The Larger Voice: Celebrating the Work of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellows

Celebrating Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellows

Edited by Rena Priest

Portland, Oregon

Copyright © Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, 2022. Individual contributors retain all rights to their work, except where they have made other agreements with previous publishers.

All Rights Reserved. The contents of this book are protected by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17). Reproduction, transmittal, or translation of any part of this book requires written permission from the publisher.

This anthology was made possible with support from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust and Engaging the Senses Foundation.

2022

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022905998

Editor: Rena Priest (Lummi Nation)

Production Editor: Laura (Cales) Matalka (Chickasaw Nation)

Cover Artist: Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋgu Lakota)

Book Designers: Barbara Soulé (Diné [Navajo Nation]) and Bert Franklin (Diné Nation)

Copy Editors: Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) and Annie Silver

Launched as a non-profit organization in 2009, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation advances equity and cultural knowledge, focusing on the power of arts and collaboration to strengthen Native communities and promote positive social change with American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native peoples in the United States.

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation 1020 SE 7th Avenue, Unit 14460 Portland, Oregon 97293

The Larger Voice: Celebrating Native Arts and Cultures Foundation

Literature Fellows is an essential reading guide to some of the most contemporary Native literature. The selections range from novel excerpts of Cherokee writer Kelli Jo Ford, which follow a comingof-age path to matriarchal power, to the luminescent fracturing in the poetry making of Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui. In the preface, editor

Rena Priest of the Lummi Nation eloquently sets up the role of those who speak as those who say what needs to be said so that all is right and proper. As Laura Da’ confirms in her introduction, the etymology of the word “anthology” is “a verbal territory of land and growth.”

All forms of writing have their roots in orality and are situated in land, or place. And no matter when and where we write from, we are always in the flux of change, embodying the need to speak. Regarding her selections, Pulitzer Prize–winning Mohave poet Natalie Diaz affirms that she carries a river in her body and considers river as a verb. Water is especially precious in the desert. River turns verbal and becomes “rivering.” Consider this anthology as a place where many of our best Native speakers stand together to give us what is as essential as water: stories, prose, and poetry that will incite inspiration, community, and growth, because in this profoundly changing world, we need their words.

Joy Harjo, Mvskoke Nation 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

Rena Priest

Laura Da’ Native Arts and Cultures Foundation

Sherwin Bitsui

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction Goods of Value: Gathering Flowers in the Land Beyond Mapping

About the National Artist Fellowship

Unvaulted Shadows Varnish There’s a Way Out— Mud-splattered Thought Patterns Ceramic Ladles Scrape Snares A Bottom Lit Sea Ponders the Lake’s Questions Benches Face Before. Cranes Pass as Swans

Laura Da’

Adornment Blackfish State Refusal of the Return Twelve Gates

Natalie Diaz Heid E. Erdrich

26

American Arithmetic

The First Water is the Body exhibits from The American Water Museum

Curatorial Statement for Apocalyptic Poetics Autobiography as Mix Tape for Lady Mon de Green Pre-Occupied The Honey Suckers Lexiconography 2—It Was Cloudy

Kelli Jo Ford

Santee Frazier

The Year 2003 Minus 20

Variations on Loneliness Aubade Lachrymose

Linda Hogan Layli Long Soldier

Fences Tulsa

Ways of the Cranes Introduction

Whereas When Offered an Apology Whereas a Friend Senses Whereas Resolution’s an Act Whereas Native Peoples Are Whereas I Read an Article

Mona Susan Power

Luci Tapahonso David Treuer Michael Wasson Elizabeth Woody

No More Name: Sitka, Alaska - 1918 Day Sun: Fort Yates, North Dakota - 1934

Ilíígo Naalyéhé: Goods of Value

Return the National Parks to the Tribes

So Call it Grace When [Our] Lips & Skin Remember [Erasure] In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive & You Were Full of Joy Countdown as Slow Kisses Your Shadow Invents You Every Time Light Fails to Pass Through You

Twanat, to follow behind the ancestors Conversion

Permissions and Publication Credits

Photo Credits

Author Biographies

Cover Art Credit

PREFACE

“One night a driving storm shakes the world. Thunder breaks open sky and for the first time all is silent for a while, as if the cranes are taking in the larger voice, and then it begins again, the constant talk, the convergence of languages from the four corners of the world...” Linda Hogan (from “Ways of the Cranes”)

In my tribal tradition, the custom in ceremony is for a family matriarch to hire a speaker to be the voice of the family. The speaker calls forth witnesses, who will be able to recount what took place when asked. The speaker explains the purpose of the gathering and guides the work as it is carried out so that all in attendance are with the family throughout the ceremony. When needed, a matriarch will stand beside the speaker and whisper explanations, to be relayed to the people, about why something is being done in a certain way.

A speaker has a large and beautiful voice that will carry into the hearts and minds of the people; knows how to say things so that all is right and proper; knows the customs and traditions, history, challenges, and strengths of the people. A speaker is hospitable, compassionate, and kind. To be called upon as a speaker means you carry a gift.

In our Lhaq’temish legends, thunderstorms are created by a powerful being who lives behind the mountain, “Kwelshan.” To have a voice that carries like thunder across the landscape is to be blessed with the gifts of this powerful thunder being.

In the time before newspapers, email, cell phones, satellites, TV, 5G, and the worldwide web—in the time of the oral tradition—you had to be present to hear something, or you had to hear it from a person who was called forward as a witness to the work. The speaker repeated the important details four times, facing each of the four corners of the longhouse so that everyone in attendance would hear. This is how important information was carried, through ceremony, out into the world.

Today in the longhouse, this is still how we carry truly sacred and important information to the community. No doubt, all this makes the speaker an honored and respected person, but the larger voice is the reason for the ceremony. The larger voice is the bolt of lightning—bits of cloud reaching down to touch the earth.

It is the whisper of intuition, the voice in our dreams; the voice of our memories,

longings, obligations, identities, and griefs; it is the voice of our spirit, the spirit of the planet. It is understood through the vast, intricate network of relationships and experiences that tie a person to the land and the people, the way a tree is tied by its roots to the earth.

The larger voice is the voice that compels the writers in this collection, who are also speakers, blessed with a gift of saying things in a way that will be deeply understood, even when what they are saying is difficult, multi-layered, sorrow-laden, or filled with inexplicable joy. The writers in this collection are all here, expressing what they are compelled to speak onto the page to be carried like a powerful thunder out across the landscape.

Each of the writers featured in this collection carries the distinction of being named a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow in literature. They are recognized for excellence in their work in literature, and their willingness to use their gifts to create offerings of beauty and truth for the benefit of the people. The intention of this collection is to celebrate their voices and to build pathways of understanding and education that will carry their writing to the four corners of the world, reclaiming social narratives around Native cultures and perspectives and highlighting the crucial contributions of contemporary Native writers.

I have assembled this collection with a feeling of awe and gratitude—thankful to be called as a witness to such meaningful work, thankful to relay to you, by way of this anthology, the important messages of the speaker and the larger voice. Hy’sxw’qe!

Yours, Rena Priest Ce’Whel’Tenaut

Washington State Poet Laureate, 2021-2023

INTRODUCTION

Goods of Value: Gathering Flowers in the Land Beyond Mapping

Inside the word “anthology” is a verbal territory of land and growth. The etymology of the word includes anthos for flowers and logia, a root word that holds concepts for place, gathering, and collecting. Deeper in the word is anthera, the medicinal or healing extract of flowers. So, in a way, within the frame of anthology, our words are gathered inside a structure that is recognizable, yet distinct to every place, language, and time. A gathering of flowers from the fields beyond mapping; a vast collection of healing and affinity by word and image.

Devotion, integrity, and intricacy are the words that come into mind when reading the works collected in this anthology. These works are lit under a desert sun, they caw warnings from the green sentinels of the coastlands, and they follow the deep-rooted prairie grasses in their complex webs of strength and tenacity. Together, these works create an immersive reading experience that could be summarized using an excerpt from Sherwin Bitsui’s book Dissolve:

The dark before me, unfolded from bead-pressed earth, sparkles, groans, whistles, I breathe it in.

Precision of language, imagery, and craft is evident in this collection. Many writers utilize word choice, syntax, and imagery of striking originality and power. The variety of voice and style collected in these pages attests to the ineffable power of Indigenous letters. It defies easy categorization but collectively reaches the remarkable territory of human excellence. Heid Erdrich’s “The Honey Suckers” revels in the sensuality of expression:

Taste in the grass, be drunk— Taste many times over taste more taste in hurry in passion taste to the end of all tongues and be done

Support from this fellowship has had a remarkable impact on individual writers and the world of literature. Fellows from the past decade have gone on to publish awardwinning books, win prestigious prizes, and serve communities in profound ways. The writers in this anthology do much more than deny erasure and negate callow tropes of essentialization and tokenization. There is a widely divergent representation of genres, aesthetics, preoccupations, and affinities.

Inherent to this anthology is a deep regard for the sophisticated patterns of Indigenous scholarship and expression. Natalie Diaz’s expansive examination of the Colorado River moves across time and space, and in “exhibits from The American Water Museum,” Diaz embraces the ambiguity of lyrical examination:

I can’t tell you anything now about the river— you can’t tell a river to itself

Land and engagement with time are significant points of curiosity. In her compelling essay, Elizabeth Woody writes, “Adaptation is necessary for survival. Despite the need for change, old lessons are not ignored by choice. We have abided by natural law for thousands of years. Our civilization did not detrimentally impact resources because of this. In our world view, everything has a life and purpose on earth. There is a reason for everything, while we may not always understand why. It is not a simple platitude but a cultural way of life.” And Linda Hogan, writing about sandhill cranes: “The birds are this American sky. They are the sand and water, all the elements, even fire, in their desire to travel the river, braided together in strand. Tribes have told stories about them, told stories to them, for centuries, and they have told the tribes the stories of their own journeys.”

Writers in this anthology engage with Indigenous language, and it creates a sense of artistic integrity that is unique to Indigenous spaces. Our languages have such power to frame and define new ways of looking at story and learning. Words and phrases open a doorway that informs perspective and secures agency at the same time. Luci Tapahonso illustrates the power of language in “Ilíígo Naalyéhé: Goods of Value”:

Yes, those days are over; our childhoods were immersed in ílíígo hané–Diné stories and songs that were conveyed with delight, reverence, or sometimes tears. Hané is always bound with comfort.

Expertise and clarity are present in these words. David Treuer explains a thesis of agency and potential in “Return the National Parks to the Tribes”:

It wasn’t the frontier that made us as much as the land itself, land that has always been Native land but that has also come to be American. The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew. More than just America’s “best idea,” the parks are the best of America, the jewels of its landscape. It’s time they were returned to America’s original peoples.

This call to Indigenous stewardship creates a parallel to the literary landscape. What happens when readers are exposed to Indigenous peoples and our creative visions, aesthetics, languages, and stories is evident in the pages of this anthology.

Laura Da’ Eastern Shawnee

NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES FOUNDATION NATIONAL ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) National Artist Fellowship was the organization’s first program and launched in 2010. The Fellowship honored Native artists making a significant impact in their discipline, who were respected by their colleagues and the greater arts field, or were emerging as powerful voices in the arts.

The Fellowship was a one-year, unrestricted monetary award that provided support for Native artists to study, explore, develop, and experiment with original and existing projects. Fellows also engaged with their communities and shared their work and their cultures in numerous ways.

NACF awarded Artist Fellowships from 2010-2020 to 134 artists. As of 2022, the Foundation has supported in total over 390 artists and arts organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia.

SHERWIN BITSUI

Excerpts from Dissolve

Unvaulted shadows varnish their ghosts’ leaf patterns in unlit elevators.

What’s left in their chests— scrapes teeth on bonemeal.

They pile ellipses on feathered gears murmuring inside their coffins’ pill- shaped whispers, then trawl mountains for bleached weather patterns clipped from view with body heat.

Somewhere a gun’s shadow, borrowed from their husbands’ deaths, leaks the smell of desert rain.

Elsewhere—chemical burns trail our brothers’ sons rifling alleyways for plates of coal dust bundled in factory-grown fur.

Everywhere is dreamed: arranged.

Sherwin Bitsui

There’s a way out— walk the dirt road into cerulean dawn, tap with clear fingerprints the windows of cars and trucks rattling down Highway 77, and clasp the nine eyes of the desert shut at the intersection of then and now.

Ask: will this whirlwind connect to that one, making them cousins to the knife?

Will lake mist etched on flakes of flood-birthed moonlight hang its beard on a tow truck hoisting up a buck, butterflies leaking from its nostrils, dark clouds draining off its cedar coat?

Sherwin Bitsui

Mud-splattered thought patterns sift into the stems of a sandpainting of a tree of birds on a factory floor.

It tethers the hill’s nape to dry mouths rooting in shifting scree.

Silica-crusted gourds crackle on the singed hides of gray mustangs galloping through night’s thinning hair. Its frayed hemline rims the street, when a left turns right onto clear

The camera sees a storm, its eyes: bullet blasts stacked atop gas-soaked magpie wings.

Sherwin Bitsui

Ceramic ladles scrape snares drinking our knees through our ankles.

Hyphens sash the tree line’s dashes; sleep seeps from its turquoise wails.

A lake, now a tire-rut pool, leaves bitter aftertastes on single-roomed tongues.

Doves, shrink-wrapped in brown skin, swallow stiff voices atop the hum of closed envelopes.

Sherwin Bitsui

A bottom-lit sea ponders the lake’s questions, their secret conversations thatching howls to whimpers exhaled from an isthmus of drowned wolves.

Its glossary’s cataclysms smoothed over the hatchet tucked into a sheath of starlight locates fractures potted in cisterns of smog.

The stitching then unthreads to muzzled worms pulsing where an arsonist begins to lather heat over his neck.

Backlit by a caravan of wailing fathers he silences their smeared faces while kneeling in an arbor of mesh and steel.

Nowhere streams in blips and beeps under them.

Sherwin Bitsui

Benches face before

I push into a coin slot: the sound of pills pebbling an emergency room floor.

My thinking stills.

A new oxygen fills my reasons for stalling.

Sherwin Bitsui

Cranes pass as swans through tunnels underneath this dreaming,

I breathe it in.

Cave paintings stammering from their speech of clear water hoof this chamber quiet,

I breathe it in.

Charred cradles, tethered to anchors, molt beside bleached saddles,

I breathe it in.

The dark before me, unfolded from bead-pressed earth, sparkles, groans, whistles,

I breathe it in.

PICC line jangling at my throat— trade sliver gorget askew.

Slim gauge needles navigate shallow shales of the periodic table, facsimiles for the benefit of pitchy blood.

Twenty-five moon spun reels, salted ground metals churn gutward, silken evening soles consumed to slick ruddy shreds.

Each flood noted in a miniscule hand.

Ink gluts on the freshets of my thistle pulses; follow down the cavern, weight the vessel.

Sign my name; surveyor.

LAURA DA’

Adornment

Blackfish State

1.

My son points up to the ship’s name—The Kaleetan.

Arrow, I say in Chinook.

A breeze tweezes a flight of my hair with his, so tonally similar our locks are inseparable— murky raspberry brunette in the softly drunken beforehand light.

2. As a child, I dipped into the cove on a dare.

Dumbstruck— cold water in my ears, blanket of silt resting on starfish so thick on the rocks.

I balanced myself two fingers on a bright magenta tentacle.

Shivering up the beach I lobbed a dirt clod at a faded church billboard asking me if I had a God shaped hole.

There was a pod of orcas visible from the ship, rippling neat and frisky as a row of dominos toppling in perfect order.

The woman next to me gripped the guardrail with such frenetic thrill her false fingernails popped off one by one.

A bright coral ellipsis gliding into the wake.

Sleek hole inside me, moving in the shape of a blackfish.

3.

One hand to steady the mild June currents underfoot, it feels off to clasp my son with my hand to my left hip, but my right abdomen is a swollen coil of surgical tubing.

I shade his forehead from the rain with a brochure for a bed and breakfast and register the avid track of his eyes taking in the water’s blurred end-line, the flicker of recognition at the island’s hump-backed breech.

Palm scattered immunosuppressant ovals and chalky steroids like dispossessed seedpods tickle at the aural hum of childhood sleep

when I might hear river rush in my right ear (Burntboot Creek, forked from the Snoqualmie River) susurrus of waterfall in my left.

Austere and ascetic nomenclature: Lindeman crossing into Buck, North Fork Railroad Trestle,

Rattlesnake Lake, Joseph, Judith, Seneca, Astrid. Star women ambling

homeward without much quarrel; never begging for cold water. Salt or skin or iodine;

meager slivers of apotheosis. Tokul—darkest water, utterly still.

Refusal of the Return

Strict and bound as an analog watch, Aristotelian narrative calls for a probable necessary sequence. It is suicide season. The calendar taunts with year three’s death dance.

Dialysate swills in my abdomen. Long arrows of surgery nudge under my ribs trace my hipbones garland my navel.

Along my lower back divots of biopsy freckle into sickles when I bend over.

Driving over the city bridge quirk or quark humming I might be spared.

My grandmother loved singing O What a Beautiful City as she sorted her pills.

The anesthetic mask shatters time’s linear discipline:

Trotting the deep path by mosslight, son is a dark-haired universe in the crook of my right arm.

Twelve Gates

Five pound blood-hum prayer and verse ripping my skull pure off.

Time has me scalped kissing whorls of brain with frank red lips.

Rolling up from surgery

I look down to my wrist where someone has clasped my watch on loosely.

NATALIE DIAZ

Native Americans make up less than 1 percent of the population of America. 0.8 percent of 100 percent.

