We captured stories and offered them to the ants, who carried the stories back to their queen.
A dozen stories per acre.
We poisoned the stories and gathered their remains with broom and pan.
The spiders disappeared suddenly
after that summer lightning storm.
Some people will insist the spiders were burned to ash
while others believe the spiders climbed the lightning bolts and became a new constellation.
The elders knew the spiders
had left behind bundles of stories.
Up in the corners of our old houses
we still find those small, white bundles
and nothing, neither fire
nor water, neither rock nor wind,
can bring them down.
The Powwow at the End of the World
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.
DG NANOUK OKPIK (1968–), Iñupiaq, was born in Anchorage, and her family is from Barrow, Alaska. She earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and her poetry has been widely acclaimed, with Corpse Whale (2012) winning an American Book Award. She was the recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship, is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, and lives in Santa Fe.
The Fate of Inupiaq-like Kingfisher
But no one can
stop
a bird spear set
in motion,
made of notched bone,
feathered arrows pinnate
around the shaft,
with hair fringe
as it strikes
piercing depilated skin.
Some humans weave themselves
with lime grass,
into large orbs.
Others make goosefeet baskets
of seaweed or with narrow leaves,
or collect matches or tobacco.
The lamp soot burns like gas.
On Clovis point a circular icy reef,
my existence becoming a flicker
like the orange scales of a kingfisher.
We pirouette, diving, diving,
deep.
No Fishing on the Point
Look at my/her engraved chin made by deep lines of soot-ink.
See the grove across her/my face.
A bull caribou tramples my shoulders, pins
her/me to the roof rock, tethers my backstrap. Boxed in ice
cellars, bowhead meat ferments, freezes
to jam.
A shotgun blasts the sky to alert the plywood shacks
of migrating bowheads. The CB voice alerts: “AAAIIGGIAARR”
the house pits and Quonset huts which line the shore of ice laden waters, gray dorsal fins
rise on the Beaufort Sea. A chore-girl in rags, she/I sit/s lotus-legged, weaving baleen
baskets.
Here, brother watches and waits for
the correct time to strike,
right above the blow hole.
Here, it is clean kill. Blood water all around us.
Here, a woman far away crying for the whale’s soul.
But, the men still heave to the beach
another day and a half. Pulling, winching,
pulling, dragging.
She/I cut/s opaque flesh and black meat with a jagged ulu,
carve muktuk, tie dark and white ribbons on each
gunnysack to mark the body parts. She/I slice/s the dorsal fin, give it to my brother
for ceremony, barter a bag of whalebones for fuel to heat the aged and chilled cement
barracks.
On Birnirk for thousands
of years called Point Barrow.
Now here, a duck site a place of trade, where a DEW line
crosses
an old military port of call for sighting air attacks,
where they want
to claim the sea for roads. She’s/I’ve watched the currents,
migrations, felt the rough movements
of the ice, which brings feasts, and famine.
CHRISTY PASSION (1974–), Kanaka Maoli, is a poet and a critical-care nurse. Passion has been the recipient of several literary awards, including Hawai‘i Pacific University’s James A. Vaughn Award for Poetry, the Atlanta Review International Merit Award, the Academy of American Poets Award, and the Eliot Cades Award for Literature. In addition, her collection of poetry, Still Out of Place (2016), earned the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Honorable Mention for Excellence in Literature.
Hear the Dogs Crying
A recording of her voice, an old woman’s voice
full of gravel and lead steeped through
the car radio. She spoke of gathering limu
visitors on ships, and dusty roads in Wai‘anae.
In the distance you could almost hear
the dogs crying, the mullet wriggling in the fish bag.
Nostalgic for a tūtū I never knew,
I feel the ocean pulse inside me
waves rolling over, pushing me till I leap
from this car through the congested H-1
across the noise and ashen sky
emerge beneath the rains in Nu‘uanu.
I move past the fresh water ponds
past the guava trees towards homes
with flimsy tin roofs where
my father, already late for school,
races up Papakōlea with a kite made
of fishing twine. Framed in a small kitchen
window, tūtū scrapes the meat from awa skin
for dinner tonight, wipes her hands on
old flour bags for dish cloths.
She is already small and wants to forget
I may be too late–
I have tomatoes and onion from the market, tūtū,
my hand is out, my plate is empty
and some bones for the dogs to stop their crying
do you know my name?
I am listening for your stories to call me in
my hand is out, my plate is empty
for your stories to show me the way
tūtū, do you know my name?
BRANDY NĀLANI MCDOUGALL (1976–), Kanaka Maoli, is a poet, scholar, editor, and publisher from Kula, Maui. She is an associate professor specializing in Indigenous studies in the American Studies department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is the author of The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Pa‘akai (2008), a poetry collection, and the scholarly monograph Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (2016), which won the 2017 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. She is the editor of several anthologies and, with Craig Santos Perez, cofounded Ala Press, which publishes Indigenous Pacific literature.
He Mele Aloha no ka Niu
I’m so tired of pretending
each gesture is meaningless,
that the clattering of niu leaves
and the guttural call of birds
overhead say nothing.
There are reasons why
the lichen and moss kākau
the niu’s bark, why
this tree has worn
an ahu of ua and lā
since birth. Scars were carved
into its trunk to record
the mo‘olelo of its being
by the passage of insects
becoming one to move
the earth, speck by speck.
Try to tell them to let go
of the niu rings marking
each passing year, to abandon
their only home and move on.
I can’t pretend there is
no memory held
; in the dried coconut hat,
the star ornament, the midribs
bent and dangling away
from their roots, no thought
behind the kāwelewele
that continues to hold us
steady. There was a time
before they were bent
under their need to make
an honest living, when
each frond was bound
by its life to another
like a long, erect fin
skimming the surface
of a sea of grass and sand.
Eventually, it knew it would rise
higher, its flower would emerge
gold, then darken in the sun,
that its fruit would fall, only
to ripen before its brown fronds
bent naturally under the weight
of such memory, back toward
the trunk to drop to the sand,
back to its beginnings, again.
Let this be enough to feed us,
to remember: ka wailewa
i loko, that our own bodies
are buoyant when they bend
and fall, and that the ocean
shall carry us and weave us
back into the sand’s fabric,
that the mo‘opuna taste our sweet.
Ka ‘Ōlelo
O ke alelo ka hoe uli o ka ʻōlelo a ka waha.
The tongue is the steering paddle of the words uttered by the mouth.
—‘Ōlelo Noʻeau
‘ekahi
Think of all the lost words, still unspoken,
waiting to be given use, again, claimed,
or for newly born words to unburden
them of their meanings. There are winds and rains
who have lost their names, descending the slopes
of every mountain, each lush valley’s mouth,