Grandmother’s Land, poem by William Oandasan

GRANDMOTHER’S LAND
by William Oandasan

around the house stood an
orchard of plum, apple and pear
a blackwalnut tree, one white pine,
groves of white oak and willow clumps
the home of Jessie was largely redwood

blood, flesh and bone sprouted
inside her womb of redwood
for five generations
the trees now stand unpruned and wild

after relocating so many years before the War
the seeds of Jessie have returned

afternoon sunlight on the field
breezes moving grass and leaves
memories with family names wait
within the earth, the mountains,
the valley, the field, the trees

SOURCE: “Grandmother’s Land” appears in William Oandasan’s collection Round Valley Songs (West End Press, 1984), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Light Coming Through Redwood Trees” by Kaj R. Svennson. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Of mixed Yuki and Filipino heritage, William Oandasan (1947-1992) was a member of the Yuki tribe of Round Valley, California. An advocate for Native American writers, he founded A Press in 1976 and edited A: A Journal of Contemporary Literature. He is the author of the poetry collections Taking Off (1976), Sermon & Three Waves: A Journey Through Night (1978), Moving Inland, A Cycle of Lyrics (1983), Round Valley Songs (1984) — winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation — Round Valley Verses (1987), and Summer Night (1989).

Morning Talk, poem by Roberta Hill Whiteman

MORNING TALK
by Roberta Hill Whiteman

“Hi, guy,” said I to a robin
perched on a pole in the middle
of the garden. Pink and yellow
firecracker zinnias, rough green
leaves of broccoli,
and deep red tomatoes on dying stems
frame his still presence.

“I’ve heard you’re not
THE REAL ROBIN. Bird watchers have
agreed,” I said.”THE REAL ROBIN
lives in England. They claim
your are misnamed and that we ought
to call you ‘a red-breasted thrush’
because you are
indigenous.”

He fluffed up. “Am I not
Jis ko ko?” he cried, “that persistent
warrior who carries warmth
northward every spring?”
He seemed so young, his red belly
a bit light and his wings, still
faded brown. He watched me
untangling the hose to water squash.

“Look who’s talking!” he chirruped.
“Your people didn’t come
from Europe or even India.
The turtles say you’re a relative
to red clay on this great island.”
Drops of crystal water
sparkled on the squash.

“Indigenous!” he teased
as he flew by.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  Jis ko ko is the Iroquoian name for Robin. In the story, he is a young warrior who confronts the old man of winter. The old man uses ice and brutal winds to keep Jis ko ko’s warmth away from the earth. When the old man shoots him on the chest with an arrow of ice, the young man bleeds and transforms into the bird. Even as a bird, he continues his purpose, bringing warm rain and growth—green leaves, flowers and fruit.

SOURCE: “Morning Talk” appears in Roberta Hill Whiteman‘s collection Philadelphia Flowers (Holy Cow! Press, 1996), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Harbinger,” watercolor by Betty LaRue. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Roberta Hill Whiteman is a poet of Wisconsin Oneida heritage. She is known for the collections Star Quilt (1984) and Philadelphia Flowers (1996). She received the 1991 Wisconsin Idea Foundation’s Excellence Award and has a PhD from the University of Minnesota.

Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow, poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca

[Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow] (Excerpt)
by Jimmy Santiago Baca 

Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow
pushing me like a sixteen-year-old
to toss my shirt off, and run along the river shore,
splashing in the water, wading out to the reeds,
my heart an ancient Yaki drum
and I believed,
more than believed,
the air beneath trees was female blue dancers
I approached, and there in the dry leaves, in the crisp twigs,
I turned softly as if dancing with a blue woman made of air,
sunlight,
in shrub-weed skirts.
I knew the dance that would please the Gods,
I knew the dance that would make the river water
smile glistening ever silvering,
I knew the dance steps that praised my ancestors…

…Read “Yesterday…” by Jimmy Santiago Baca in its entirety at poetryfoundation.org.

IMAGE: “Dance” by Gun Legler. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in 1952 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was abandoned by his parents and at 13 ran away from the orphanage where his grandmother had placed him. He was convicted on drug charges in 1973 and spent five years in prison. There, he learned to read and began writing poetry. His semiautobiographical novel in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), received the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1989. In addition to over a dozen books of poetry, he has published memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay, Bound by Honor (1993), which was made into a feature-length film directed by Taylor Hackford. Baca’s poetry titles include Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train & 13 Mexicans (2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), and Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (2007). Baca has received a Pushcart Prize and the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. His memoir, A Place to Stand (2001), garnered the International Prize. In 2006, Baca was awarded the Cornelius P. Turner Award, which honors GED graduates who have made “outstanding contributions” in areas such as education, justice, and social welfare. For more than 30 years, Baca has conducted writing workshops in prisons, libraries, and universities across the country. In 2004, he launched Cedar Tree, a literary nonprofit designed to provide writing workshops, training, and outreach programs for at-risk youth, prisoners and ex-prisoners, and disadvantaged communities. Baca holds a BA in English and an honorary PhD in literature from the University of New Mexico.

Canyon de Chelly, poem by Simon J. Ortiz

CANYON DE CHELLY
by Simon J. Ortiz

Lie on your back on stone
the stone carved to fit
the shape of yourself.
Who made it like this,
knowing that I would be along
in a million years and look
at the sky being blue forever?