O, mine efficient country.

I do not remember the days before America— I do not remember the days when we were all here.

Police kill Native Americans more than any other race. Race is a funny word. Race implies someone will win, implies, I have as good a chance of winning as

Who wins the race that isn’t a race?

Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all police killings, higher per capita than any race—

sometimes race means run.

I’m not good at math—can you blame me? I’ve had an American education.

We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent of Americans. We do a better job of dying by police than we do existing.

When we are dying, who should we call? The police? Or our senator? Please, someone, call my mother.

At the National Museum of the American lndian, 68 percent of the collection is from the United States. I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

American Arithmetic

Natalie Diaz

I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible

But in an American room of one hundred people, I am Native American—less than one, less than whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand

and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover I disappear completely.

Natalie Diaz

The First Water is the Body

The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States— also, it is a part of my body.

I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor.

When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.

So far, I have said the word river in every stanza. I don’t want to waste water. I must preserve the river in my body.

In future stanzas, I will try to be more conservative.

The Spanish called us, Mojave. Colorado, the name they gave our river because it was silt-red-thick.

Natives have been called red forever. I have never met a red Native, not even on my reservation, not even at the National Museum of the American Indian, not even at the largest powwow in Parker, Arizona.

I live in the desert along a dammed blue river. The only red people I’ve seen are white tourists sunburned after staying out on the water too long.

‘Aha Makav is the true name of our people, given to us by our Creator who loosed the river from the earth and built it into our living bodies.

Translated into English, ‘Aha Makav means the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land.

This is a poor translation, like all translations.

Natalie Diaz

In American imaginations, the logic of this image will lend itself to surrealism or magical realism—

Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real Native. Even a real Native carrying the dangerous and heavy blues of a river in her body.

What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.

Jacques Derrida says, Every text remains in mourning until it is translated.

When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief.

But who is this translation for and will they come to my language’s fournight funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation? When they have drunk dry my river will they join the mourning procession across our bleached desert?

The word for drought is different across many languages and lands. The ache of thirst, though, translates to all bodies along the same paths—the tongue, the throat, the kidneys. No matter what language you speak, no matter the color of your skin. We carry the river, its body of water, in our body.

I do not mean to imply a visual relationship. Such as: a Native woman on her knees holding a box of Land O’Lakes butter whose label has a picture of a Native woman on her knees holding a box of Land O’Lakes butter whose label has a picture of a Native woman on her knees . . .

Natalie Diaz

We carry the river, its body of water, in our body. I do not mean to invoke the Droste effect—this is not a picture of a river within a picture of a river.

I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.

This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things—they are more than close together or side by side. They are same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine.

The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement.

Energy is a moving river moving my moving body.

In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both.

If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?

How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?

John Berger wrote, True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay

behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.

Between the English translation I offered, and the urgency I felt typing ‘Aha Makav in the lines above, is not the point where this story ends or begins.

We must go to the place before those two points—we must go to the third place that is the river.

We must go to the point of lance entering the earth, and the river becoming the first body bursting from earth’s clay body into my sudden body. We must submerge, come under, beneath those once warm red waters now channeled blue and cool, the current’s endless yards of emerald silk wrapping the body and moving it, swift enough to take life or give it.

We must go until we smell the black root-wet anchoring the river’s mud banks. We must go beyond beyond to a place where we have never been the center, where there is no center—beyond, toward what does not need us yet makes us.

What is this third point, this place that breaks a surface, if not the deep-cut and crooked bone bed where the Colorado River runs—a one-thousandfour-hundred-and-fifty-mile thirst—into and through a body?

Berger called it the pre-verbal. Pre-verbal as in the body when the body was more than body. Before it could name itself body and be limited, bordered by the space body indicated.

Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy greening, greened and bluing the stone, red and floodwater, the razorback fish, the beetle, and the cottonwoods’ and willows’ shaded shadows.

Pre-verbal was when the body was more than a body and possible.

One of its possibilities was to hold a river within it.

Natalie Diaz

A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything.

If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?

What does ‘Aha Makav mean if the river is emptied to the skeleton of its fish and the miniature sand dunes of its dry silten beds?

If the river is a ghost, am l?

Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.

A phrase popular or more known to non-Natives during the Standing Rock encampment was, Water is the first medicine. It is true.

Where I come from we cleanse ourselves in the river. I mean: The water makes us strong and able to move forward into what is set before us to do with good energy.

We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water.

If we poison and use up our water, how will we clean our wounds and our wrongs? How will we wash away what we must leave behind us? How will we make ourselves new?

To thirst and to drink is how one knows they are alive and grateful. To thirst and then not drink is . . .

If your builder could place a small red bird in your chest to beat as your heart, is it so hard for you to picture the blue river hurtling inside the slow muscled curves of my long body? Is it too difficult to believe it is as sacred as a breath or a star or a sidewinder or your own mother or your beloveds?

If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?

The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking waler to be a national human right. While in the United States, we are teargassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling Natives trying to ptotect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead-contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan, who have been drinking it for years.

America is a land of bad math and science. The Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars. We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body.This thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.

My Elder says, Cut off your ear, and you will live. Cut off your hand, you will live. Cut off your leg, you can still live. Cut off our water, we will not live more than a week.

The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one—to the body, to the water—we do to the other.

Toni Morrison writes, All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back.

Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.

And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?

Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?

exhibits from The American Water Museum

0.

I can’t tell you anything new about the river— you can’t tell a river to itself.

17.

A recording plays from somewhere high, or low, floating up or down through the falling dust-light.

It is a voice out of time, voice of quickness, voice of glass—or wind. A melody, almost—of mud. How it takes a deep blue to tumble wet stones into a songline. The music any earth makes when touched and shaped by the original green energy. The song, if translated, might feel like this: You have been made in my likeness. I am inside you—I am you / or you are me.

Let us say to one another: I am yours— and know finally that we will only ever be as much as we are willing to save of one another.

4. The guidebook’s single entry: There is no guide. You built this museum. You have always been its Muse and Master.

5.

Admission is general and free except for what the children pay and they pay in the kidneys.

99. From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a wall-mounted monitor:

Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff into the earth, and the earth opened it wasn’t a wound, it was joy joy! ! Out of this opening leaped earth’s most radical bloom: our people—

we blossoms from the original body: water, flowering and flowing until it became itself, and we, us: River. Body.

78.

The first violence against any body of water is to forget the name its creator first called it. Worse: forget the bodies who spoke that name.

An American way of forgetting Natives: Discover them with City. Crumble them by City. Erase them into Cities named for their bones, until you are the new Natives of your new Cities. Let the new faucets run in celebration, in excess. Who lies beneath streets, universities, art museums? My people!

I learn to love them from up here, through concrete. La llorona out on the avenues crying for everyone’s babies, for all the mothers, including River, grinded

to their knees and dust for the splendid City. Still, we must sweep the dust, gather our own bodies like messes of sand and memory. Who will excavate

our clodded bodies from the banks, pick embedded stones and sticks from the raw scrapes oozing our backs and thighs? Who will call us back to the water, wash the dirt from our eyes and hair? Can anybody uncrush our hands, reshape them from clay, let us touch one another’s faces again?

Has anyone answered? We’ve been crying out for 600 years

Tengo sed.

204.

A dilapidated diorama of the mythical city of Flint, Michigan:

The glue that once held the small-scale balsa wood children to their places along the streets, waiting in line at the bus stop, on top of the slide in a playground, or on the basketball court has desiccated and snapped away. Now the children lie flat on the floor of the diorama, like they are sleeping, open-eyed to the sight, to what they have seen through their mouths hundreds of miniature empty clay cups roll back and forth out of reach of their hands, some have ground down to tinier piles of dust and sand at their unmoving fingertips.

23.

River, an interactive performance piece:

Sit or stand silently. Close your eyes until they are still. In the stillness breathe in the river moving inside you. It is a thick smell, a color. Touch it—not with your hands, but with your entire sensual skin. Touch it with your flesh.

Natalie Diaz

Drink from yourself until you are full. Realize the emptiness made by your fullness. . . . No, no, no—Don’t repent. This is a museum not a church.

123. Marginalia from the BIA Watermongers Congressional Records, redacted:

To kill take their water

To kill steal their water then tell them how much they owe

To kill bleed them of what is wet in them

To kill find their river and slit its throat

To kill pollute their water with their daughters’ busted drowned bodies washed up on the shores, piece by piece

205.

The water piped into every American city is called dead water

300. There is a urinal inside a curtained booth in the corner. The lit sign above the curtain hums and flickers: Donations.

You have nothing to give.

10. Metonymic Experience:

There are more than 60,000 miles of waterways in our bodies veins, arteries the red lines of our own lives. We are topographies of sustainable greed—dragons be here now, in our bellies, in the cracked bowl bottoms of lakebeds, bloodshot eyes frayed like red speaker wires scorched in the sun. We thirst. Our thirst is a caravan pilgrims of

scarcity. As we die of drought, we splay in the shifting sand like old maps to follow, ones that led us here to begin with, brought us to this masterpiece of thirst, as architects and social practice artists. The curators ask us to collapse as naturally as possible, in a heap so those who come behind us might be immersed in this exhibit of thirst, as if it was their own.

Soon.

67.

There are grief counselors on site for those who realize they have entered The American Water Museum not as patrons but rather as parts of the new exhibit.

68.

The drinking fountain blows a metallic blue ribbon from its spout.

41.

Embroidered martyr banners hang in the entryway: A swath of cloth and flag for the rivers who refused American citizenry, who would not speak English, no matter how badly they were beaten and bled.

7. Text RVR followed by # to sign up for the text message survey:

What does a day feel like when you’re nourished on the bodies and fleshes of those felled for your arrival? A butterfly sipping on the opened neck of a horse stiffening beneath the mottled shade wept by a cottonwood tree? What does it mean that your life is made of someone else’s shed water and blood? Dial 1 if you don’t care.

Natalie Diaz

874.

Blueprints from another water restoration project:

Faint lines of freeway overpass and surrounding houses. The kidney-shape of a pond circled by a concrete path. Sketches of a ramada, a parking lot, fake visitors, toy cars . . .

Graffitied in red spray paint across the blueprints:

This once-river has not been restored to itself it is a river and still isn’t a river.

2345.*

The river is my sister I am its daughter. It is my hands when I drink from it, my own eye when I am weeping, and my desire when I ache like a yucca bell in the night. The river says, Open your mouth to me, and I will make you more.

Because even a river can be lonely, even a river will die of thirst.

I am both the river and its vessel. It maps me alluvium. A net of moon-colored fish. I’ve flashed through it like copper wire.

A cottonwood root swelling with drink, I tremble every leaf to lime, every bean to gold, jingle the willow in the same song the river sings.

I am it and its mud. I am the body kneeling at the river’s edge letting it drink from me.

* The prayer of an Elder Mojave woman shot in the head and throat by two rubber bullets as she sat in prayer before a tractor and a row of German shepherds barking against their leashes at the site of yet another pipeline.

200.

You cannot drink poetry.

19.

There is often trouble choosing which language for the headset:

Makav: ‘Aha Haviily inyep nyuwiich.

Español: A beber y a tragar, que el mundo se va a acabar. I am fluent in water. Water is fluent in my body it spoke my body into existence.

If a river spoke English, it might say:

What begins in water will end without it. Or,

I remember you— I cannot forget my own body.

88.*

You remember everything, carve a waterline of my transgressions, and despite all I’ve done, you’ve suffered to return to me. You’ve fed the mesquite’s thorns and the sweet of its glowing beans.

You’ve pulled me under and released me clean. You made me new, something better than good.

* The last love letter wtitten to the last river. It was the wish of the last river that the letter not be made public until 100 years after her death.

Natalie Diaz

Like me you are a fast body. A coppery current. I laid in your bed. I kept you for myself except you are myself and kept me instead.

365.

Photograph from a South American newspaper:

US-headquartered companies bought the rights to water in other countries. These companies are strangers to the gods of those waters, were not formed from them, have never said Gracias to those waters, never prayed to those waters have never been cleansed by those waters.

The US-headquartered companies announce, with armed guards, You can’t drink from this lake anymore. The Natives gather rain instead, open their beautiful water-shaped mouths to the sky, catch it in curved, peach-colored shells, in halved gourds, in their water-shaped hands.

The companies say, Read these documents we bought the rain too. We own the rain.

210.

The Credible Thirst Interview: When did you first enter the territory of thirst?

How many days have you waited in the long line of thirst with your dirty jug?

Are you able to love anyone your mother, your son, your lover in the midst of such hunger and this fire stretching out and lengthening your throat?

How many bodies have you pressed into, not for desire but for the saliva you sucked from their tongue?

Have you leaned your head against the miles and miles of cyclone fence to steady the dizziness, to slow the breath and thud at your temples, the mirages, and hallucinations?

Have you ever considered your thirst as a weapon?

Do you now consider yourself a soldier in the battle for something wet?

Do you recall in how many instances you didn’t care when it was someone else’s thirst erupting?

And now: Who should fill your cup from their own jug?

211.

There are differing opinions about how kissing became criminal. Who hasn’t drunk, hasn’t begged at the well of a lover’s mouth?

Love has never been different from thirst, but now everything is different. All the cups are filled with dirt even our mouths.

3000.

Water remembers everything it travels over and through. If you have been in water, part of you remains there still.

Natalie Diaz

It is a memoir of an indissoluble relationship with the world. But where is water now? Where is the world?

301. The Magic Show:

Only water can change water, can heal itself. Not even God made water. Not on any of the seven days. It was already here. Or maybe God is water, because I am water, and you are water.

11. Art of Fact:

Let me tell you a story about water: Once upon a time there was us. America’s thirst tried to drink us away. And here we still are.

HEID E. ERDRICH

Curatorial Statement for Apocalyptic Poetics

You describe just what you fear. You imagine 99% of the human population just drops dead. You imagine they curl and rot where they drop. Plants die, strange plants spring up, new animals appear, old animals disappear. You imagine this in some future. You imagine a now. You can yet vibrate the hive, cough up rafts of plastic, find time for reprieve, cry out for justice, own the apocalypse before it owns you. You imagine a past. A past as a virgin land, rich loam, bottomland—it was all just waiting there, going to waste, before. Before was just after—after 99% of the living dropped dead, unwept, went back to the earth where they lay. Strange plants sprang up, new animals appeared, old animals disappeared. We walk on the bridge of bones our ancestors left, their bodies fed the great overbloom of America where we are 1% of the 5% who eat nearly everything. All just as you fear. Yet we are still here.

Heid E. Erdrich

Autobiography as Mix Tape for Lady Mon de Green

All that I read I misread All that I heard I misheard

My skull holds a bowl of spark soup imprinted with grooves that ripple briefly and remove their paths so faint traces remain yes As if sparks in dark liquids could know/guess our first and most ancient medium—mud and sticks or no our hands the thumb of the beloved gesture trace—mother’s touch Creator’s breath

What I have to say I’ve said in glyph and graph incised inscribed sprayed scratched pen and pencil ink and etching and charcoal with my hand as template for mammoth back and pregnant mare—

All that I read I misread All that I heard I misheard

Don’t go out tonight, it’s bound to take your life, there’s a bathroom on the right . . . Oh, Benny, she’s really wonderful, oh, Benny, she’s really mean ... Don’t shake it baby, lay the real thing on me. The Church of Mellow is such a holy place to be . . .

In the old folks home they’ll know which grooves my needle sticks They’ll hear my full Archive of Mixed Grooves—a mystery to the youth who marvels closely at cassettes and deck then says . . . music made with ribbons and magnets what alchemy is this?

What I have to say I’ve said with correction fluid X-ACTO knife wax and bray with stylus and scribe Commodore Fat Mac origami rubber stamp iron-on calligraphy Etch A Sketch and nib and quill and crayon—

Heid E. Erdrich

She’s got erector boots, it’s not her suit, you know I read it in a magazine, oh, oh, . . . Blinded by the light, revved up like a douche, you know the rumor in the night . . . Dirty Dean and the Thunder Chiefs . . .

The Archive of Mixed Grooves and all these labels meant to prove the thesis of my love Remember I gave one to you? But I kept one too I had the kind of faith that duplicates even in those days when we gave it all away

What I have to say I’ve said via telex Teletype facsimilie/fax radio in vinyl postcard sticky note through the curled 12-foot cord of old-school teen-line land-line telephone

And then? We just let it go no record left of what it was so needed to be said

There was no Curator of Ephemera though if there were she would be me

my coil of copper a heavy sheen in my hand—recording wire scored at an estate sale for “Six Generations of Hoarders!” stacked high-fi on top of hi-fi atop wireless routers and “Project-O-Scope” beneath the dusty buttress of slide viewers number one and two and many more “Pana-Vue” and Sharper Image wireless TV analog tuned to perpetual static now It comforts me somehow—the white noise of before times We waited eternities for the grainy waver of TVs Something called “warming up” we found the patience for—

Well you promised to love me completely baby—whatever happened to you?

