towards summer when the lengthening days
will have no lasting darkness. He stands
witnessing the season’s slow thaw and sings
a hunter’s song across the sea.
When Heaven Shits on the World
In my Indian language the word
for “falling star” is son’ tsaane
which literally means “star shit”
as if the heavens shit on the world.
Listening to the news every day
with its headlines of rapes and murders,
deceit and greed, genocide and war,
I think it could be true.
How Reservations Got Their Name
White government official comes out to see
land selected for Indian resettlement;
looks around, scratches his head and says,
“I don’t know. I got some reservations about this place.”
Indian Social Security
At Eternal Poverty Reservation
the First Baptist Church of Indian Conversion
bingo hall is filled with smoke and laughter,
hope and the greasy smell of fry bread,
and prayers for rent or groceries
are answered in the calling of letters and numbers.
B-32 B-32
If Willy Loman Had Been Indian
After graduating from
George Armstrong Custer High School
Simon Lone Fight got a job selling insurance
door-to-door on the reservation.
He never sold a single policy.
Other Indians just stared at him
from behind screened doors
wearing a dark suit and tie
with a briefcase and hat in his hand,
their empty hands in their empty pockets,
puzzled by his sales pitch,
wondering how one is insured against the future.
What the Tour Guide Said
“Oh, that,” said the bus driver
in reply to a tourist’s question
about a dilapidated and overgrown
white picket-fenced area just
behind the reservation’s cemetery.
“That’s where the failed dreams
of Indians go to be buried.”
Anchorage
He said his name was Harry when a white hotdog vendor told him to stand behind the stainless steel cart where tourists wouldn’t see him as they walked Fourth Avenue and into gift shops with Native souvenirs displayed in crowded storefronts. He wanted change for a dollar to call his son, but the vendor called him a drunk. “Harry, who’s committing hari kari with booze.” That’s what he said, but I didn’t smell anything on his breath. The Indian saw me, and while I traded coins he told me how his great grandfather was a shaman whose magic once filled Cook Inlet with shimmering salmon at a time when fish were few. He left me alone on the noisy street where two German tourists parked a zebra-striped motorcycle and ordered reindeer sausages with onions and green peppers, and a woman from New York City with a Gucci handbag passed with her catch of carved ivory and Eskimo masks.
It’s All in the Blood
Herbert Redskin was in a car accident
and got a blood transfusion from a white guy.
Afterward, he burned his BIA card,
sold his allotment and moved off the rez
to a suburb where he bought a condo,
a gas grill, an SUV, golf clubs, and a flat screen TV,
wore fat-ass Dockers and polo shirts,
started a portfolio, listened to Kenny G.
and prayed at the altar of Martha Stewart.
Birthday Girl
Nila Both-Feet-on-the-Ground
came out of her mother backwards
and stood in a slick pool asking questions
about broken treaties and broken promises,
what’s a reservation,
why’s the house so poor;
where’s her father;
why’s she naked;
and why’s everyone staring
at her brown and blue eyes?
Indians should always come out feet first,
ready to hit the ground and make a stand
or run at the first sign of trouble.
(Native) America Enters the Atomic Age
“Could it not be arranged to send the Small Pox among the Indians?”
—Letter from Major General Jeffery Amherst, 1763
In the spring of 1763, Chief Pontiac’s second cousin
He saw an enormous silver eagle flying five miles
above the earth with the words Enola Gay
painted on the side. The bird laid a giant egg
that fell and exploded over a city.
In a flash as bright as the sun,
100,000 people were vaporized—
their spirits clambering into the swirling inferno.
Seymour tried to warn his people, but everyone just laughed
and said the government would never do anything so terrible.
That winter, soldiers brought them a wagonload of blankets,
and in the days and weeks to come,
death unleashed soared the earth like an eagle.
High Anxiety
Nila Both-Feet-on-the-Ground
had never flown in an airplane before.
On the first time she labeled her body parts
with a black permanent marker:
Nila’s left arm, Nilas’s right foot,
left breast, big toe, pinky, and so on.
During turbulence, she counted body parts
like worn beads on a rosary.
Oneupmanship
God got angry at Humanity
So he created a cataclysmic Flood.
Raven got angry at Indians
So he created Christopher Columbus.
Jimmy Stands-Too-Tall
On the day Jimmy-Stands-Too-Tall hung himself
the wind outside blew dust over everything
commercials still played on his black and white tv
his old dog spun in tight circles before lying down
the stock market was up then down and up again
traffic backed up on city freeways for miles
1,684 babies were born prematurely
Elvis was seen at a car wash
credit card companies left three messages on the phone
couples were married and divorced
children conceived and unborn
and the earth kept spinning and spinning.
But all around the world there was nothing
left of Jimmy Stands-Too-Tall
but unpaid bills, empty beer cans and bottles,
dirty dishes, and the sound of a weighted rope creaking.
Recipe for a Reztini
Two parts cheap gin or vodka
One part of your youth
Garnish with a strip of dried salmon or jerky
Shake it in the backseat of a Pontiac
doing 70 mph around Dead Man’s Curve
Reservation Roulette
My cousin, Kenny, and I are sitting on the porch
of his HUD home drinking beer and bitching
about the lack of jobs.
A raven lands on a broken-down refrigerator
used to smoke salmon.
“God’s come to see us,” I say. We both laugh.
After six beers each, Kenny brings out his .44 magnum,
the hole so big I swear a Mack truck could turn around in it.
He loads the cylinder with one bullet,
spins it, and snaps it shut without looking.
“God wants a show,” he says putting the barrel in his mouth
and pulling the trigger five times in a hurry,
like he’s got some place to go.
