Dakota Homecoming
We are so honored that you are here, they said. We know that this is your homeland, they said. The admission price is five dollars, they said. Here is your button for the event, they said. It means so much to us that you are here, they said. We want to write an apology letter, they said. Tell us what to say.
Birdfoot’s Grampa
The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. The rain was falling, a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can’t save them all accept it, get back in we’ve got places to go. But, leathery hands full of wet brown life knee-deep in the summer roadside grass he just smiled and said they have places to go too.
Walking With My Delaware Grandfather
Walking home I feel a presence following and realize he is always there that Native man with coal-black hair who is my grandfather. In my first memories he is present, mostly wordless, resident in the house where I was born. My mother shows him the cleft in my chin identical to his. I am swaddled and blinking in the kitchen light. So we are introduced. We never part. Sometimes I forget he lodges in my house still the bone-house where my heart beats. I carry his mother’s framework a sturdy structure. I learn his birthright. I hear his mother’s teachings through what my mother said of her: She kept a pot of stew on the stove all day for anyone to eat. She never went to church but said you could be a good person anyway. She fed hoboes during the ’30s, her back porch a regular stopover. Every person has rights no matter what color. Be respectful. This son of hers, my grandfather, still walks the streets with me. Some twist of blood and heat still spark across the time bridge. Here, listen: Air draws through these lungs made from his. His blood still pulses through this hand.
The Tecumseh Motel
In Shawnee cosmology, a shooting star can fall to earth as a mythical panther. Tecumseh — phonetic approximation of an Algonquian name: Shooting Star, One Who Waits, Crouching Panther. The first cultural event in Chillicothe is a matinee performance of an outdoor play highlighting Tecumseh’s life. We are honored guests, ushered backstage before the show. How to approximate a scalping at the Tecumseh Outdoor Drama: Hollow an egg with care. Fill with Karo syrup and red tempera paint. Soak a toupee with cherry Kool-Aid and mineral oil. Crack the egg onto the actor’s head. Red matter will slide down the crown and eggshell will mimic shards of skull. Actors on horseback frame the stage. A roan flicks his tail irritably at flies as his rider shifts uncertainly on the saddle blanket. How to approximate death by gauntlet: The victim must lead the action. The aggressor follows. Burn marks are approximated on the actor’s chest with burnt ends of wine corks hidden in the sand at his feet. The knife is dull edged, lined with a small tubing mechanism. The actor squeezes a pump of corn syrup, liquid soap, and red food dye in a limp arc across the torso. At the end of the performance the crowd turns a standing ovation to the representatives of our tribe sitting in the middle rows. Are we mocked or honored with such a display? That evening, I rail glibly on the telephone: historical inaccuracies, hooping and hollering, pandering to the worst stereotypes. My husband interrupts me — You sound like you’ve been crying. A Chillicothe chief to the British Army Commander in 1779: We have always been the frontier.
The Feed
Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way — addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang on to because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips are still simmering in a pot on the stove.
An American Sunrise
We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike. It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight. Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could sing so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz I argued with a Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June, forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon.
“Dakota Homecoming” first appeared in New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich and published by Graywolf Press. Copyright © 2018 by Gwen Nell Westerman. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Birdfoot’s Grampa” is from Entering Onondaga by Joseph Bruchac, published by Cold Mountain Press. Copyright © 1978 by Joseph Bruchac. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Walking with My Delaware Grandfather” is from Mélange Block by Denise Low, published by Red Mountain Press. Copyright © 2014 by Denise Low. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Tecumseh Motel” is from Tributaries by Laura Da’, published by the University of Arizona Press. Copyright © 2015 by Laura Da’. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Feed” is from Another Attempt at Rescue by M.L. Smoker. Copyright © 2005 by M.L. Smoker. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.
“An American Sunrise” is from An American Sunrise: Poems by Joy Harjo, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 2017, 2019 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company on behalf of the author.