What I have to say I’ve said I’ve fed the Ephemeral Fountain at the center of the New Museum’s Most Recent Wing where all our instant messages reprint themselves in endless flickering splashing twinkling chatting blathering and ranting scattering like schools of tetras at the plop of trolls and stalkers

Heid E. Erdrich

The limitlessness of light—light once the essence of ephemeral—now how we groove the spark soup

All that I read I misread All that I heard I misheard

What I have to say I’ve light all the love that I What I have to say I’ve light all the love that I

What I have to say I’ve said with light

What I have to say I’ve said yet never made my meaning known

never the same message I sent something always lost in transmit lost and transformed by the limits of the limitless that blinks back your I plus verb plus you

light OF the love That I found

Heid E. Erdrich

Pre-Occupied

River river river

I never never never etched your spiral icon in limestone or for that matter pitched a tent on cement near your banks

Banks of marble stock still all movement in the plaza river walking its message on an avenue rallied in bitter wind

Excuse my digression my mind tends . . . In reality my screen is lit with invitations bake a casserole—send pizza—make soup for the 99%

Sorry somehow I haven’t time

Flow flow flow both ways in time There’s a river to consider after all

No time no hours no decades no millennia. No I cannot dump cans of creamed corn and turkey on noodles and offer forth sustenance again

A bit pre-occupied, we original 100% who are also 1%, more or less

Heid E. Erdrich

Simply distracted by sulfide emissions tar sands pipelines foster care polar bears hydro-fracking and the playlist deeply intoning Superman never made any money . . .

River river river Our river Map of the Milky Way reflection of stars whence all life commenced 100% of all life on our planet

River in the middle Mississippi not the East Coast Hudson where this all started waterway Max Fleischer’s team lushly rendered via the wonder of Technicolor

Emerging from an underwater lair a Mad Scientist we comprehend as indigenous has lost his signifiers (no braids, no blanket) but we recognize him A snappy dresser who flashes a maniac grin he is not not your TV Indian

Ignoble Savage “. . . and I still say Manhattan righfully belongs to my people” Superman “Possibly but just what do you expect us to do about it?”

Occupy Occupy Worked for the 99 Occupy Re-occupy Alcatraz and Wounded Knee

Sorry somehow now I’ve too much time Flow flow flow both ways story-history-story There’s a river that considers us after all

Heid E. Erdrich

All time all hours all decades all millennia

NOTES OF PRE·OCCUPIED DIGRESSION: Descendants of the indigenous population of the United States remain just a tad less than 1% of the population according to the 2010 census. If you add Native Hawaiians to the total we are 1.1% of the population. So, we are, more or less, the original 1% as well as the original 100%. As the Occupy movement took hold, indigenous groups continued to struggle to protect our homelands from imminent threats such as the tar sands in Canada and its Keystone pipeline, copper mining in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and hydro-fracking elsewhere— everywhere, it seems. This era of alternative energy has become the new land grab, the new water grab. Indigenous activists are thoroughly pre-occupied with the social and environmental issues I mention and more. Activists can’t be everywhere at once—not like Superman. I refer here, of course, to the Crash Test Dummies’ 1991 “Superman’s Song,” which despairs that the world will never see altruism like that of the unpaid hero. In the 1942 cartoon Electric Earthquake, an indigenous (but not stereotypically “Indian”) Mad Scientist is thwarted, of course, by Superman. At one point Clark Kent admits indigenous land claim as “possibly” valid but says there’s nothing the Daily Planet can do about it. A shrewd Tesla wannabe, our villain attempts to publish his demands first, then occupies Lois Lane while toppling Manhattan skyscrapers. You can see this beauty all over the Internets.

Heid E. Erdrich

River river river I never never never—but that is not to say that I won’t ever

We drank the nectar left there for you We grew drunk on doom

There was never enough

Down by the river of our youth we pulled love with our tongues

We took something from you

Green-groping in reeds and stink river slow in its drive-by saw us said nothing We could say we were young—young was once true

We took all that was sweet and all that would be We left no excuse

We ignored the body-made call the sweet text its subtle, alien speech

We beseeched! We beseeched! Did you not get our message?

It tasted of many grasses drunk clover bud, sepal, petals then panic, then wrath, then the end

All that we read we misread

Come hither, help us! Come-come!

Did you not get enough?

Taste in the grass, be drunk—

Taste many times over taste more taste in hurry in passion taste to the end of all tongues and be done

The Honey Suckers

Heid E. Erdrich

Lexiconography 2—It was Cloudy

for the Nichols and Nyholm dictionary, pages 158-159

Cloud beings come laughing, comical, They come singing, through the clouds: morning white clouds, a good color. minwaandemagad vii

Springtime is a comedy.

Cloud beings come telling news, clouds come as wind from a certain place. Cloud beings come to sit comfortably, companion, in Summer.

Red clouds come, colored a certain way: copper coins, hot coals, they come with a light. biidaazakwanenjige vai

Fall dark clouds come into view. They come in anger, storm clouds, a ball-headed club, a war club, coals again, coffee. akakanzhe ni;

Winter comes, contests continually.

aanakwad vii, biidaapi vai; biidwewidam vai waabishkaanakwad vii; gagiibaadaatesemagad vii biidaajimo vai ondaanimad vii minwabi vai wiijiiwaagan na miskwaanakwad vii zhooniyaans na, akakanzhe ni, makadeyaanakwad vii biijigidaazo vai, zegaanakwad vii bikwaakwado-bagamaagan ni; Biboon bakinaage apane

Heid E. Erdrich

KELLI JO FORD

Reney’s bones can feel a fight long before the rest of her wakes to the rising voices and clattering bottles. She is eight, almost nine. Granny and Lula live in a new rent house across the tracks and down a long hill, not so very far. Over there—standing on a chair rolling up balls of dough as Granny’s hearing aids whistle or lying curled into Granny’s great body napping—is Reney’s best place. But Reney knows that her place is with her mom.

Tonight, Reney is leaning against the bathroom doorjamb with her arms crossed, watching Justine and Christy, a junior in high school with permed black hair and thighs that bulge around her cutoffs. The young women dig into a pink suitcase of makeup samples that have just arrived in the mail.

“Emerald Noir, fancy!” Christy says, opening a plastic eye shadow tray. “I can’t believe you signed up.”

“Wrote a check, so it won’t cost anybody anything,” says Justine. “An’it,” Christy says, and they laugh like bouncing a check is the funniest thing in the world. Reney doesn’t laugh.

“Just kidding,” Justine says, tossing a cotton ball at her. “Besides, if I get good at this, we’ll be in our own place before you know it. We’ll probably get a pink Cadillac and drive to Dallas and dine with Mary Kay herself.”

“I’m definitely skipping school for that,” Christy says, bumping Reney with her butt. “I’ve never seen a vampire.”

Reney and Justine rent the two upstairs bedrooms of this big, old rickety house from Christy’s mom, who Justine worked with on the line before switching to days. Reney likes it here okay. Christy lets her come into her room and listen to albums sometimes. She lets her watch television with her and her friends after school. Justine isn’t quiet like she was at Granny and Lula’s, isn’t so mad.

Justine makes a V with her fingers. She puts them over Christy’s cheeks and tells her to hold still and quit grinning. She colors in dark rouge, first on Christy’s cheekbones and then her own, just the way the lady had shown her. She pulls out a deep maroon lipstick to match the rouge and turns to Reney.

“Sure you don’t want to get dolled up, Bean?”

Kelli Jo Ford

“The Year 2003 Minus 20” an excerpt from Crooked Hallelujah

Reney shakes her head. The lipstick is so dark it almost looks black in the florescent light of the bathroom mirror.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re the prettiest little Indian I ever did see.” Justine rolls her lips together, smoothing the lipstick, and then kisses a piece of toilet paper and hands it to Reney.

Makeup, Justine had said, was just one reason they couldn’t live with Granny and Lula, who quoted Timothy so much that Reney could mouth the entire Scripture along with her: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety …” and so on. Reney could count on Justine to follow with a crack about Timothy’s next verse: women staying in silence and subjugation. Then there would be stretches of hard quiet, and they were just better off here, so said Justine.

Reney takes the toilet paper and presses her own lips to it, rolls them into the color. She stands on her tiptoes in front of Justine and looks in the mirror, then wipes her lips with the back of her arm.

A good-time crew from the factory drifts in and out of the house. Cigarette butts transform ashtrays into morning-after volcanoes. Reney turns the ash-dusted tabletops into canvasses, tracing hearts in her path when she creeps to the kitchen in the morning quiet. Men, some with union money to spare, bring occasional gifts (a bone-handled jackknife, a book of knots, the licks of a bobtailed dog). They fill the house with noise and a sweet-smelling smoke that Reney has come to know. They leave behind safety glasses, a stray sock here or there. One leaves the Waylon and Willie record that Reney keeps stashed beneath her bed.

“If being with my ex taught me anything,” Justine says, “it’s take not one ounce of shit from a man.” Justine, who won’t call Kenny by name anymore, holds her eyeliner to the flame of a match to soften it before touching it to her eyelid.

Reney leans in the doorway, waiting for the familiar sermon.

“You can’t trust a man to take care of you. Remember that, Reney. You can’t trust them at all for that matter. They’ll lie to get what they want. And they always want something.”

Justine steps over Reney and disappears into the kitchen. She is going to work tonight at the second job she’s picked up waiting tables at a cowboy bar. Justine walks back in with a shot glass of tequila.

“I wish you wouldn’t go to that job,” Reney says. The low-cut blouse Justine has to wear makes Reney feel equal parts angry and embarrassed.

“I wish Granny and Lula didn’t have to walk to the laundromat. Wishing won’t get that washing machine out of layaway.” Justine does a little shake with her hips, holds up her tequila, and winks at Reney.

Kelli Jo Ford

Reney digs through Justine’s purse and finds the lemon-shaped squeeze bottle and disposable saltshaker. She passes the salt and squeezes a bit of lemon into her own mouth before handing it up to Justine, who has already licked the back of her hand. “I go and prepare a place for you,” Justine says before giving the salt a shake and drinking the tequila down. She cackles and then gets mock serious—maybe, Reney is not sure—says, “Father, forgive me.”

Kenny seemed good-natured enough until he didn’t. After him, men ran together in Reney’s mind. There could have been one or ten. There was the one who traveled around sharpening barbers’ razors and scissors and prided himself on keeping the kitchen knives sharp. There was a rodeo clown with the sweet dog and his own bag of makeup. Then there was the one whose friend owned the bar where Justine worked. This one wore a .38 Special in a holster he clipped to the inside of his cowboy boot. He had a long red ponytail and plenty of money but no job. After Justine ended it the first time, he stood at the bottom of her bedroom window crying and strumming a guitar. The second time, he snuck into her locker at the plant and filled her purse with poison ivy.

Reney doesn’t know what her mom is looking for in the men or nonstop working. She doesn’t know what makes her squeeze Reney so hard and so long sometimes that it seems like all the air might leave Reney’s chest for good, what makes her sit up all night watching Reney sleep some nights and stay up making noise with the good-time gang others. Reney doesn’t understand what makes it so hard for her mom to keep still. As far as Reney can tell, they don’t need much at all, and between the one job and Granny and Lula, they have all they might ever need in the world.

Like a cowboy from Waylon and Willie come to life, in saunters the jockey from Texas. A towhead with blue eyes and skin like orange leather, Pitch stands a whole head shorter than Justine. Despite his size, he fills the house with bellowing laughter and a Texas jangle, tight as a new barbed wire fence. He doesn’t drink much. When he’s around, whatever it is that keeps Justine wound so tight seems to ease up. He buys Reney a Zebco reel one visit, then shows back up to take her and Granny fishing. He lets her braid racehorse mane and stand in winner’s circle pictures. Reney beams when he remembers to leave her eggs runny and fry her bologna black on the edges.

One Friday morning before school, Justine’s flurry of getting-to-work-on-time chaos comes to a stop in the kitchen doorway. She stands there, tying her hair up in a bun, watching as Pitch flips a pancake more or less shaped like Texas. It grazes the ceiling, and Reney doubles over giggling as Pitch stretches himself as far as he can to catch the pancake before it slaps the floor. When Reney straightens, she notices Justine’s eyes are not on Pitch, but on the sink piled with dishes.

“Go comb your hair, Bean,” Justine says. She sticks her safety glasses in her shirt pocket. “I have to go, and you don’t have time to be playing.”

Kelli Jo Ford

“But we made God’s country for breakfast,” Pitch says, offering her a plate. “You better be out there when the bus comes, Reney,” Justine says.

Pitch and Reney listen to her bang down the hallway. When the front door closes, Pitch makes a scary face that gets Reney laughing all over again, but as she lies in bed that night, worry washes over her. She knows the beats of their old apartment by heart. Two doors slammed, one after another, was guaranteed trouble. The sounds of skin hitting skin had been rare, but Reney’s bones zapped like a mosquito trap before it happened. She remembers the grunts and knocks of two people falling together in a room, still stupidly—lovingly—trying not to wake a child. She knew when she would be herded from her room before she had half what wanted, driven across town where she would wake up at Granny and Lula’s. If only one door was slammed, Justine might sneak into Reney’s room. Crying, she would curl into the bed beside Reney and stroke her hair until the night hummed quiet.

Reney loves her mother more than anything. She feels thankful for this old house and for goofy Pitch, but she can’t shake her uneasiness. She squeezes her eyes shut and whispers a prayer for all of it, all of them. “He didn’t invent the pancake, you know,” Justine says, as they pull into Granny and Lula’s driveway. “Or tap a damn maple tree.”

Justine had to pick up a Saturday shift, and Reney knows she is annoyed that Pitch left to gallop horses before the sun came up. He’d said he was going to take her fishing. The ride over was quiet, and now Justine’s words seem to come from the middle of a conversation, an argument.

“I’m glad I get to see Granny today,” Reney says. She opens the door and pulls on her backpack. “It’s okay.”

Justine takes a deep breath before leaning over for a hug. “Pitch isn’t ever going to leave Texas, Reney. Plus, he’s got girlfriends in every town from here to Santa Anita. Don’t get attached.”

“He wouldn’t if you told him not to,” Reney says. “And he doesn’t have another me.”

Justine begins to make excuses when they go fishing. She tries to stay out of photos, but Reney pulls her back into the frames. When he goes back to his beloved Texas or packs up his gear for another track town, the good-time crew returns, and to Reney their edges feel sharper than before.

Reney gets up for a drink of water but stops at the foot of the stairs. The ponytail guy is kicked back on the couch. His feet rest on the coffee table, and he’s hugged up on Justine,

Kelli Jo Ford

whispering in her ear.

“What’s that sorry sack of snakes doing here?” Reney says. She can’t believe how calm she sounds. “Did he bring you some calamine lotion?” She had been nearly sleepwalking before, but now she is wide awake.

“Reney, you need to mind your business,” Justine says. “Get back to bed.” Her mascara is smeared.

Reney stomps up the stairs, thirsty.

Two nights later, Reney hears his voice downstairs again. Justine’s been picking up more shifts at the bar. Nobody wants to buy the Mary Kay, and Justine and Christy have gone through most of it themselves. Justine won’t let anybody answer the phone because of bill collectors.

Ponytail guy laughs. His low voice rumbles through the walls, up the banister, and under her bedroom door, where it rattles her bones.

When they begin to yell, Reney’s feet hardly touch the stairs before she’s in the living room and sees that they have already passed through the fight into something else.

“Go to bed, sweet girl,” Justine says. She pulls away from his embrace and glances at the coffee table full of party stuff. In the middle of it all, a leather holster with a metal clip swaddles the .38.

Reney’s about to say something else, something that will probably get her in big trouble when she feels a hand on her neck. It’s Christy.

“Come on, Beenie Weenie,” Christy says. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Reney goes, but she cannot get her mother’s eyes out of her mind. There was something wild about them, something sad. She waits until she hears her mother’s bedroom door close. Then she waits some more, watching the flames of the gas wall heater dance on her walls. When she knows they won’t be awake for a very long time, she creeps back down the stairs.

The gun is heavier than she expected, the handle a hundred sharp, tiny teeth in her hands. When she turns back toward the stairs, she accidentally kicks over his cowboy boots. They are expensive, with lizard toe boxes and garish stitching up and down the shaft. She grinds the heel of her foot into one boot’s counter and the other one’s toe box. Then she carries the gun upstairs to her room. She sits on her bed, holds the gun in her lap.

Reney thinks about what she might do next. She could walk to Granny and Lula’s for good and bury the gun on the side of the road, far away from anybody who might do any harm with it. Once she got to Granny and Lula’s, she would wash her hands and face and maybe get something sweet out of the fridge. Then she’d go get in bed with Granny, where everything would be alright as alright could be.

She could put on a mask and hold up the store on the corner where the man behind the counter always made her feel like she was stealing anyway. She’d take the money and all the Reese’s Pieces in the place. She’d leave a trail of them to her Cookson Hills hideout and send her mom a letter telling her all their troubles were over, telling her

she could follow the Reese’s trail, but only if she came alone and ate the evidence.

Reney cocks the gun, then holds the hammer and gently releases the trigger. She doesn’t know how she knows to do this, but she does. She does it again and again. Then she gets on her knees and puts the gun deep under her bed, next to Waylon and Willie.

The next morning, when Reney goes downstairs, ponytail guy is pacing the living room, wearing nothing but jeans and an unbuckled belt. He has long red hairs spilling off his big toes that make Reney sick. Justine is sitting on the couch chewing a thumbnail. The party stuff is still strewn on the coffee table before her.

“Where is it?” he says to Reney. It doesn’t really seem like a question. She settles onto the couch next to her mom and tucks her legs into her sleep shirt, rests her chin on her knees.

“Where’s my fucking gun?” he says again.

Justine stands but doesn’t go after him like Reney expects her to. “I told you— you probably left it at the bar. Reney wouldn’t dare touch your gun.”

“I don’t leave it anywhere,” he says, starting to yell. “That’s the fucking point, Justine. It was right here, and somebody stole it.”

He stomps down the hall. When he starts banging on Christy’s door, Reney runs up the stairs. She gets on her hands and knees and inches under the bed for the gun. When she gets ahold of it now, it no longer feels like power and possibilities. It feels just like the danger she always knew it was, and she wants it far away from all of them.