“Shit,
man!” says Kenny, grabbing another beer.
“Nothing works around here.”
Ceremony
for Kenny B.
There’s only so many times you can holler,
‘Here, Bullet!’ before one comes a runnin’.
I walk down to your grave by the river
and turn my face up to the patient sky.
In the gray shade of dusk
I see the black bird of your spirit
rising like a feather above the river
and narrow field
into a dark and rolling sundown
slowly stealing toward the blue light
of a distant pink mountain.
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Indian Stompers
“August 30, 1779. Toward noon we found some dead Indians and skinned two of them from their hips down to make leather boots; one pair for Major Platt, the other for myself.”
—from the Journal of Lt. William Barton, under the command of General Sullivan’s expedition against Six Nation Indians
Good thing
it never caught on
as a fad.
Everyone
would have wanted
a pair.
Salmonomics
based on a true story
“Let me try to explain it again,”
said the man from the Department of Fish & Game
as he looked out across the divided room—
White commercial fisherman on one side;
Indians on the other.
“It’s really quite simple. You Indians have always
been allowed to catch five hundred salmon
from the river each summer.
That’s not going to change under our new policy.
We’re only going to increase the number of salmon
these commercial fisherman can catch at the mouth
of the river by half a million. So, you can plainly see
that this really isn’t going to impact you at all.”
The commercial fishermen applauded wildly.
The Indians sat quietly doing arithmetic in their heads.
The Last Speech of Chief Sits-on-the-Fence
after a poem by Pastor Niemöller
First they came for the Lakota
and I did not fight because I was not Lakota.
Then they came for the Sioux
and I did not fight because I was not Sioux.
Then they came for the Apache
and I did not fight because I was not Apache.
When they finally came for me
there was no one left to fight with me.
The Virginia Woolf Suicide of Mary Caught-in-Between
Mary Caught-in-Between
must have been made of clay,
red as the soil of her ancestors.
Every time it rained
her features were dulled—
her nose and shoulders,
hips and knees, fingers and toes.
Storm after storm, she was weathered
away until one day she filled her pockets
with stones and walked into the rising river,
her feet firmly on the bottom
until she became part of its clay bed.
Dandelions in Full Bloom
On the wintry day of his execution
the Sioux poet Jimmy Blue Cloud
sang his final poem to the sun,
wrapped it tightly in sackcloth
rent from his ragged clothes
and buried it in the prison yard.
Spring after spring
the words of the poet
sprouted into dandelions,
their white fluffy heads
spreading news of his innocence
to the world.
Home
Standing on the edge of the silty river,
snowy mountains in the distance
waiting for the river to reclaim my blood,
waiting for the earth to reclaim my bones.
Red America
ignorant america, see
those Indian children
in reservation schools
failing history and english?
they will be our poets
writing the secret truths
of your guilty nation.
blind america, see
those tourist shops
full of Indian souvenirs?
they are selling our past
for trinkets made in taiwan.
selfish america, see
those Indians sleeping
on your city streets?
they are not lazy drunks
dreaming of buffalo,
they don’t have jobs
because you won’t hire them.
deaf america, hear
us singing at powwows?
they are not chants of
rebellion, but love songs
from a million broken hearts.
stupid america, see
that big Indian with
a knife in his hand?
he doesn’t want to cut you,
he only wants to sit by a stream
in a forest and carve totems.
Tax Evasion
After being audited by the IRS seven years in a row
Willie Armstrong bought a puppy
named him Loophole
paid a retired tax collector
to beat it four times a day until it was grown.
Nowadays, that mean old dog can smell an IRS agent
a mile away, and Willie’s always out the back door
and halfway across the reservation
by the time one of them comes aknockin’.
Smoke Signal
Duke Sky Thunder on his red Indian motorcycle
at a stoplight in Albuquerque
wearing a red bandana and a T-shirt
that screams Indian Pride,
Crazy Horse painted on the gas tank
and a license plate that reads INJIN.
A pickup truck with two Rednecks pulls alongside.
The closer dude leans out the window and hollers,
“I hate you sonabitches!”
The second dude with really bad teeth yells,
“Why don’t you go back wherever you came from?”
When the light turns green, Sky Thunder grins and shouts,
“Right back at ya!” and peels away—
his long black hair whipping in the wind
like a stallion’s mane, the smoke signal from his tailpipe
rising like a finger.
The One-Minute Racism Test
A Black man and an Indian walk into a bar.
The Black man smiles at the White bartender and says,
“Gimme a beer, please. Whatever you got on tap.”
The smiling Indian slaps a twenty on the counter and says,
“I’ll take the same thing as my friend here.”
For half an hour the bartender ignores their requests,
serving other customers instead.
Later, five angry White men beat them to death
in the parking lot while bystanders look on.
In this story, which person are you?
Real Live Indian
I’m sitting in a small Midwestern café when I see an old man and a boy walk up to an Indian sitting at the table next to me. “Excuse me,” says the old man. “This here is my grandson.” The Indian with long black hair nods hello. “What’s your name?” the Indian asks the blue-eyed little boy. “My name is Timmy. I’m in the third grade.” The Indian smiles, takes a b
ite of his pancakes. “We seen you from our table over there,” says the grandfather, pointing. “And I says to Timmy . . . I says, ‘that there’s a real live Indian.’ Darn if he didn’t say, ‘I didn’t know there were any Indians anymore.’ So I brung him over here to show him. See Timmy? A real live Indian. Go ahead, touch him. It don’t rub off.” Even from where I’m sitting I see the Indian’s jaw clench.
My Frostbitten Heart
I remember the day it happened—
the day my heart was frozen.
Thermometer read thirty below zero when we left the cabin