My son is near me. He sits
and turns on his butt
and crawls over to stones,
picks one up and holds it,
and then puts it in his mouth.
The taste of stone.
What is it but stone,
the earth in your mouth.
You, son, are tasting forever.

We walk to the edge of a cliff
and look down into the canyon.
On this side, we cannot see
the bottom cliffedge but looking
further out, we see fields,
sand furrows, cottonwoods.
In winter, they are softly gray,
The cliffs’ shadows are distant,
hundreds of feet below;
we cannot see our own shadows,
The wind moves softly into us,
My son laughs with the wind;
he gasps and laughs.

We find gray root, old wood,
so old, with curious twists
in it, curving back into curves,
juniper, pinon, or something
with hard, red berries in spring.
You taste them, and they are sweet
and bitter, the berries a delicacy
for bluejays. The plant rooted
fragilely in a sandy place
by a canyon wall, the sun bathing
shiny, pointed leaves.
My son touches the root carefully,
aware of its ancient quality.
He lays his soft, small fingers on it
and looks at me for information.
I tell him: wood, an old root,
and around it, the earth, ourselves.

NOTE: Canyon de Chelly National Monument was established on April 1, 1931 as a unit of the National Park Service. It is located in northeastern Arizona within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation. Reflecting one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes of North America, it preserves ruins of the early indigenous tribes that lived in the area, including the Ancient Pueblo Peoples (also called Anasazi) and Navajo. The monument covers 83,840 acres and encompasses the floors and rims of the three major canyons: de Chelly, del Muerto, and Monument. These canyons were cut by streams with headwaters in the Chuska mountains just to the east of the monument. None of the land is federally owned. In 2009, Canyon de Chelly National Monument was recognized as one of the most-visited national monuments in the United States. (SOURCE: wikipedia.org.)

PHOTO: “Canyon de Chelly” by Ansel Adams (1941)

Blind Curse, poem by Simon J. Ortiz

BLIND CURSE
by Simon J. Ortiz

You could drive blind
for those two seconds
and they would be forever.
I think that as a diesel truck
passes us eight miles east of Mission.
Churning through the storm, heedless
of the hill sliding away.
There isn’t much use to curse but I do.
Words fly away, tumbling invisibly
toward the unseen point where
the prairie and sky meet.
The road is like that in those seconds,
nothing but the blind white side
of creation.
 
                   You’re there somewhere,
a tiny struggling cell.
You just might be significant
but you might not be anything.
Forever is a space of split time
from which to recover after the mass passes.
My curse flies out there somewhere,
and then I send my prayer into the wake
of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls
one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.
***
“Blind Curse” appears in Simon J. Ortiz’s collection After and Before the Lightning (The University of Arizona Press, 1994).

PHOTO: “Slippery When Wet” by Brian L. Romig, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo

 
EAGLE POEM
by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joy Harjo (born May 9, 1951) is a Native American poet, musician, and author. Known primarily as a poet, Harjo has also taught at the college level, played alto saxophone with a band called Poetic Justice, edited literary journals, and written screenplays. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Cherokee descent, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1995, Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. In 2002, Harjo received the PEN Open Book Award for A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales. Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2013. (Read more at wikipedia.org.) Visit Joy Harjo at joyharjo.com.

“Eagle Poem” appears in Joy Harjo’s collection In Mad Love and War.(Wesleyan University Press, 1990), available at Amazon.com.

Author Photo: Joy Harjo, Albuquerque, 1975, by LaVerne Harrell Clark, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Illustration: “Eagle Flight,” watercolor (detail) by The Rose Palette (therosepalette.net).

Joy Harjo wins 2013 American Book Award for Crazy Brave

On November 23, 2013, one of our favorite poets, Joy Harjo, received a 2013 American Book Award for her memoir Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton, July 2013).  In the book, Harjo, one of the nation’s leading Native American voices, details her journey as an artist — from her difficult childhood to her transformation into an award-winning poet and musician. .

Find Crazy Brave, a memoir by Joy Harjo at Amazon.com.

Louise Erdrich wins 2013 American Book Award

On November 23, 2013, author Louise Erdrich received a well-deserved 2013 American Book Award for her novel THE ROUND HOUSE, which has been called the Native American TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. The American Book Award celebrates diversity and recognizes authors for outstanding literary achievement — a unique honor, since it’s an award given by other writers, with no categories, no nominees, and no losers.

“The novel showcases her [Erdrich’s] extraordinary ability to delineate the ties of love, resentment, need, duty and sympathy that bind families together…[a] powerful novel worth reading.”

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 

Advice to Myself, poem by Louise Erdrich

ADVICE TO MYSELF
by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons 
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

“Advice to Myself” is found in Louise Erdrich’s poetry collection Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Louise Erdrich, born on June 7, 1954, is an American author of novels, poetry, and children’s books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.

Louise Erdrich Discusses the Writer’s Trance

“I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is simple persistence …

But if the trance happens, even though it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling that makes you think, it can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I always need to go back and reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle, and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.”

LOUISE ERDRICH, The Paris Review (Winter 2010)

Illustration: Portrait of Louise Erdrich (Chicago Magazine, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)