When Reney gets to the hallway, Justine is stepping between him and a messyhaired, cursing Christy. “Here,” Reney says, shoving the gun at her mom.

He yanks the gun from Justine before she can react and takes one hard step toward Reney. Justine slaps both of her hands against his chest, pushing him back back back into the living room and out the front door.

Reney hears him shout “about like a bunch of Indians” and runs over to the window in time to see him yanking open the door to his truck. Justine bursts back in the door and grabs his boots. She throws them from the porch all the way to the driveway, and Reney smiles.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” Justine says.

Reney’s been getting in trouble at school. She leaves her lunch sack on the kitchen counter and won’t eat all day long. She feigns a stomachache if Justine works overtime and talks back to Lula. Granny gives Reney her own key and says it doesn’t matter if nobody’s home. She can always come inside; she can always stay. Even stern Lula nods her head and says, “Always.” But as soon as Justine drops her off, Reney starts walking home. The belt doesn’t work.

When Justine catches her trying to light a roach left in an ashtray, that’s it. She ties her hair up in a bun and spends an entire Sunday cleaning house. Then she gets

Kelli Jo Ford

on the phone. The next weekend Pitch makes the drive across the Red River and into Oklahoma even though he didn’t have a race. Reney crouches at the top of the stairs listening to the two of them talk deep into the night. Pitch stays for three weeks before Reney suspects that the good-time crew might be gone for good. They take her to Padlock Pizza to tell her they are getting married. The three of them are moving to Texas, and she’ll get a horse. Reney’s eyes well with tears. Though she is no farther from Granny than she had been a minute before, she thinks her heart might burst from the way she suddenly misses Granny, dear Granny who speaks Cherokee best and wraps her up in arms that smell like Shower to Shower and something good cooked over the stove. A single gray braid curling to the middle of her back, she crushes Reney’s bones the good way, like only love can.

Justine sits across the table from Reney and Pitch, and Reney can feel her waiting for a response. Not knowing today would be special, Reney has brought along her book of knots and one of Pitch’s lead ropes. Parmesan cheese and red pepper jars balance on either side of her open book, holding open the page for bowline knots. Reney sets the jars off the book and lets the book slap shut.

She feels the long skeleton key that hangs from a piece of twine to the middle of her chest. Granny and Lula’s back door is still held together by a cast-iron rim lock with a heavy doorknob that feels like a small heart in Reney’s hand.

Reney looks at her mom there waiting. Reney had never had a dad. She didn’t think she was missing anything. She thought about ponytail guy and Kenny. She thought about her mom, beautiful, unable to let herself come to a rest, no matter how hard she worked. And then there was Pitch, sitting next to her, loudly finishing his Dr Pepper with a straw.

“Is it going to be a Paint Horse?” Reney asks.

“We can get you an Indian pony if that’s what you want,” Pitch says. He grins and hugs her against his side. Then he props Justine’s elbow on the table, takes the rope, and flips it around Justine’s arm. “This is the rabbit,” he says, holding up one end. “This here is Mr. Rabbit’s home,” he says as he makes a loop. He shakes Justine’s arm. “And this is the tree.”

Justine sighs and rolls her eyes but plays along as he runs the rope up through the rabbit hole, around the tree, and back home. Reney reaches across the table to try it.

“What about your job at the plant?” Reney asks, rounding Justine’s arm with the rope.

Justine shrugs. With her free hand, she pulls a string of cheese from the slice she’d put on Reney’s plate and drops it into her mouth. She smiles a little, and Reney cannot tell if it is forced. “I was looking for a job when I found that one. I’m sure I can find something.” And with that, it’s decided.

Jo Ford

When her bones buzz her awake that night, all she hears is the gas heater’s low hiss. There had been a party, but it was across the street. She had fallen asleep to the muffled thumping of country music and occasional bursts of laughter. Now everything is quiet. Confused, she chalks it up to nerves. Still she is too unsettled to sleep. She flips one of her granny’s tied quilts to the bottom of the bed and walks across the hallway. She puts her ear against her mom’s door but hears nothing that would set her bones so abuzz.

When she pushes into the room, she finds Justine and Pitch crouched on the floor before the window, a wool Pendleton blanket over their shoulders. “New neighbors are fighting,” Justine whispers.

Relief moves through Reney’s limbs. Whatever it was that had woken her is outside. She and her mom are safe inside this house. In Texas, there would be a whole house and a Paint. Maybe the nights would be punctuated with barking dogs and stamping horses. Maybe Texas would be quiet.

From the darkness, the three of them kneel before the window, looking down across the street. Bare oak limbs spider their view. Pitch pounds the frame twice with the palm of his hand to break the paint seal. When the window pops up, cold air blows across them, and the branches rattle. Reney shivers in her sleep shirt. She reaches up and slides her fingers across the fogged glass, drawing a heart that drips down her arm. Justine opens up the blanket that Granny had saved money to buy for Justine when she graduated eighth grade. Justine pulls Reney close, kisses the top of her head.

A yellow bulb from the porch lights the man from behind as he stands over the neighbor lady. The man’s hair seems to glow, but his face is a shadow. Reney hasn’t seen him before, but she can imagine just what he looks like in the light. From up above, Reney, Justine, and Pitch have just watched the woman run down the cement steps, her long brown hair streaming behind her. They heard the smack when she slapped him. When he pushed her away, the woman fell onto her back in the dry yellow grass and kicked at him.

The man bellows, her name lost in his throat, and grabs at her foot.

“She needs help,” Reney says. Pitch is already reaching for his wadded-up jeans, and Justine has started for the phone. They are too late; from down the street comes the sound of the sirens. Reney presses her forehead against the cold metal screen.

Two cops, one Native and one white, jump out of the car, and it seems to Reney that everybody across the street starts yelling at once. The man is on his stomach now, the white cop’s knee in his back. The woman cries out and flashes up the steps inside.

When she runs back outside and down the steps, one of the cops shouts, “Gun, gun, gun.” And it is so. Three quick shots.

Pitch covers his head with his hands and ducks before wedging himself between Reney and the window. Justine, too, reaches for Reney, tries to cover her eyes.

The white cop is on the ground now, and so is the woman. The man with the

Kelli Jo Ford

glowing hair struggles to his knees and cries out in a voice so wild, so full of despair and love that it shakes Reney from the inside out.

Pitch tries to pull the window shut, but now it’s stuck open. He puts all of his weight behind it, but it will not close. Instead, he grabs the pull-down vinyl shade, but he fumbles it, and it springs up inside its roller. “Real nice setup you got here,” Pitch says. “Nice town.”

“There’s work,” Justine hisses, straining to pick Reney up.

Pitch doesn’t answer. He takes a deep breath and drapes the blanket over the rolled-up blind. Then he slides down the wall to the floor.

Reney wraps her legs around Justine’s waist, locks them at her ankles. Everyone is quiet as Justine carries Reney over to the bed. Pitch, looking smaller than before, stays put.

Justine pulls Reney’s head to her chest. Reney can tell her mom is quiet crying, so she is relieved to hear her mom’s heart pound steady and regular, if a little too fast, a little too loud. Reney thinks she is too old to stay in her mom’s lap, but she doesn’t care. Reney settles her head onto Justine’s shoulder and closes her eyes. Even after the flashing lights spin out of the room and the sound of sirens deepen before growing faint, Justine and Pitch stay fixed to their places, as if they are on a stage waiting for curtains that will not come.

Jo Ford

SANTEE FRAZIER

A white light spalls through the drab. Curtains beige and stiff. Outside, limbs, ground aglow—a lean of snow carved by a dim wind. Tires hiss the wet asphalt.

In pining for the slow hum of gears— a rumble in the cavern of ear—low hung limbs vein distance. Pumpjacks gnaw at dirt, a dreary run of hours, the brush bending, dustless.

Light and sound shaping the blackness— sometimes distance is a malady fraught with undazzling clank. As to skim slick misty bark, or hum a tune of rot.

I envy dreams that cleave well-bred spells of woe, that vector ache, and rifle the banal into dusks ornamented with kindling. As to argufy small oblivions culled and speared by ocherish glint.

Variations on Loneliness

Santee Frazier

Pavement roars the thin dark to dawn, the softest of dreads. In the brains’s dark the metal noise of work wanes, and I wince in the quiet as beltings and welts shape themselves into jejune grey sunup, the slightest of umbrage tracing the edges of verse wrung of lenity. I uncork the amber and swill. My neck slumps in nod— to excise misbelief as headlights beam the length of a bridge where below the stream is high, the current swirling, bugs not yet buzzing the thicket.

The day begins in blur and racket, the whine of diesels, the grunt of gears—a void of wrenches and pistons— and I stare until drizzle becomes rain, and the rain clicks.

Santee Frazier

Aubade

The slow crawling light wilts into the dark crags of asphalt.

The moon rings the dim-lit room. The scrapping. The fire. Dust in the deep flesh of ear.

Strike a match, watch the flame— the scrapping, the fire, ring in unison, the brain’s bent fugue.

Yoked mica, deafened glint— scrape and fire, the moon ringing the dim-lit room.

A louse in the crevice of brain— wrinkle-scape in knuckles flexed lashed, etched, around the steel— the affiliation of squalor—a pummeling —skull and brain smelted, starless.

Santee Frazier

Lachrymose

LINDA HOGAN

I will never think of this in the same way, watching the woman in her daily brown skirt throw her own body against the fence and try to climb. We believe in freedom. She does, but she hits the fence like the wind and still it keeps her from the clean water of another life, the dream of another imagined world until finally she does nothing, but with all her might she throws a rock over so something will reach that destination of justice she has walked toward.

What about the meek, the wretched, the tired, the poor and yearning, the vulnerable ones in their countries of life thieves who, like the vigilantes, have no fiber of mercy, no humanity, have never lived only to be free, no hunger or pain about them, not for the fragile being of that young woman. The Americans forget they were land thieves here, the takers, the soldier gangs.

Like their poor dogs some will never find another bone to crack, some gristle or other nerve of mercy for the penned, fenced children, little birds locked in a room of strong windows.

Fences

Linda Hogan

Not in the white men riots of the past, but yesterday a man was shot in the back by a police officer. She was white, he black, she a medic who didn’t help him, nor did the others who arrived. For minutes they watched while they could have saved him but for his skin.

I try to imagine watching a man die because they fear or hate the darkness of a human, a man who had no weapon, not even words, the man who began his day like any other day, saying to his wife, Helene, I’ll be back early today. I’m taking you out for Mother’s Day.

I love you. She sat under the lamp with her tea, finishing the hem of their daughter’s jeans before she left for work. The pictures on the table of their children, children with more melanin in their skin. They are beautiful and smart, loved, and doesn’t it scare a father that they are learning to drive? Does it scare you that one dates a white boy and they might love? What does the officer think as she stands, watching the man lose blood and die? That she might get in trouble? That she won’t?

2.

Me, I am a dark woman. Dark. Darker. Even Darker. An Indian woman from the very old days, but if the police saw me they would think I am white, even whiter than them. I can pass. They would save me, not knowing the dark history in my skin that lies to them and how I might be thinking of them with fear or something worse.

Linda Hogan

3. Rapid City, South Dakota

Before this day, the kids from the tribe had a chance to go to a soccer game. They kept up their grades; this was the reward. Excited, they rode the bus, so quiet, and sat on the bleachers, learning and watching, until the white men above them poured beer on the children’s color of skin, poured beer on the unknown reservation world from which they came. White Men. Native Children. I wonder if, like the policewoman, the soul of those men came from some other place.

Ways of the Cranes

When the red sun is sinking behind the mist in the evening, the sandhill cranes begin to arrive. Long-legged, wings open wide, they come first sparely, two watchers, then in scatterings and finally in great numbers, lines of them crossing the sky to land before us hidden humans. The great birds fly across the mist, through it, necks lengthened, legs stretched out behind them, then landing, their sound an uproar. It has been noted through history that they look like writing across the sky, that they fly like words and sentences. I know a message is given above us, one of mystery and animal dignity. They have their inner maps, the memory of constellations, and a magnetic pull to place that must feel something like a passion; it is a deep pilgrimage home.

As sun passes, water is blue vein and the world currents of heartbeat of this river are even felt by the human in this flat land of golden grasses. They land and congregate one with another until they become the world. Soon no water is seen.

More fly directly over us and with such beauty there is not even a word to describe it. They have been to many places and when they leave they will fly to other worlds, waters we do not know, so many, with the last light of evening flashing on their hundred thousand wings that speak the language of feather-light, air-filled bones. They are driven by what is hidden to most of us, understood in aboriginal remembrance of traveling the causeways of land and water shine, as we recall the eroded passages of time where we, too, as Indian people who have come together for this sojourn, journeyed, seeking survival for all time.

They come to this place, now a soft gray field of birds, almost a cloud, except that they stand crowded in the water and talk, noisy, loud, and yet I find it comforting. It is night when all this life takes place, when they return to the narrowing braid of waters that was once a great, crashing river, now sandbars and only a few inches deep.

Above, as they continue to arrive, the wind shows the clouds moving with the curve of earth and the birds look darker than they are, in the turning night, all looking like water. They appear as they have done forever, along the river, half a million in number, and continue to land for many nights, the voice of earth history crying out, calling, even slightly roaring as humans try to sleep.

Tree branches are still without leaves and yet the pulse of the ground sends the fluids skyward, all attention there. It is the first evening of spring in all its chaos. Sprouts rise from the ground. A volcano erupts in Alaska. The whole earth is filled with motion and new life.

Linda Hogan

The birds are this American sky. They are the sand and water, all the elements, even fire, in their desire to travel the river, braided together in a strand. Tribes have told stories about them, told stories to them, for centuries, and they have told the tribes the stories of their own entwined journeys.

More than the mind or imagination or even the spirit can hold, they fly in, black strings of movement across the night sky, still coming when we leave to walk toward them in darkness, walking bent, single file, trying to be Crane, the life that was here before humans.

About five years ago, being a rock hound, I found the bone of an ancient sea turtle near here. Ossified. I was searching for a round river stone to take home with me. I always hope to collect even a small one from every place I visit, but instead I found a bit of the ancient world that lived here, along with the ancestors of these cranes. Those great turtles are now gone from the nearby inland waters, but the cranes still arrive. They have flown over fences, international boundary lines from Mexico, over cut golden stalks, wetlands, and each night becomes one special language, each bird joining with the others over our human silence, listening, watching.

Although the true dance takes place in the fields, some rise up, wings open, then come back down in motions elegant as the dances of Asian theater. The ones they create for possible partners are dances of stylized seduction and enchantment, and it works. I am seduced, enchanted for certain, by their songs and stories, cantos, the way they know a private world and language, ancient and separate from ours, yet part of the same, and they are telling something important. We desire to understand that telling. It seems they are sharing stories as the whales do when they congregate in the depths of ocean to speak. And as with the whales, when they leave their joined destination, it has been noted by experts that their language is different. It has changed. Writers would say they tell a new story.

For some of the younger cranes, theirs is an elaborate dance of mating. They open wings and move in great arcs and curves to attract a lifetime partner, one who will call out, return their calls, in unison, the same words and sounds establishing the union.

One night a driving storm shakes the world. Thunder breaks open sky and for the first time all is silent for a while, as if the cranes are taking in the larger voice, and then it begins again, the constant talk, the convergence of languages from the four corners of the world, where they have all been.

I hear them all night and I think, They are the soul of this land. In the morning, I go outside to watch them leave in a roar of wing beats, traveling to near fields to eat the leftover harvests, gleaning corn and wheat, crickets and other insects, to stretch and dance. They need a certain amount of calcium, and I wonder if nutrition plays a part in the dwindling of the whooping cranes who come to this same place, smaller in number, larger in size.

These sandhills were once a savannah, a world of tall plants and grasses. Now it is changed by farmlands and highways. Once, there was a roaring river. It was called by some of the tribes a place of healing waters.

Cranes have a fossil map four and a half million years old. Other research says nine million years. The bones of sandhill cranes have been used by ancient peoples in beads and medicine bundles. Also, the crane leads a line of animals connected with humans in a pictograph that was once thought of as a story, then used as an old Chippewa land claim in court, where it held up as legal. Writer Allison Hedge Coke says that the Chippewa call the cranes keepers of language. When I see their writing in the sky, or even their tracks in sandy mud, hear their voices, I can understand this of these birds with long black legs, the red top of head and eye, the softly colored feathers and bend of neck. They are animals of dignity, meaning, and a history we only try to imagine, even as we recognize them on ancient pottery designs. They have to do, in the human being, with divinity.

Still, we are always tracking, keeping numbers, measuring that which is without measure, trying to either categorize or to make sense of meaning or beauty in this world. In our new times, we track most often to help the survival of other lives, and yet the world all around us is changing, growing smaller moment by moment. We must encircle that with our knowledge, our intuition, with what we do not yet have, the learning of an entirety, a wholeness, or an expanded vision that takes in not just the study of one but the knowledge and understanding of all. We might track ourselves, our true histories, even truth, constantly forgotten, ignored, and denied.

We are not at peace, even among ourselves. What can I say of the rest of the human world, but that it all breaks my heart day after day and I wish to fly away with the cranes and be one of them, in the gleaning field by day, legs down when I come to the water flying by night, going afar with my clan, returning each year to reaches in the right place in sky and water, alive with the moon inside me.

