The Nespelem Girl by Inés Hernández-Ávila (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

The Nespelem Girl
by Inés Hernández-Ávila

When my mom traveled to Galveston, Texas in 1946, the Tribal Tribune
(of the Colville Reservation) had a tiny story titled
“Nespelem Girl Marries.”
My mom kept the little article and gave it to me. It is my treasure.

íinim Niimiipu píke, my Nez Perce mom, was her own person. Always.

Daring risktaker for her time. WWII. She thought, “Hmm, I wonder what work I could find in Seattle?” Making her way there by herself, picking up odd jobs until she found the one meant for her.

Janice the riveter—Boeing Aircraft Factory. Imagine. The Nespelem Girl meeting other strong, risk-taking women from all over the country. Forging independence, Niimiipuu style, earning a salary, sending most of it home, but keeping a little for herself (she loved Joy perfume back then). Realizing what the world “out there” looked like.

During free time, off work, dressing up, styling, hair just right, bold lipstick, taking lots of photos solo or with friends in those cramped little photo booths. Back home in Nespelem I found a cigar box full of those photos of hers. In each one, I am drawn to her eyes. In each photo she looks directly at the camera, as she did in life. She looked straight at you, and that meeting of the eyes had to be real. She could tell if it wasn’t.

Soldiers Clubs on weekends. Patriotic to support the troops. Socializing with them, dancing, laughing, going out with your best girl buds, and your sisters when they came to town to stay with you in your sparse but nicely kept attic apartment.

Meeting my handsome Tejano dad, a Marine. Semper fidelis. Traveling by train to Galveston, Texas, to marry him. The Nespelem Girl finding herself in the heart of Texas-Mexican culture. My dad’s dad her ally, seeing his own mother in my mom’s Nativeness.

Becoming Catholic to marry my dad, but after I turned seven and made my First Communion, she took me aside and said, “ok, now you can go with your father to Mass every Sunday, or you can stay at home with me.”

Choice. My mom gave me choice. She didn’t argue with my dad about religion. She respected his faith. And she respected my right to decide.

Catholic notions of confession, sin, guilt, and dominion over the earth did not sit well with her. She never accepted Christianity, even though all her siblings did. She would say, adamantly, “I believe in God, that’s all.”

Despite only going as far as seventh grade, she loved to read and write. It was part of her curiousness. She wanted to know things, to be informed. She made me a passionate reader and writer. She loved language.

But oh!

Not one to budge if she had her own opinion, or if she was upset. I’ve been known to say, “If my mom is upset with you, you could drop dead in front of her, and it would make no difference. She would merely turn her head away to ignore you still.” You cease to exist until you make things right, if you have done something to offend, or until you understand that you will never be able to force her into anything, including changing her mind.

“Don’t say, ‘I love you,’ if you don’t mean it,” she would say. Mean your words, don’t treat language carelessly, don’t let your voice be false. Words have spirit, power, heart. Sometimes she would say firmly in family, “I have spoken.”

In the Niimiipuu language the word tamálwit means our laws, our governance, the way we are supposed to be true humans. This is when she would remind us.

When something terrible would happen, some offense to someone, some betrayal, some wrongdoing, so big as to leave her speechless, she would say, “Words fail me!”

The tenderness: One of my dear friends told me after he first met her, “Your mom has such a girlish laughter!” She did. Even in her nineties, she was known for her laughter, her delight, her inclination, like so many Native folks, to want to laugh, to need to laugh, to be light-hearted. Those who loved her wanted to make her laugh. We were healed by her laughter.

My mom felt for every living thing. She would be filled with sadness to see suffering. Fierce love. Fierce woman. Fierce mom. The Nespelem Girl always stood up for herself. My father was so fortunate to meet his match in her. I am so grateful they are my parents.

Qe’ciyéwyew, íinim píke.

PHOTO: Vintage bottle of Joy de Jean Patou perfume.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My mom was a force to be reckoned with. She and my dad knew full well what they had in each other. I am an only child, so I had ample time to observe, to notice, to listen, to grow in awareness about each of them. My mom, and therefore I, are from Chief Joseph’s band of the Nez Perce. We are enrolled on the Colville Reservation in Washington State. My dad was Texas-Mexican. He taught my mom to love Tejano conjunto music (though she never learned Spanish). They would go dancing every weekend with his brothers, cousins, and their wives. He trusted her so much that he turned over his check to her whenever he got paid, keeping 10% for his expenses. So much to their story that I’m writing a collection to honor them. In my life, an odd thing has occurred. Some people have wanted me to choose one side or the other, to identify as either Nez Perce or Tejana—as if I could erase either one of my parents. But theirs is a riveting story that I am telling. She once gave me her handwritten copy of a Kahlil Gibran poem that says, “But let there be spaces in your togetherness / Love one another, but make not a bond of love— / Sing and dance together and be joyous / but let each one of you be alone— / And stand together yet not too near together / For the pillars of the temple stand apart, / and the oak tree and the cypress / grow not in each other’s shadow.” I know this. I know that I come from strong, loving roots. This is what moves me to write about her and them.