There was something I once read in one of the great mythologies and stories of cranes. Here is what I remember of it:

Linda Hogan

Goddess

There was a woman they called Crane because of her dance. Graceful of leg, she always wore the color of feathers, downy white, gray-tipped, red paint across her eyes. She enchanted men and they believed they loved her. Following her at night, they walked through marshes and dried grasses, over fallen trees, into snow, cold, and through the brush, only to find themselves winged and standing among others like spirits taken away to other worlds calling out all night in a new language searching for that one lost among the many. —LH

There they go now, early morning, leaving, the red sun on them. They are fires flying red through sky, living winged embers, loud, the whoosh of wings like the sound of a train. The bringing together of feather, perfectly groomed. Droves of them travel. When there is more clear light. At the top, perhaps it is only the sun, the white of their wings is visible in light, but mostly they are soft gray, cloud gray. Many tribes have watched these elegant birds, many tribes, even those in the north, and for many years. In Mississippi, where we are from, the cranes have gathered in the deep green of water, the blue of it, the sand of it, and remained, never leaving, as if they are The Ones Who Hid and Remained, while the rest of us, my people, were forced to leave our country and walk to Indian Territory.

These birds of Nebraska’s Platte River come through that territory as well, to the red lands and thick trees, to the shallow rivers. Red People, Red Land, it means. Oklahoma. Red Waters. I have seen them, the red feathers across or above the eye we sometimes used to design with red paint as we danced.

Linda Hogan

In their congress of wing and beak and claw, gathering all in one place, crowded, they are a tribe surrounded by stalks and grasses leaning in the wind, winding through a bend in the sky, clouds of the cranes, wings closing and opening, their voices telling us what we need to hear, that we are never going to know what they do, that we are never going to reach the mystery we seek, that we are always going to be children here until we find new ways of knowing and of belonging.

Linda Hogan

LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

Introduction

Excerpts from Whereas

On Saturday, December 19, 2009, US President Barack Obama signed the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. No tribal leaders or official representatives were invited to witness and receive the Apology on behalf of tribal nations. President Obama never read the Apology aloud, publicly—although, for the record, Senator Sam Brownback five months later read the Apology to a gathering of five tribal leaders, though there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes in the US. The Apology was then folded into a larger, unrelated piece of legislation called the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act.

My response is directed to the Apology’s delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document. I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled mem ber of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.

Layli Long Soldier

WHEREAS when offered an apology I watch each movement the shoulders high or folding, tilt of the head both eyes down or straight through me, I listen for cracks in knuckles or in the word choice, what is it that I want? To feel and mind you I feel from the senses—I read each muscle, I ask the strength of the gesture to move like a poem. Expectation’s a terse arm-fold, a failing noun-thing I scold myself in the mirror for holding.

Because I learn from young poets. One sends me new work spotted with salt crystals she metaphors as her tears. I feel her phrases, “I say,” and “Understand me,” and “I wonder.”

Pages are cavernous places, white at entrance, black in absorption. Echo.

I’m transformed by language, I am often crouched in footnote or blazing in title. Where in the body do I begin;

Layli Long Soldier

WHEREAS a friend senses what she calls cultural emptiness in a poet’s work and after a reading she feels bad for feeling bad for the poet she admits. I want to respond the same could be said for me, some sticky current of Indian emptiness, I feel it not just in my poems but when I’m on drives, in conversations, or as I lie down to sleep but since this dialogue is about writing I want to be correct with my languageness. In a note following the entry for Indian an Oxford dictionary warns: Do not use Indian or Red Indian to talk about American native peoples, as these terms are now outdated; use American Indian instead. So I explain perhaps the same could be said for my work some burden of American Indian emptiness in my poems how American Indian emptiness surfaces not just on the page but often on drives, in conversations, or when I lie down to sleep. But the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us anywhere but to rot. If the language of race is ever truly attached to emptiness whatever it is I feel now has me in the hull, head knees feet curled, I dare say, to fetal position—but better stated as the form I resort to inside the jaws of a reference;

Layli Long Soldier

WHEREAS resolution’s an act of analyzing and restructuring complex ideas into simpler ones so I place a black bracket on either side of an [idea] I cordon it to safety away from national resolution the threat of reductive [thinking]:

Layli Long Soldier

Whereas Native Peoples are [spiritual] people with a deep and abiding [belief] in the [Creator], and for millenia Native Peoples have maintained a powerful [spiritual] connection to this land, as evidenced by their [customs] and legends;

Whereas the Federal Government condemned the [traditions], [beliefs], and [customs] of Native Peoples and endeavored to assimilate them by such policies as the redistribution of land under the Act of February 8, 1887 (25 U.S.C. 331; 24 Stat. 388, chapter 119) (commonly known as the “General Allotment Act”), and the forcible removal of Native [children] from their [families] to faraway boarding schools where their Native [practices] and [languages] were degraded and forbidden;

Layli Long Soldier

WHEREAS I read an article in the New York Times about the federal sequestration of funds from reservation programs, the cuts. In federal promises and treaties. The article details living conditions on reservations a suicide rate ten times higher than the rest of the country. Therein the story of a twelve-year old girl whose mother died, she doesn’t know her father, she bounces home to home to foster home, weary. I regard how plainly the writer imparts her repeated sexual abuse. For mental care, unavailable services. There’s a clinic that doesn’t have money after May, don’t get sick after May is the important message. As I read I cry, I always cry, and here I must be clear my crying doesn’t indicate sadness. Then I read a comment posted below the online article:

I am a fourteen-year-old girl who recently visited the Reservation in South Dakota, with my youth group. The conditions the Native American people were living in were shocking. When I arrived home, I wrote a petition on whitehouse.gov for the US to formally apologize and pay reparations to the Native American people. This petition only stays up until July 23rd, so please sign and share!!! You signing it would really mean a lot to a lot of people. Thank you.

Dear Fourteen-Year-Old Girl, I want to write. The government has already “formally apologized” to Native American people on behalf of the plural you, your youth group, your mother and father, your best friends and their families. You, as in all American citizens. You didn’t know that, I know. Yet indeed, Dear Girl, the conditions on reservations have changed since the Apology. Meaning, the Apology has been followed by budget sequestration. In common terms sequestration is removal banishment or exile. In law-speak it means seizure for safekeeping but changed in federal budgeting to mean subject to cuts, best as I can understand it. Dear Girl, I went to the Indian Health Services to fix a tooth, a complicated pain. Indian health care is guaranteed by treaty but at the clinic limited funds don’t allow treatment beyond a filling. The solution offered: Pull it. Under pliers masks and clinical lights, a tooth that could’ve been saved was placed in my palm to hold after sequestration. Dear Girl, I honor your response and action, I do. Yet the root of reparation is repair. My tooth will not grow back. The root, gone.

Layli Long Soldier

Whereas Native Peoples are [spiritual] people with a deep and abiding [belief] in the [Creator], and for millenia Native Peoples have maintained a powerful [spiritual] connection to this land, as evidenced by their [customs] and legends;

Whereas the Federal Government condemned the [traditions], [beliefs], and [customs] of Native Peoples and endeavored to assimilate them by such policies as the redistribution of land under the Act of February 8, 1887 (25 U.S.C. 331; 24 Stat. 388, chapter 119) (commonly known as the “General Allotment Act”), and the forcible removal of Native [children] from their [families] to faraway boarding schools where their Native [practices] and [languages] were degraded and forbidden;

Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier

MONA SUSAN POWER

No More Name Sitka, Alaska - 1918

The woods are angry. The spruce shakes its boughs for me and raven hollers into the wind. He offers a curse as he flies past matron’s window. When I cannot cry, Sitka cries for me. A storm rustles in and heaves its weight around more heavily than matron ever can. I smile inside to think how these people are not as powerful as the tides or the mountains. Not as powerful as my grandfather’s spirit. I carry him in a stone in my pocket. He speaks to me at night, in Tlingit, and no one can stop his voice as they have silenced mine. I buried my voice in the damp hollow of a cedar tree so that it will not die. All my prayers and stories and songs nest in that ground, and the rain keeps the words alive. English will not kill me. English will not kill my memories or the last words my mother spoke to me.

My grandfather stone says I am a warrior. He says this to make me strong when I hear crying in the night. My friends are dying. They cough blood into their hands, it dribbles down their chins. Matron says they are coughing up all the bad words and stories we were taught by our families, by our clans. She says they will soon be empty and clean. I do not cough blood because I buried my voice already where no one can take it from me, no one can scrape it out like the tangled guts of a fish.

One night I slither past the other boys, past doors and steps and dark windows, past our sleeping jailers. I stand outside on the grass in bare feet. I stand like that with my toes clenching earth so I can stamp my life into the ground. Plant myself in Sitka like the oldest tree. Our shoes capture me by day. I plant myself at night.

Matron says she sees a devil in my heart. I am a special case, a terrible boy. My grandfather stone talks over her voice and tells me I am good. That I was always a comfort to my family, and industrious. But when matron sends me down for punishment and doctor teacher beats me with heavy sticks, my grandfather’s voice is drowned out by the noise of blows on my starved-thin body. Doctor teacher does things to my flesh I never knew you could to a boy. I chew the wood desk so he will not hear me whimper. I chew the wood desk so I will be a warrior in my own way. Raven screams my name to give me courage. He curses these people who never stop fighting us even when they have all that is ours.

Mona Susan Power

Sometimes I think I will never leave this place. I will always be trapped in my shoes, in the angry grip of doctor teacher’s hands. Sometimes I think I will never find my voice again, never place my words and stories back on my tongue. Then how will my people know me? How will they take me back when I was always a chattering bird and now I am mute? In the face of these worries my grandfather tells me to live. Just live. That a warrior can’t win every battle. But he can survive. So each morning I gather breath in my hands to check that I am here another day. This is the gift I offer my family. Another breath, another step. I guard my life. It is the only way to outlast the people who have stolen our territory, our bodies, our stories, our dreams.

Mona Susan Power

Day Sun

Fort Yates, North Dakota - 1934

“Let the sun wash your face,” my ate always told me. So that’s why I go outside every morning and offer my smile to the sky.

I come from a long line of hereditary chiefs–leaders who are supposed to put the good of the people ahead of their own desires. My grandfather was the last official chief of our family but that doesn’t stop the people from making their way to my door, bringing their worries and problems to be shared with the one who carries that strong blood. “Josawee,” they call me, “Josa-wee,” as they tote their stories into our cabin along with what scrapes of food they can dig from exhausted soil.

I married my mihiŋhna Indian Way and we have six children now. How can I say that is too many when each one is loved a different way? But the more there are, the less food they have to eat, less room in a crowded bed, fewer inches of the old Army blanket covering them from a frost that coats everything, even their eyelashes. I told my husband we must behave as our ancestors did and quiet our passions for a while so we won’t make more children than we can protect. He listens and nods his head. “Ohan,” he agrees. But when he comes by illegal hootch and drinks angry worms into his brain, he forgets his promises. I try to keep the children around at those times, but they are like dandelion fluff it is so easy to scatter to a hundred winds. We are soon alone, and he comes for me like a bull charging a fence. He wants to smash into me, work on me, take me, use me, pound me, until there is no one left. Until I am nothing more than a heap of my ancestor’s bones. He kills us both with his sex.

Women look up to me. Sometimes I see one lift her chin higher when I pass, as if she can see all those who stand behind me, and they have given her strength. There is a parade at my back. I can feel them. Is it me, or my ancestors, who make a fist and shake it at the sheriff when he is brutal? Together we make a fist and pound the reservation agent’s desk when we need answers. There is no battle we are afraid to enter when it comes to our people.

But I cannot make that fist against my man. He lost his leg when he was twelve years old, the same age as my oldest boy. It was the fourth time he ran away from Carlisle,

Mona Susan Power

the Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania where the agent kept sending him. He slipped as he ran for a freight train, and it took its terrible bite. His wood leg pains him even though there’s nothing there beyond his stump. He rubs it the way I sometimes rub my sore feet. On good days he speaks Dakota, and lifts us into another time with his eloquent speech. He feeds the people who are hungry for words they had forgotten, the eloquent speech of wise counselors and storytellers. He doesn’t like English because he says it steals the best words and leaves us with fewer than we had the day before. He is all that is good. He is all that is lost. I cannot make that fist.

Another child is due. She kicks and complains and wants to run with the others rather than wait in the stillness of my womb. She is a fighter, too. She has something to say. I can almost hear her in those first moments when I wake. I stand up to wash my face in the sun, dry my unborn girl’s angry tears which I am crying for her. My bones collect in the sun and make me a woman again. I remember who I am. The parade pushes against my back. I make a fist but it has nowhere to go. So I open the hand and offer its anger to the dawn. Always the morning sun leaves me smiling. Always the day sun washes my face and restores my breath. The many stand up and help me walk into the next hour.

Mona Susan Power

LUCI TAPAHONSO

Ilíígo1 Naalyéhé2: Goods of Value

Yes, those days are over; our childhoods were immersed in ílíígo hané3 — Diné stories and songs that were conveyed with delight, reverence, or sometimes tears. Hané is always bound with comfort. When the grown-ups began talking, we paused our loud play and tussling and squeezed in at the table or settled on the floor nearby. Our visceral need and appreciation for stories took over as we absorbed the rhythm, pauses, rises and falls in their voices.

Something inside us urged us to remember, not to forget. We also knew the exact tone, that slight dip in tenor when we had to leave the room. It is said that a child’s ears and mind are vulnerable. They would say, “Nihi ‘áłchíni niłhil a’yóo da’íłíwe hold our children in much respect.”

Decades later, we share the same stories with our children and grandchildren this time mixed with English. We sing the same songs. Our children have learned to listen and to ascertain whether they could ask questions. In time they, too, grasped the intent, the underlying resolve in the pauses, smiles, dips and echoes of saad4 — the wisdom of the old words, long prayers, and timeless songs.

The adults who surrounded us in childhood are gone now –iná kaí. They have left on their journey, but their hané and songs remain. The prayers, laughter, and songs that guided them into sá5 – old age – remain with us.

Áa bił dáhwiłilį ‘ńtęé. It was their saad -verbal propertiesa form of soft goods6 that kept them steady. Saad strengthens our minds and bodies like a sis łigáaí7, the silver belt that encircles one’s waist to keep our posture upright. They used to say, “The Holy Ones will see us coming

Luci Tapahonso

at a distance, adorned with stories and jewelry, and they will murmur, “‘Ashi néé, shi awee, my beloved little ones.’” Thus, we honor them by wearing the jewelry they created and we revere the world they put into place for us: the mountains, rivers, sky, plants, stars, birds and animals. ‘Éí ‘ałdó’ íłįígo naalyéhé at’e - they, too, have great value.

Like our elders, our hope is that the young ones become diné8 bił da’ílíngipersons of virtue - a man who helps when a stranger’s car stalls, the one who offers the exact words of comfort when needed, gives a soft hug or holds your hand in silence.

The one who cooks for the grief-stricken when the hours become a blur and exhaustion hovers at the doorways and the scents of stew, just-baked bread and coffee linger. Or the person turns an ordinary day into a jovial gathering complete with íłįigo hané and chi’yáán łikaní9good stories and tasty dishes. The house again fills with outbursts of delight when relatives arrive.

We trust that the young ones will offer a bed to relatives who would otherwise sleep curled against cement buildings or panhandle on street corners - distraught and thinbeset by chemical cravings our ancestors could not fathom. They are kin who have veered from their íłįígo hané; For them, the stories are echoes that can’t be named like the resonating childhood voices that visit on the coldest nights. They pawned the family’s hard goods, the íłįígo naalyéhé, the valuables that were carried about as hané, the saad at the spiral center of the taut basket that was created to weave the past into our present and future. Still, we are grateful for the women who still wear long skirts and turquoise jewelry as if each day is sacred, They say, “Shí íłįígo naalyéhé bił naasó naashá doI will go forth into the day clothed in my shields.”

They were bestowed with hard goods at their first laugh dinner. Their parents, too, always wore a bracelet, earrings or a bolo tie.

They remember the times of crisis when everyone held each other and prayed

Luci Tapahonso

while clasping soft pouches of corn pollen.

Now they carry their childhood offerings throughout the day as overhead, the sun’s many-colored horses gallop across the sky.

1 Ilíígo: An item or idea that is literally and/or figuratively of great value. It is also used to describe a person who is well-respected, someone who is dignified.

2 Naalyéhé: An item that one carries about which has significant cultural import; something that is cherished and has heft.

3 Hané: stories that are told and retold over generations.

4 Saad: Songs, prayers and stories that comprise traditional knowledge and wisdom.

5 Sá: Old age; an elder who has acquired valuable knowledge throughout his or her long life.

6 Soft goods: Refers to items that are pliable such as fabric and blankets as well as intangible gifts such as stories, words of encouragement and teachings. Hard goods refer to material items such as jewelry, firewood and tools.

7 Sis łigaaí: A handmade belt made of silver (łigaaí means white) and turquoise stones; commonly known as a concha belt.

8 Diné: A Navajo man (singular) or the Navajo people

9 Chi’yáán łikaní: Tasty dishes; memorable meals.

Luci Tapahonso

DAVID TREUER

Return the National Parks to the Tribes

The jewels of America’s landscape should belong to America’s original peoples.

I. THE END RESULT OF DIRTY BUSINESS

In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view,” he later wrote. “A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears.” Many of those who have followed in Bunnell’s footsteps over the past 170 years, walking alongside the Merced River or gazing upon the god-rock of El Capitan, have been similarly struck by the sense that they were in the presence of the divine.

The Mariposa Battalion had come to Yosemite to kill Indians. Yosemite’s Miwok tribes, like many of California’s Native peoples, were obstructing a frenzy of extraction brought on by the Gold Rush. And whatever Bunnell’s fine sentiments about nature, he made his contempt for these “overgrown, vicious children” plain:

Any attempt to govern or civilize them without the power to compel obedience, will be looked upon by barbarians with derision … The savage is naturally vain, cruel and arrogant. He boasts of his murders and robberies, and the tortures of his victims very much in the same manner that he recounts his deeds of valor in battle.

When the roughly 200 men of the Mariposa Battalion marched into Yosemite, armed with rifles, they did not find the Miwok eager for battle. While the Miwok hid, the

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militiamen sought to starve them into submission by burning their food stores, souring the valley’s air with the smell of scorched acorns. On one particularly bloody day, some of the men came upon an inhabited village outside the valley, surprising the Miwok there. They used embers from the tribe’s own campfires to set the wigwams aflame and shot at the villagers indiscriminately as they fled, murdering 23 of them. By the time the militia’s campaign ended, many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their homeland for millennia, and forced onto reservations.

Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park. (Yellowstone, which was granted that status in 1872, was the first.) The parks were intended to be natural cathedrals: protected landscapes where people could worship the sublime. They offer Americans the thrill of looking back over their shoulder at a world without humans or technology. Many visit them to find something that exists outside or beyond us, to experience an awesome sense of scale, to contemplate our smallness and our ephemerality. It was for this reason that John Muir, the father of modern conservationism, advocated for the parks’ creation.

More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine1, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.” But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness— an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion.

The national parks are sometimes called “America’s best idea,” and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you. But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we’d signed under duress. When describing the simultaneous creation of the parks and Native American reservations, the Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk noted darkly that the United States “made little islands for us and other little islands for the fourleggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller.”

Many of the negotiations that enabled the creation of these islands took place in English (to the disadvantage of the tribes), when the tribes faced annihilation or had been

From the August 1897 issue: John Muir’s “The American Forests”

David Treuer

weakened by disease or starvation (to the disadvantage of the tribes), or with bad faith on the part of the government (to the disadvantage of the tribes). The treaties that resulted, according to the U.S. Constitution, are the “supreme Law of the Land.” Yet even despite their cruel terms, few were honored. Native American claims and rights were ignored or chipped away.

The American story of “the Indian” is one of staggering loss. Some estimates put the original Indigenous population of what would become the contiguous United States between 5 million and 15 million at the time of first contact. By 1890, around the time America began creating national parks in earnest, roughly 250,000 Native people were still alive. In 1491, Native people controlled all of the 2.4 billion acres that would become the United States. Now we control about 56 million acres, or roughly 2 percent.

And yet we remain, and some of us have stayed stubbornly near the parks, preserving our attachment to them. Grand Canyon National Park encloses much of the Havasupai Tribe and its reservation. Pipe Spring National Monument sits entirely inside the 120,000-acre Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, in northern Arizona. Many other parks neighbor Native communities. But while the parks may be near us, and of us, they are not ours.

We live in a time of historical reconsideration, as more and more people recognize that the sins of the past still haunt the present. For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend—and protect and preserve—these favored gardens again.

In July 2020, I conducted something of a barnstorming tour. I wanted to look with fresh eyes at the park system, to imagine a new future for it. I had planned on visiting all sorts of places—the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains National Park—but the coronavirus pandemic intervened.

Some parks closed completely, while others (like Yellowstone) closed campgrounds, cultural centers, and museums. In the end I drove from Minnesota through North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon and down the spine of California. Then I turned around and drove back. I visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Mount Hood National Forest, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, and Joshua Tree.

The roads were quieter than usual, though the skies were sometimes hazy as the West Coast burst into flames. I slept in campgrounds, in my tent in the backyards of friends, and, rarely, in a hotel or motor lodge. I cooked on the trunk of my car and on picnic tables, under the blazing sun and in torrential rain. I fought off raccoons and squirrels.

David Treuer

More than any other place I visited, Yellowstone seemed to contain the multitudes of America. There, I saw elk and bison. I saw enough recreational vehicles to house a good portion of this country’s homeless. I saw lake water, river water, black water, swamp water, and frothy waterfall water. I saw Tony Hawk being stopped by two park rangers after longboarding down the switchbacks above Mammoth Hot Springs while an actual hawk circled above him. I saw Instagram models in tiny bikinis posing in front of indifferent bison. I saw biker gangs (who seem to really enjoy parks) and gangs of toddlers (who don’t seem to enjoy anything). I saw tourists, masked and unmasked. I saw placards and displays. I discovered that you can learn a lot about nature at Yellowstone, and perhaps even more about American culture. But the park’s official captions give you at best a limited sense of its human history.

Yellowstone National Park was created about 100 years after the country was born. An 1806 expedition, part of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, passed just north of where the park is today. Later, John Colter, one of the Corps members, joined the fur trade and purportedly became the first non-Native to see its vistas. Of course, Native people had lived there for thousands of years, and at the time Colter was setting traps in the area, they still claimed Yellowstone as their home.

Colter traveled through the Yellowstone area and the Teton Range in the early 19th century, looking for fur. Wherever he went, he ended up in mortal conflict with Native Americans, culminating in his wounding at the hands of the Blackfeet. He hid from the tribe under a pile of driftwood and then walked for a week to safety. Over the next 60 years, trappers like him described the landscape that would become Yellowstone as an area of mud geysers, acid pools, and petrified trees.

Not until 1869 did the first official expedition explore the region and confirm the mountain men’s accounts. Things moved quickly after that. In 1871, Ferdinand V. Hayden led a government-sponsored survey of Yellowstone that produced reports complete with professional sketches and photographs. Based on that report, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Yellowstone Act of 1872, which created America’s first landscape to be “reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale … and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”

Grant’s declaration made trespassers of the Shoshone, Bannock, and other peoples who had called the parkland home for centuries. The tribes left with the understanding that they would retain hunting rights in the park, as guaranteed by an 1868 treaty. Before the century was out, however, the government had reneged on that promise. This tactic of theft by broken treaty would become a pattern where parks were concerned.

David Treuer

When Yellowstone was established, the Plains Wars were raging all around the park’s borders. It was as though the government paused mid-murder to plant a tree in the victims’ backyard. The Dakota War had erupted 10 years earlier, just east of the Great Plains. By the time it was over, dozens of Dakota had been hanged, and more than 1,600 women, children, and elders had been sent to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Eventually, all of the treaties between the Eastern Dakota and the U.S. government were “abrogated and annulled.”2

In 1864, on the Plains’ opposite edge, at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, Colonel John Chivington massacred and mutilated as many as 500 Native Americans. In 1868, just four years before the creation of Yellowstone, Native Americans, led by Red Cloud, fought the U.S. government to a standstill, then forced concessions from the Americans at the treaty table, though these, too, were eventually unmade.

War came to Yellowstone itself in 1877. Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce had been shut out of their homeland in the Wallowa Valley and embarked on a 1,500-mile journey that would end just south of the Canadian border, where they would surrender to the U.S. Army. The Nez Perce did their best to avoid white people on their way. But they were attacked on the banks of the Big Hole River, in August 1877, by soldiers in Colonel John Gibbon’s command. Gibbon’s men approached the camp on foot at dawn, killing a man during their advance. Then they began firing into the tepees of the sleeping Nez Perce, killing men, women, and children. The Nez Perce counterattacked. Their warriors kept Gibbon’s soldiers pinned down while the others escaped. Although they defended themselves well, they lost at least 60 people.

Reeling from these deaths, the Nez Perce passed into Yellowstone, where they ran into tourists from Radersburg, Montana, enjoying the “pleasuring-ground” created at the expense of Indians. The Nez Perce briefly held the tourists hostage, and then released them, but went on to kill two tourists in the park later in the month.

Moving east through the park, the tribe forded the Yellowstone River at a place still known as the Nez Perce Ford. Around the time they crossed the river, an elderly woman peeled away from the main column and stayed at an area known as Mud Volcano. She sat on a bison robe near a geyser and sang. When a U.S. scout approached her, she closed her eyes. “She seemed rather disappointed,” John W. Redington, the scout, wrote, “when instead of shooting her I refilled her water bottle. She made signs that she had been forsaken by her people, and wanted to die.” Ten minutes later, a Bannock scout for the Army obliged by striking her down and scalping her. One hundred and forty-three years later, my sons and daughter and I would stand on the same spot, wondering why there

2 Read: ‘Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone’

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are so few places in the park where you can learn about its bloody past. Viewed from the perspective of history, Yellowstone is a crime scene.

America’s national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans, but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession. Most of the major national parks are in the western United States. So, too, are most Native American tribes, owing to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which attempted to eject all tribes east of the Mississippi to what was then Indian Territory. The reservation period likewise began, for the most part, in the West, in the mid-19th century.3

Even after we were relegated to reservations, the betrayals continued. Beginning in 1887, the Dawes Act (also known as the General Allotment Act) split much of the reservations up into small parcels of land to be granted to individual Indians, while the “surplus” communal land was opened for white settlement. In blunt terms, Thomas Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs, said in 1890 that the goal of federal policy at the time was “to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens.” This land grab bled at least another 90 million acres away from the tribes—roughly equivalent to the 85 million acres that comprise America’s 423 national-park sites.

After Yellowstone was established and Indians were removed and in some cases excluded from its spaces, the same—and worse—happened elsewhere. The Blackfeet, living in three bands in northwestern Montana and southern Alberta, had long thought of the Rockies as their spiritual and physical homeland. They wouldn’t have dreamt of ceding it at the treaty table, but in the 1880s and ’90s, they were forced to negotiate with the U.S. government. Weakened by a string of epidemics, seasons of starvation, and insatiable Americans bent on opening up their homelands to timber and mineral extraction, the Blackfeet had to make concession after concession. Some years, they had to give up land just to secure enough resources to last through the next winter.

Not long after a harsh winter that killed as many as 600 Blackfeet, the tribe signed away land that would become Glacier National Park. The deal was brokered by George Bird Grinnell, the naturalist founder of the Audubon Society of New York. Grinnell had joined George Armstrong Custer on his expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. The trip was in direct violation of the treaty guaranteeing that the Black Hills would remain in Native control. Grinnell was often called a “friend of the Indian,” but he once wrote that Natives have “the mind of a child in the body of an adult.” In 1911, a year after Congress approved the creation of Glacier, Montana ceded jurisdiction of the park to the U.S. government.

From the May 2020 issue: The people who profited off the trail of tears

David Treuer

So many of the parks owe their existence to heists like these. Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in Wisconsin, was created out of Ojibwe homelands; the Havasupai lost much of their land when Grand Canyon National Park was established; the creation of Olympic National Park, in Washington, prevented Quinault tribal members from exercising their treaty rights within its boundaries; and Everglades National Park was created on Seminole land that the tribe depended on for food. The list goes on.

I set out on my trip through America’s national parks from my home, at Leech Lake Reservation, in Minnesota, on the southern fringe of the North American boreal forest. This forest is one of the largest stretches of woodland in the world: It spreads from the Aleutian Islands all the way to Newfoundland and from near the southern edge of Hudson Bay to northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As I headed west for Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in North Dakota, the taiga gave way to grasslands and oak savanna near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. By the time I crossed the Red River, I’d left the forest behind altogether. I felt the land dip, and looking west, I thought I could make out the horizon where the Great Plains begin.

As a boy, I would accompany my father on business trips through some of these same landscapes. In the car, he would narrate the history of our region, mostly without much emotional inflection: “Chief Little Crow fled this way to escape the military after the Dakota War in 1862.” We would pass many small towns—Hawley, Valley City, Medina, Steele—that seemed pleasant enough, until my father ruined them for me. The calm and order of them, their small houses and neatly kept yards, the Protestant ethic reflected in their organization—all of it infuriates me, because every single one of those towns exists at our expense.

Medora, North Dakota, is the southern gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (The Marquis de Morès named the town after his wife, Medora von Hoffman, though the romance of the gesture suffers when you consider that he established the town as a place to slaughter cattle to be sold at eastern markets.) Medora today is a fantasy of a time that never was. There is a statue of Roosevelt and a Rough Riders Hotel and, during the summer months, the Medora Musical. The show’s website really says it best when it promises “the rootin’-tootinest, boot-scootinest show in all the Midwest. There’s no other show quite like it. It’s an ode to patriotism, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Great American West!” When I was there it was an ode to COVID-19: According to a clerk at the convenience store, one of the cast members was spreading the virus from the stage.

I wanted to begin my journey at Theodore Roosevelt because no one embodies the tensions of the park system as it is currently constituted like the 26th president. Contained in the person of Roosevelt was a wild love for natural vistas and a propensity

David Treuer

for violent imperialism; an overwhelming desire for freedom and a readiness to take it away from other people. Much of the park named after him exists on top of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) land. The MHA lost that land in 1851, with the signing of the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. Executive orders in 1870 and 1880 seized still more of the tribes’ homeland.

Roosevelt went to hunt bison in Dakota Territory in 1883. In 1884, when he was back home in New York, his wife gave birth to their daughter, Alice, but unbeknownst to her doctors, his wife had a kidney ailment, and died on Valentine’s Day that year. Teddy’s mother died the same day in the same house. After drawing a large X in his diary, Roosevelt wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.” He returned to the West and built a ranch outside Medora, intent on letting nature soothe him. He didn’t last long out there, and the West never became his permanent home, but it left a mark on him—and he, in turn, left his mark on it.4

Roosevelt was familiar with Native Americans, having interacted with them when he was in Dakota Territory. “The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian,” he would say in an 1886 speech, during which he also famously declared: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

Roosevelt’s attitude toward Indians is manifest in his treatment of the Apache leader Geronimo. Born in 1829, Geronimo lived the first three decades of his life in the peace and security of his Apache homelands, in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. In the second half of the 19th century, he rose to international fame for fighting the American and Mexican governments in an attempt to preserve his tribe’s piece of the Southwest.

In 1858—the year of Roosevelt’s birth—Geronimo joined a large trading party that left the Mogollon Mountains and entered Mexico. While he was in town conducting business, his band was attacked and slaughtered at camp. Among the dead were Geronimo’s wife, mother, and three small children. He later recalled, “I did not pray, nor did I resolve to do anything in particular, for I had no purpose left.” Life, for him, as recounted by Gilbert King in Smithsonian magazine, shaded from peace into a state of perpetual warfare, ending only with his capture by U.S. forces in 1886, around the time Roosevelt was mourning in Dakota Territory.

Geronimo was shipped east and spent the rest of his life in captivity, and his tribe’s land was whittled away. Around the same time, Native children were also being shipped away from their homelands, to government-sponsored boarding schools—removed

David Treuer

From the May 1906 issue: Camping with President Theodore Roosevelt

from their families and their culture so as to mainstream them. Attendance was sometimes mandated by law and sometimes coerced, but it was rarely strictly voluntary. For speaking in their own language, the children were sometimes beaten or had soap put in their mouths. Of the 112 Apache children from Geronimo’s band sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, 36 died—most of them likely from tuberculosis—and were buried there.5

For his part, Geronimo did get out (under guard) once in a while, including a stint in 1904 as part of the “Apache Village” at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where he was made to play the role of the savage. In 1905, he and other Native leaders were asked to be part of Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. It was a who’s who of tribal leadership, including Quanah Parker (Comanche), Buckskin Charlie (Ute), Hollow Horn Bear (Brulé Lakota), American Horse (Oglala Lakota), and Little Plume (Piegan Blackfeet). They rode horses down Pennsylvania Avenue in regalia not entirely in step with their individual tribal traditions. America liked and still likes its Indians to function much like its nature: frozen in time; outside history; the antithesis, or at best the outer limit, of humanity and civilization.

Geronimo met with Roosevelt afterward. “Take the ropes from our hands,” he begged, in a desperate appeal to be allowed to return, along with other Apache prisoners, to his homeland. Roosevelt declined, telling him, “You killed many of my people; you burned villages.” Geronimo began to gesture and yell but was cut off. Four years later, he died in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

In 1903, Roosevelt had let himself be drawn back west. In April of that year he embarked on a 14,000-mile train journey that took him through 24 states and territories in nine weeks. He traveled to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and California, where he enjoyed a three-night camping trip with John Muir.

Top left: Red Cloud (seated, center) and other Native American leaders visited President Ulysses S. Grant in 1875, but failed to persuade him to honor existing treaties. Top right: Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, circa 1900.

Bottom left: Geronimo at the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. Bottom right: George Gillette (left), the chairman of the Fort Berthold Indian Tribal Business Council, weeps as more than 150,000 acres of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota are signed away for the Garrison Dam and Reservoir project. (Bettmann/Getty; De Lancey Gill/Library of Congress; The Gerhard Sisters/Library of Congress; William Chaplis/AP)

Along the way, Roosevelt gave speeches—at the Grand Canyon; at Yellowstone, where he laid the cornerstone for the Roosevelt Arch; near some redwoods in Santa Cruz. He said

5 From the October 2020 issue: “My Industrial Work,” a poem written in 1914 by an anonymous student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

David Treuer

much about the majesty of nature. Regarding the Grand Canyon: “I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country— to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is … I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon.” And Yellowstone: “The Yellowstone Park is something absolutely unique in the world, so far as I know … The scheme of its preservation is noteworthy in its essential democracy … This Park was created, and is now administered, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Roosevelt translated his passions into policy. During his time in office, he created 150 national forests, 18 national monuments, five national parks, four national game preserves, and 51 bird “reservations.”

Like Geronimo, Roosevelt came of age during a pivotal 50-year stretch when the contiguous United States assumed its final dimensions. The last major armed conflict between a Native tribe and the U.S. government ended at Wounded Knee Creek with the massacre of as many as 300 men, women, and children of Spotted Elk’s band of Miniconjou. The frontier was pushed all the way to the Pacific and then was no more, and America’s truly wild space—land outside the embrace of “civilization”—was subsumed.

The American West began with war but concluded with parks.

Instead of describing one moment in time (for example, “Here’s what tribal boundaries looked like before Columbus reached America”), this map approximates the tribal boundaries that European settlers recorded as they traveled through the frontier—the western half of the map describes a later period than the eastern half does.6

David Treuer

6 A. L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America; Encyclopedia Britannica; Bureau of Indian Affairs

In 1914, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that American democracy was forged on the frontier. It was there that the uniquely American mixture of egalitarianism, self-reliance, and individualism commingled to form the nation and its character. “American democracy,” he said, “was born of no theorist’s dream … It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.”

Turner was almost right. It wasn’t the frontier that made us as much as the land itself, land that has always been Native land but that has also come to be American. The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew. More than just America’s “best idea,” the parks are the best of America, the jewels of its landscape. It’s time they were returned to America’s original peoples.

This selection is an excerpt. The original article appeared in The Atlantic, in May 2021. Full text and audio available here:

David Treuer

The first pleasure was, someday, a man amen a boy before this boy without form yet here godsend said god send me another portion of sky ’ipelíikt turns to bruise pressed to our skin now skinn-ed touch us into extinction where we are alive, so say it: live—no out-

MICHAEL WASSON

So Call it Grace

Michael Wasson

live any god salvaged by the image aflame trapped in the night of the throat like a gunlit glimmer in a room shredded with our pleasure.

Michael Wasson

When [Our] Lips & Skin Remember [Erasure]

Return, take me, beloved— the body’s memory awake, resurges in blood; when the lips & hands are touching again in the night, lips, the skin remember

páaytoqsa, heté’ew— cilakátnim tim’íipnit pipe’tít híikus, kikétki xuyyíi hikúuse; kakáa héenek’e him’ kaa ‘ípsus hitukéepsuksix

cikéetpe, him’, táalp hitmíipn’isix

Michael Wasson

In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive & You Were Full of Joy

A fragment of your palm. For you have never once betrayed your god, your thirst. I read the backs of hands like books— open them in the shadows left to ripple the full red edges of my lips. I find a pencil sketch of a baby staring without a mouth, without a way towards the sound of your body pulling back its arms until you no longer have the arms you were born with— only the end of every snake you weren’t willing to find in the grass. You said cilímxayqin, the very whites of my eyes you pluck out.

I’m arriving at the door of a bright blue June— the petals

dotted in yesterday’s slow rain curl back into dark eyelashes—we blink. Your face turns from mine into sky

& nothing else.

Michael Wasson

Countdown as Slow Kisses

10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

6. America declares these dreams I have every night be redreamed & pressed into names

5. Upended petals of qém’es abandoned like torn butterfly wings—we’é I pray

4. I pray that nobody ever hears us

3. An eye gone bloodshot: I tear through the crisp apple of your throat & find—

2. myself: this—a boy beside a boy. An eyelash fallen at the base of a valley, our dark bones bursting in-

1. to bloom. I stare into your beloved face & enter: yes, yes, this nation, under god, its black sky we lay our nightmares to

0. where I am your animal: my Lamb—now eat me alive.

Michael Wasson

Your Shadow Invents You Every Time Light Fails to Pass Through You

Some days you wake to the sound of smoke pouring through the key hole in the room. Open your eyes. This is only a test. The bluing of your hands can be anything you want. The bruised dawn like a river rising to your windowsill. A purple forgetting how blood leaves the body in ruin. A forsaken lip smeared in thirst resting on your lip as though your skin could salvage the dream of being so touched. Listen. I know you’re afraid—I am too. I know how the body prays for beauty but remains a shipwreck you are building in my image. How many books are enough to tell you you’re alive today? How many days end up all dark & the monsters of your childhood appear like saints erased of their mouths? How the mouth cradles a tongue carved by years in exile until it’s ready to shape a word like a parting handful of promised wildflowers: Happy Mother’s Day. This is you at the edge of a paradise growing back after being scorched from the face of earth. This is us afraid of the men who fail to kiss us goodnight & step through the walls. Some days you are living a nightmare. Some days a miracle as wide as a spared life. Listen to me. There will be a day when the world will need you most—be alive on that day. I vow your father is as American as the bones your mother grew inside you. The gunshot in your head is only a shadow puppet, a slow explosion of a field of qém’es in early June’s bloom. Look. Look at the colors like little gods on fire—hurdling in & out of each other’s terrified skies. Are you still alone in bed? Is it morning yet where you are? The smoke turns to rain as usual. Listen, my love. This year is just a visitor & next year’s ghost. Take care of it because yes—yes, you do deserve flowers for once

Michael Wasson

in your life. You will be the only one left. So hold my hand & call me tomorrow. We are all here. It’s okay—it’s okay to be this afraid. I am you. Can you feel that? Yes, that is the whole world outside moving without us. But listen to me. Listen. Here’s the light an arm’s length away. The ceiling reforming above you, like another heaven after its own selfdestruction. Here’s my body & you stretching life-long toward every hole in the house left as warm as a father running from horizon to horizon. Don’t be afraid. Touch me here where, some days, it hurts. Get up, get dressed, open the door.

NIMIPUUTÍMT TRANSLATIONS:

“So Call It Grace” ’ipelíikt. Cloud, especially that of a cloud colored in that way that implies thunder, or sky.

“When [Our] Lips & Skin Remember [Erasure]” The entire translation accompanies. This is an erasure piece after C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Return”. “In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive & You Were Full of Joy” cilímxayqin. The whites of the eyes, or broken at the morphemes: eye – whited part.

“Countdown As Slow Kisses” qém’es. A plant regionally called camas (camassia), also known as wild hyacinth or quamash. we’é. The sound of butterfly wings opening and closing.

“Your Shadow Invents You Every Time Light Fails to Pass Through You” See previous translation of qém’es.

Michael Wasson

ELIZABETH WOODY

Twanat, to follow behind the ancestors

Along the mid-Columbia River are Celilo Indian Village and Celilo Park. On the right side of the freeway heading east is a peaked roof Longhouse and a large metal building. The houses in the village are older and you can miss them completely at a glance. You can sometimes see nets and boats beside the homes. Some houses are empty. By comparison, the park is frequently filled with lively and colorful wind surfers. This is above a place presently under the river, Celilo Falls, or Wyam

Wyam means the “Echo of Falling Water” or “Sound of Water upon the Rocks.” It was one of the most significant fisheries on the Columbia River system, the fourth largest North American waterway. In recent decades the greatest irreversible change occurred in the middle Columbia as the site was inundated by The Dalles Dam on March 10, 1957. The drop in elevation of the river from its origin to the Pacific makes it a powerhouse. This is part of the reason for the construction of the dams to convert the strength in its velocity into cheap electricity. The obvious effects we experience now seemed insignificant in the boom of construction and employment of that time.

Glaciers in an extreme meltdown cut a path with torrential water through the volcanic land after the last ice age. This formed, in part, the Columbia River Gorge and Celilo Falls. This dramatic formation has given us a beautiful land that some compare to Hawaii in the more humid, wet sections. The fiery upheavals of the area described from geological study show us this is a land of cataclysmic change.

Historically, the Wyampum lived at Wyam for over 12,000 years. The estimates vary, but Wyam is one of the longest continuously inhabited communities in North America. Estimates will always vary as our tenure in the Western Hemisphere is disputed due to changes in the belief system of the stolid science of archeology. The elders tell us we have been here from time immemorial.

Today we know Celilo Falls as more than a lost landmark. It was a place as revered as one’s own mother. The story of Wyam’s life is the story of the salmon, and my own ancestry. I live with the forty-year absence and silence of Celilo Falls, much as an orphan lives hearing of the kindness and greatness of his or her maternal parent.

Elizabeth Woody

I use this metaphor of mother, because both my grandparents lost their parents at a young age. The original locations of my ancestral villages on the Nch’I-Wana (Columbia River) are Celilo Village and the Wishram village that nestled below the petroglyph, SheWho-Watches or Tsagaglallal. My grandmother, Elizabeth Thompson Pitt (Mohalla), was a Wyampum descendent and a Tygh woman. My grandfather, Lewis Pitt (Wa Soox Site), was a Wasco, Wishram and Watlala man. Epidemics of influenza and malpractice by doctors of the day were at fault. My grandparents lived through this due to Indian medicine—part spirit, native herbs and chemistry. What stories I have inherited include this medicine as an emotional cornerstone in their lives. The strength they had to acquire at a young age is what guided them through all the losses that followed.

Adaptation is necessary for survival. Despite the need for change, old lessons are not ignored by choice. We have abided by natural law for thousands of years. Our civilization did not detrimentally impact resources because of this. In our world view, everything has a life and purpose on the earth. There is a reason for everything, while we may not always understand why. It is not a simple platitude but a cultural life way.

This is how I view my experiences with loss and how I have learned about the cultural life of the Columbia River Plateau. My connections to Celilo Falls are tenuous at best. I was born two years after Celilo drowned in the backwaters of The Dalles Dam. The tribal people who gathered there did not believe it possible.

My people haven’t talked much of Celilo. The grief is so great. What I did hear were small bits and pieces. Chief Tommy Kuni Thompson was one of the chiefs who negotiated with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in that time. He “exhorted Congress to prevent the closing” of the gates of the dam. ‘’The Almighty took a long time to make this place,” he said. As the backwaters grew to the falls, he held a sing. Martha Ferguson McKeown in Welcome to Our Salmon Feast said he never spoke of salmon in English. Salmon were a gift from the Creator and sacred.

Elizabeth Woody

My grandmother was a Thompson. Her father was James Thompson (Wata-hus). She told us that Chief Tommy Thompson was her uncle. Chief Thompson’s reasoning is more significant to me than deliberations of Congress, as it determined the destiny of the people who lived along the great river. People followed their leaders through acclamation. Leaders deliberated issues through careful thought and input from their villages. Most American citizens in the country, however, felt the construction of the dams was necessary.

My grandfather fished at Celilo with his brother, George Pitt II, at a site a relative or friend permitted, as is their privilege. They fished on scaffolds above the white water with a dip net. Since locations are inherited, they probably did not have a spot. They were Wascopum, not Wyampum. Catching a fish, the fisher hollered, “HO!” They would lift up the dip net with its wild, powerful fish. My mother and aunt, Charlotte and Lillian, recall riding the dangerous cable cars back and forth over the white water of the falls. This, I imagine, was to my great-uncle’s place. Andrew David (Tuutawaĩsa) fished on Big Island. My uncle, Lewis, who was preschool age, recalls the hot sands and the indescribable smell of the falls. A smell that he cannot find to compare or show me today.

Feast of the First Salmon, Celilo Indian village, April 22, 1945. Chief Tommy Thompson and his wife Flora.

When the fish ran, people were wealthy. People from all over the country would come to Celilo to watch the “Indians” catch fish. They would buy the fish freshly caught. It was one the most famous tourist sites in North America. You can tell a native Oregonian or Washingtonian by the accuracy of their fond memories of Celilo Falls. Today my uncle tells me one can identify a true Northwesterner by their love for the salmon. What happened at Wyam was more significant than entertainment. People gathered here by season through multi-millennium generations to catch nusoox and news of relatives across the river or far away. People celebrated their happiness with horse racing and gambling. Women played card games like Wa-look-sha and Montee in their free time.

Elizabeth Woody

A network of cables with basket ferries transported Native people to their favorite fishing rocks at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. ca. 1940

People played stick games in the evenings.

During the day women cleaned large amounts of finely-cut fish and hung the parts to dry in the heat of the arid landscape. We ate all of the fish, except for the guts. Nutritionally complete, the fish provided essential nutrients, dried or fresh. Coupled with the fruits and roots, the diet was high in calcium, iron, vitamin C, healthy oils and minerals. Before the building of the dams upriver, the fishers caught June hogs. These salmon were unbelievably large and fat for their long journey to distant spawning grounds. I have heard of women who packed these fish four at a time, while dragging the tails on the ground behind them. Imagine one seventy-pound fish and then imagine carrying four of them up a hill. The people were healthy and strong from the natural diet and lifestyle.

The enormous quantity of spawning fish running to the various tributaries, some as far north as Canada, could feed a whole family through the winter. Chah-lĩ, finely pounded dried flesh of the salmon mixed with dried berries, could store for up to two years. Expertly cut, dried salmon flesh in drying sheds looked like spread kites. The women dried the heads and gills. The spines and tails, with small orange windows of dry flesh between the bones, went into soup, eventually. Many had enough to trade with other tribes or individuals for specialty items. We had Klickitat baskets from such trades. My grandfather’s mother, Charlotte Edwards Pitt (Y-yuten ), traded her fine pictorial beadwork, for example.

No one would starve if they could work. Even those who could not physically work had some talent that they could share. It was a dignified existence. Peaceful, perhaps due in part to the sound of the water that echoed in people’s minds and the negative ions produced by the falls. This has been scientifically proven to generate a feeling of well-being in human beings. It is with a certain sense of irony I note companies selling machines to replicate this environment in the homes of those who can afford it.

Elizabeth Woody

Edna David (left) and Stella McKinley in a salmon-drying shed, drying fish at Celilo Falls. The salmon have been stretched on small wooden sticks and hung from poles suspended from the ceiling of the wooden building. 1952.

Children had a wonderful time here. They would climb the rocks behind Celilo, walking above the chutes that bordered the edge of the river. You became everyone’s child when you left your lodging. Relatives and villagers instructed, and occasionally scolded, the children. You had to behave. Every day was school for young children, learning by observance and eventual full participation in the day’s activities and work. Individual contribution was the norm and each individual had respect regardless of ability. One could improve with practice. Young boys could fish at safer locations in the chutes to learn the skills they needed to move to the more dangerous places.

It had its risks. The rocks were wet and slippery. One photo from the period shows a boy being fished out of the falls. He had fallen into one of the chutes. Miraculously, he appeared in one of the fishers’ dip nets. Pulled to safety on the platform, it was a lucky day for him. This was a dangerous place and occasionally an unwatched child or unlucky fisher drowned.

An elder woman explained that if my generation knew the language, we would have no questions. We would hear these words directly from the teachings and songs. From time immemorial the Creator’s instruction was direct and clear. Feasts and worship held in honor of the first roots and huckleberries are major events. The first salmon honored at Celilo had its head and tail placed back into Nch’I-Wana. The whole community honored the first catch: One of our relatives has returned, and we consider the lives we take to care for our communities.

Prayer may not be enough in this time and with the complexities we face to restore wild runs. We may see a vital piece of the circle absent. Absent like the old village and Celilo Falls. It can be said that tribal peoples built the longhouses and Shaker churches for their spiritual comfort. It can also be said that great spiritual comfort is derived from the first salmon whose journey ends with a feast held in its honor. Together, tribal members and salmon weave a unique cultural fabric designed by the Divine Creator. What the mind cannot comprehend, the heart and spirit interpret. The result is a beautiful and dignified ceremonial response to the Creator in appreciation for the willingness of Nature to serve humankind. These ceremonial homes and their leaders and participants have known each other since time immemorial. As natives to these lands, tribal members know the true freedom of religion. It manifests itself in PEACE, HAPPINESS, and STRENGTH.¹

Woody

The songs in the “ceremonial response to the Creator” referred to above are phenomenal, repeated seven times by seven drummers, a bell ringer and people gathered in the Longhouse. Washat song is an ancient method of worship. Before the singing, dancers line up from eldest to the youngest in a circle around the rim of the open floor. Chief Thompson called this the open heart of Mother Earth.² By wearing the finest Indian dress they show respect to the Creator. Some have beaded and woven family heirlooms mixed with modern cloth ribbon shirts and bright wing dresses. Those who can, stand and rhythmically move their bodies with the bend of their knees. The swinging of their cupped hand to their heart signifies the gathering of the songs into their hearts. Some people bring large eagle feathers to swing.

They begin to move with men on the South side, women on the North. In a pattern of a complete circle they dance sideways, counter-clockwise. Some dancers leap high. When they stop, they are North and South again. The drums in the West, the East is open towards the rising sun. The North holds the stationary seven drummers and the bell ringer. This ceremony illustrates the partnership of men and women, essential equality and the balance within the four directions and the cosmos. We each have our place and our role. As a result, the Longhouse is a special place to learn.

The miraculous rescue of Danny Sampson who was caught in a fishing net after accidentally plunging into Celilo Falls. Photo by Robert L. Wheeler.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, women cook the food for the meal. Salmon (nusoox), venison, the edible roots (x’ash, sowĩtk, wak’ amu, p’axĩ] and various berries—huckleberries and chokecherries—are the four sacred foods. Common types of food are added to the significant four on portable tables. Tule mats on the floor are traditional tables. The cooks have prepared the meal for long hours.

Those who gather the roots and berries are distinguished. They are selected to gather the foods and, thus, recognized for their good hearts and minds. Tribal men who have hunted and fished are acknowledged for being fine persons. You do not gather food without proper training, so as to not disrupt the natural systems or “law of the land.”

The prayer is led in song. With instruction in Sahaptin, the people take one of each sacred four to their plates with a cup of water beside them. In turn we pick up a sample of each and eat a small piece: the salmon, venison, roots and berries. Finally, the water is

Elizabeth Woody

called for with a loud and long “Chush!’’ We drink and the ritual is finished.

My uncle explained to his children, “We travel from the river to the mountains with these foods.” Even the order in which we taste the food travels from Nch’I-Wana to the white peaks of the volcanic Cascade range. Part of my ancestral geography, these mountains are presently called Adams and Hood.

The plenitude of these foods has drastically diminished. In 1995, having only 12,000 salmon passing the Bonneville Dam shocked Northwest communities, a drastic reduction from 2.5 million in 1993. There was a moratorium on ceremonial harvests in the Columbia River. This meant tribal leaders ordered designated fishermen to harvest only “Treaty Sustainable” amounts of fish in tributaries where there were substantial runs. It was a frightening public acknowledgment of a species’ endangerment.

The tribes sounded the alarm regarding exposure to waterborne toxins through contaminated fish, largely because native people on the Columbia River consume fish at the average of 2.1 ounces a day, or nine times the national average. The EPA’s survey revealed to the tribes: these toxins include dioxin, furans and other organochlorine chemicals in fish tissue. This is primarily from industrial polluters.³

My uncle, Lewis Pitt, said, “I like to eat those fish in peace, but today it’s a scary proposition. The reality is we’re not just talking of Indian people here. We’re talking about all the citizens of Oregon and Washington. Today, the entire Columbia River in Oregon, all of the Snake River in Washington State and the Columbia River from Priest Rapids Dam to the Oregon-Washington border violate water quality criteria for dioxin (.013 parts per quadrillion).” Dioxin is a highly toxic chemical produced as a by-product of chlorine-using pulp and paper mills, from burning of waste by hospital and municipal incinerators, and from other polluters.⁴ People were warned not to consume more than one fish a week if caught in the Columbia River.

Returning to my thoughts about the Longhouse and the Columbia River Plateau indigenous peoples’ belief system, my younger relatives should feel pride in their history and lineage. It has not been such a long time from the era when we were free to practice and live by subsistence. It is hard to forget a time when people hated, feared and despised Indians. Once, as a child, a non-Indian neighbor girl came to visit and we watched an old western. The Indians rode over the rise, hooting and whooping. Her eyes got real big and she turned to look at my grandfather saying, “Ooo, Indians!” My grandfather said, “Honey, I’m an Indian.” She emphatically shook her head, no. We weren’t “Indians” to her.

In a sense we are not Indians. We have a specific name for ourselves and a location that

we consider our place of origin. The effort to overpower and exploit the land has caused death to native people, animals, plants, water and soil. As the list of endangered species grows and species die, our global knowledge diminishes.

Removal of indigenous peoples of the last century is the precedent for the removal and expending of our natural resources, or as some now call it, our natural capital.* The Treaty of 1855 ceded 10.5 million acres of territory to the United States and retained certain inalienable rights. Tribes decide their membership and activities through an older sovereign government. These rights are retained through negotiation between sovereigns as pre-colonial, independent American nations. Our claims come from a time before the existence of the United States. Living beings like salmon and foods are integral and significant in our lives, considerations we cannot ignore.

Salmon stocks found in the Columbia River may be as old as two to three million years. Many species are extinct today. While people can adapt to change faster than animals, it is the animals that die first. The damage requires a higher price tag the longer we wait.

Our religion, or cultural world, views science not as a field apart but as part of our law. The stories and native language contain our knowledge. Each generation acts with a responsibility for the next while examining the outcomes of the last. Maybe nature’s intelligent laws have been breached, but not without consequence. Returning salmon are not as strong or as big as those in the past.

The core of my female self, the Great Mother, is joined to the land to provide nourishment through gathering. Another aspect of humanity, the male core, accesses this nourishment by a certain discipline in hunting and fishing. Centered on gathering and expressions of thankfulness, we learn well-defined gender roles within ceremonial life. We are bereft of honor in the separation from the river and the land. This adversely influences our partnership with other living beings. Descendants, like myself, do not learn the language or how to live if this modern world collapsed. Most of the world lives without the electricity we take for granted. The lessons innate in my culture include the history of specific relationships established in a culture that codifies and bonds animals and people.

Celilo Falls illustrates the story of inadequacy and ignorance of this land. The story begins even before that event with the building of ambitions to make an Eden where Eden was not needed. One only needs to learn from the land how to live upon it.

* Natural Capital: “The natural capital of a place is the productive capacity inherent in its healthy soil, clean water, native diversity and functioning natural systems.” Ted Wolf of Ecotrust paraphrased this definition from the Shorebank and Ecotrust’s Shorebank Pacific, The First Environmental Bancorporation’s business plan.

Elizabeth Woody

In history, another form of story, we can scrutinize the primary causes for the loss of salmon and habitat. The mainstream Nch’I-Wana is broken up by nineteen mega hydroelectric dams, many built without plans for the cyclic route of the salmon. Nuclear, agricultural and industrial pollution, the evaporation of water from broad surfaces of reservoirs and destructive clear-cuts are detrimental to salmon. Since 1855, the Nch’IWana’s 14 million salmon and steelhead have dwindled to 2.5 million in 1991, 150,000 in 1995 and just 75,000 in 1996.

The 1994 endangered list noted three species of salmon. The massive cutting of evergreen forests has changed our land’s ability to produce what it once had. Felled trees crash down at a rate faster than those in tropical rain forests.

While hard cash matters and loss-of-job issues are the new cant for those who protest conservation, there is no one who is singularly responsible. Corporations move on to cheaper resources all over the world when the old disappears. Reported submersion of whole trees in cold bays to save their value in rarity is one example of predicted obsolescence. Our present economy has no provision, no right, for citizens to have jobs. We cannot regenerate biologically diverse forests in our lifetime because this takes centuries. What tribes I have mentioned have signed a valid document called a treaty. It has been said to hold an inalienable right to honor and protect their heritage and the ancient ecosystem on which this heritage relies. Tribal leaders often negotiate with policy makers for the benefit of many.

The practice of traditional awareness in a simple, direct way is to take only what we need, and let the rest grow. How does one know what is traditional? How can one learn? My uncle reminded me that we learned about simplicity first. He said, “The stories your grandmother told. Remember when she said her great-grandmother, Kah-NeeTa, would tell her to go to the river and catch some fish for the day. Your grandmother would catch several fish, because she loved looking at them. She would let all but two go. Her grandmother taught her that.” A larger sorrow shadows my maternal grandparent’s story of childhood loss of the material and intangible. What if the wild salmon no longer return? I cannot say if we have the necessary strength to face this impending loss.

While we may feel an impotent opposition to systemic greed, we are not without power. We need a dream of the future and to find the ability to realize this vision by practice of native applications to find meaning. Some find a need to live for their children, as my grandparents believed. These are the characteristics that enable survival. People who respect the Columbia River as a system may possess the vision for the survival of the salmon. An individual provocation from here informed by noble intent and study can make a difference. Our mission, ethics, entity and collaborative spirit must include a contract between individuals and a “Higher Power” as I have observed in ceremonial

life. As a creative unit, and out of necessity, we must construct a learning society throughout, teaching the art of making connections, all of which is fundamental to the system’s thinking. Differences are an asset in collective wisdom. “You think because you understand one, you must understand two and that one and one makes two, but you must also understand and” (Sufi Teaching). Saving salmon is an effort to save ourselves.

Arthur Dye, the director of Ecotrust, says, “All of us have the capacity and personal influence we are not using. The challenge is to find the resources not used within ourselves and figure out how to use them wisely. Even in dark times, people have a right to expect some ray of hope from their leaders. Often this is small scale because this may be all the influence we have.” Ecotrust Board member Connie Best once said, “Even a small object can cast a large shadow if it is held up to light.” In a human scale we are all potential leaders and true leaders must teach.

Giving in and being an American is a tough road to travel, because being one in many ways is devoid of responsibility when we do not make decisions or accept responsibility. The fallacy is that we are individual and alone. Decision requires feeling and caring. Creativity dies without heart. Our pack instincts and frustrations call on the “other” to blame.

We are past discovery and colonization. Integration of our universal values must include those who cannot speak. The salmon, the tree and even Celilo Falls (Wyam) echo within if we become still and listen. Once heard and understood, take only what you need and let the rest grow.

Elizabeth Woody

Overview of Indians fishing at Horseshoe falls, in Celilo Falls. Taken about 1928. In the foreground are Yakama Indian fishing platforms. Every year in October these would be dismantled and stored until they could be reassembled the following year.

³

Sources Cited:

¹Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Annual Report. Portland, OR, 1994, p. 15. ²McKeown, Martha Ferguson. Welcome to Our Salmon Feast. Binfords & Mort, 1959 Portland, OR, p. 32.

Wana Chinook Tymoo. Issue 1, 1995 Portland, OR, pp. 4-5.

⁴Ibid.

Note: All native words are spelled phonetically.

Editor’s Note:

As of 2020, there are fourteen Washington state salmon and steelhead species listed as at risk of extinction under the Endangered Species Act. Of these, five are categorized as “in crisis,” while five others are identified as “not keeping pace” with recovery efforts. Two species are classified as making progress toward recovery, and two are listed as approaching goal numbers. (Information provided by State of Salmon 2020)

Changeable surface, sand, wind, brushes of grass. The composition of small particles and abalone shell a mutable language, fluid and clean, tonal lilting in attenuated motion.

On the surface, removed from image, an iridescent garment of compassion. Boulders are lapped in flow, voices ascend to the lunar disk. Simple paintbrush bloom, ecstatic, in orange and red.

Salmon pass through the river’s mouth, Songs hum in the vocal throat of grace.

Sagebrush around the loving fire waits in aureole of pale courage. Hold still, touch the compact smoldering soil. The flesh of salmon is translucent as flame.

Heat and ardor, tender interior, smoke and calm weeds. The fire is a furious matter of watching.

Familiar warm air rises as the red tailed hawk, slow and loose, a pinpoint of vision on movement. Land uplifts the shadow, higher. Sun raises the cottonwood branches from the river’s surface.

The salmon wait inside rippling light on reversal of current. The song says, Come or pass. Be weak or strong. Dance on light.

Moon is in the color of pale bellies’ slow turn to sky. Scales illumine desire. Loosened moon particles collect on the fringe of grass and water.

A brittle sheen of calcium and light combine with radiance. Fine combs of supple and rigid spines rest among the stone. The root, stone, flesh and water.

Elizabeth Woody

Conversion

PERMISSIONS & PUBLICATION CREDITS

Sherwin Bitsui, selections from Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Sherwin Bitsui. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Laura Da’, “Adornment” first published in The Rumpus, Copyright © 2018 by Laura Da’. “Blackfish State” first published in Moss, Copyright © 2017 by Laura Da’. “Refusal of the Return” first published in Seattle Review of Books, Copyright © 2018 by Laura Da’. “Twelve Gates” first published in The Academy of American Poets PoemA-Day, Copyright © 2018 by Laura Da’. All selections reprinted by permission of the author.

Natalie Diaz, “American Arithmetic,” “The First Water is the Body,” and “exhibits from The American Water Museum” from Postcolonial Love Poem. Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.

Heid E. Erdrich, selections from Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Heid Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of Copyright Clearance Center, on behalf of Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan, www.msupress.org.

Excerpt from Crooked Hallelujah copyright © 2020 by Kelli Jo Ford. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. “The Year 2003 Minus 20” first published in Virginia Quarterly Review. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

Santee Frazier, “Variations on Loneliness”, “Aubade”, and “Lachrymose”. Copyright © 2022 by Santee Frazier. Printed by permission of the author.

Linda Hogan, “Tulsa,” and “Fences,” by Linda Hogan from A History of Kindness (Torrey House Press, 2020). Reprinted with permission from the publisher. “The Ways of Cranes” first published in Image, Copyright © 2013 by Linda Hogan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Layli Long Soldier, selections from “Whereas Statements” from Whereas. Copyright © 2017 by Layli Long Soldier. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.

Mona Susan Power, “No More Name: Sitka, Alaska – 1918” and “Day Sun: Fort Yates, North Dakota – 1934”. Copyright © 2022 by Mona Susan Power. Printed by permission of the author.

Luci Tapahonso,“Illígo Naalyéhé: Goods of Value” first published in Living Nations, Living Words: A Collection of First Peoples Poetry (AFC 2020/004: 33) Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/2020785233. Copyright © 2020 by Luci Tapahonso. Reprinted by permission of the author.

David Treuer, “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” From The Atlantic. © 2021. The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Michael Wasson, “So Call It Grace” first published in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Copyright © 2020 by Michael Wasson. “In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive & You Were Full of Joy” first published in Narrative, Copyright © 2019 by Michael Wasson. “Countdown As Slow Kisses” first published in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Copyright © 2019 by Michael Wasson. “Your Shadow Invents You Every Time Light Fails to Pass Through You” first published in Poetry, Copyright © 2019 by Michael Wasson. All selections reprinted by permission of the author.

Elizabeth Woody, “Twanat, to follow behind the ancestors” and “Conversion” from First Fish - First People (University of Washington Press, 1998). Copyright © 1998 by Elizabeth Woody. Reprinted by permission of University of Washington Press on behalf of the author.

PHOTO CREDITS

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation would like to extend gratitude to the family of Robert Wheeler for granting permission to use his historical photo of the rescue of Danny Sampson at Celilo Falls; and to Elizabeth Woody and Joe Cantrell for use of the photo of the author at the petroglyph, “She-who-watches,” and the photo of the author’s grandmother, Charlotte Edwards Pitt. Tremendous thanks are also due to Thomas Robinson for use of the photos featuring Chief Tommy Thompson and Flora Thompson (1945), Seufert cable car at Celilo Falls (1940), Edna David and Stella McKinley in a salmon-drying shed (1952), and Horseshoe Falls at Celilo Falls (approximately 1928).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift, Flood Song, and Dissolve. His honors include a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. He is on faculty at Northern Arizona University.

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, American Book Award winner, and Instruments of the True Measure, Washington State Book Award winnter. She is the recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She lives near Renton, Washington, with her family.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her 2021 collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and a Lannan Literary Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a U.S. Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of several collections of poetry and a work of nonfiction. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Her writing has won fellowships from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Loft Literary Center, and First People’s Fund. She has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry, and her most recent poetry collection, Little Big Bully, won a National Poetry Series award. She is an independent scholar and curator working with Amherst and Dartmouth colleges in 2022. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her debut novel-in-stories, Crooked Hallelujah, was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Story Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. She teaches writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Santee Frazier is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His first collection of poems, Dark Thirty (2009),

was published in the Sun Tracks series of the University of Arizona Press. Frazier’s honors include a fall 2009 Lannan Residency Fellowship and a 2014 Native Arts and Culture Foundation National Artist Fellowship. He was also the 2011 Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at the School for Advanced Research. His second collection of poems, Aurum, was released in 2019 by The University of Arizona Press.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is an internationally recognized public reader, speaker, and writer in all genres. Her work is writing of literary quality that contains new environmental and Indigenous knowledge and activism. It illuminates a Native spirituality that has endured. Hogan has received many awards for her poetry, including the Colorado Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award (twice), Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an American Book Award, and a prestigious Lannan Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, The Wordcraft Circle, and The Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association. Her novel, Mean Spirit, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the current Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation and is a Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado.

Layli Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the full-length collection Whereas (2017), which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2012, her participatory installation, Whereas We Respond, was featured on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Long Soldier is the recipient of a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. She holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and earned an MFA with honors from Bard College.

Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation. She is the author of The Grass Dancer (winner of the 1995 PEN/Hemingway award), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and the forthcoming novel, A Council of Dolls. Her fellowships include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, a Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Princeton Hodder Fellowship, a U.S. Artists Fellowship, a McKnight Fellowship, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies. She is currently working on a new novel titled The Year of Fury

Luci Tapahonso [Diné (Navajo)] is professor emerita of English Literature (University of New Mexico 2016) and served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation (2013-2015). She is the author of three children’s books and six books of poetry, including A Radiant Curve, which received the 2008 Arizona Book Award for poetry. She was a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow in 2018, and her recent literary recognitions include the 2021 Ostana (Italy) Prize, an international award which honors authors who write in their mother tongue, and the delivery of the keynote address at the 5th Annual Taos Writers Conference. Tapahonso will also receive the 2021 Distinguished Literary Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association at its 2022 conference.

David Treuer (Ojibwe) is a New York Times Bestselling author from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor and an Ojibwe lawyer and judge, Treuer attended Princeton, where he worked with Toni Morrison, and the University of Michigan, where he earned his PhD in anthropology. Treuer is the author of seven books—four novels and three works of nonfiction. He was a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship recipient, and is the winner of three Minnesota Book Awards, the California Book Award for Nonfiction, the Housatonic Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, LA Times, and The Washington Post, among others. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a Professor of English at The University of Southern California. In 2021, Treuer became an editor-at-large at Pantheon Books.

Michael Wasson is the author of Swallowed Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), a 2019 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow and a recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship. His poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Best New Poets. He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.

Elizabeth Woody (The Confederated Tribes of the Reservation at Warm Springs, Oregon) is a critically praised poet, lecturer, and educator. She received a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, an American Book Award and the William Stafford Memorial Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. Her poetry collections include Hand into Stone (reprinted as Seven Hands, Seven Hearts) and Luminaries of the Humble. She also writes short fiction and essays and is a visual artist. She is a founding member of the Northwest Native American Writers Association and is a board member of Soapstone that celebrates and recognizes women writers. In 2017, she was named the eighth Oregon Poet Laureate. Woody is the Executive Director of The Museum at Warm Springs.

Rena Priest is a poet and an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She has been appointed to serve as the Washington State Poet Laureate for the term of April 2021-2023. She is the 2022 Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow, a Vadon Foundation Fellow, and recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award. Her debut collection, Patriarchy Blues, was published by MoonPath Press and received an American Book Award. She is a National Geographic Explorer (2018-2020) and a Jack Straw Writer (2019). Priest holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

COVER ART CREDIT

White Hawk, Dyani (Sičáŋgu Lakota), Transition, 48 x 48 in., oil on canvas, 2011, image courtesy of the artist, photograph by Jim Escalante