PHOTO: The author and her mother at the seashore in Galveston, Texas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Inés Hernández-Ávila (Niimiipuu/Nez Perce and Tejana), Professor Emerita, Native American Studies, UC Davis, is enrolled with the Colville Confederated Tribes. A Ford Fellow, she is one of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She is a scholar-activist, poet, essayist, visual artist, translator, and a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, a group of Niimiipuu creative writers/language workers. Luk’upsíimey members are fusing language revitalization work and promotion with creative writing, performance, and publication. She is collaborating with the Library of Congress´s Hispanic Division, to include more Indigenous writers from Latin America in their Palabra archive. Her scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published widely. Her most recent publication (essay and poems) appears in The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States (literal publishing, 2024). Her painting, Coyote, Looking Deeply, is the cover art for Native American Rhetoric, ed. Lawrence Gross. Recently retired, she is loving the time she has to create. She is completing For the Nespelem Girl and the Cisco Kid: A Love Story (honoring her mom and dad), and her memoir, LuzEspiritu/SpiritLight.

Guardians by Alan Walowitz (HOW TO HEAL THE EARTH Series)

Guardians
by Alan Walowitz

I watched old Westerns every day
when I was young,
Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Restless Gun—
but Indians—that’s what we called them then—
seemed more alive, but for the targets on their backs—
slept close to the earth;
hardly made a sound;
walked with soft intention;
found their way
by the light of the moon.
Sat in a circle to hear the elders
speak slow, their measured words far apart
as clouds in an indigo sky.

I’m always in a hurry to get nowhere,
no matter the little I have to do,
and rattle the teacups as I go
and get undone by the silence
that can travel with love.

My ear’s to the ground more frequently now
when I fall to the floor,
shattered awake from worry of this world.
No hoofbeats. Only faint heartbeats
now and then, and from deep within.
Maybe it’s enough, could save us,
if we stop and listen for them
while we can.

PAINTING: Small Catcher by T.C. Cannon (1973-1978).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: It’s a fairly common trope to bless native peoples whenever we consider the mess we’ve made of the earth. There’s probably not much more to say about that in a poem. However, the Cleveland Indians will be known as the Guardians starting next season. I was dubious, at first, but now I kind of like that name. Maybe it reminds us all,  all we have to do is listen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night, written trans-continentally with poet Betsy Mars.

Jim Morrison and I Head to Standing Rock by Lindsey Martin-Bowen (HOW TO HEAL THE EARTH Series)

Jim Morrison and I Head to Standing Rock
by Lindsey Martin-Bowen

Dakota Pipeline, North Dakota

When clouds form an eagle above a red sun,
and the Flint Hills and dried-up wheat fields
beckon us onward, we head east and north—

beyond the Great Plains and the narrow lanes
to which we’d become accustomed—after spinning
across sand in our chase for California dreams

of peace and love, still uncaptured. Here, police
shoot pepper spray and water cannons at 30 of us.
Security guards unleash dogs that maim six,

one a small child. Still, we clutch signs—black
crosses against a blue sky, where cirrus clouds
hover then become black knots of rain.

We clasp hands with the Standing Rock Sioux,
pray with them in a circle, and I ask Jim
if he wants to risk getting arrested.

He shakes his head. “We’ll help. But this is their
Wounded Knee. It isn’t to be fought by you—by me.”
He pulls out three fifties to leave for munitions.

I nod to agree, it’s the natives’ call. Even if it’s for all
of us, they must win it in these unaligned times
when the eagle cloud rises high on the horizon.

Previously published in (Tittynope Zine 2017). Forthcoming in the author’s collection Cashing Checks with Jim Morrison (redbat books 2023).

PHOTO: Native Americans demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline in May 2021 at the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the border of North Dakota and South Dakota. Learn more at standwithstandingrock.net.  Photo by Jolanda Kirpensteijn on Unsplash. 

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Years ago, when I (my persona) screamed down asphalt through mauve Kansas fields and the Flint Hills, rock shaman Jim Morrison crawled out of my car stereo while a yellow hornet on the windshield danced like a Kachina in a sand painting. It was magic. Perhaps. I still don’t know. Yet poems resulting from this encounter resulted in my third poetry book, CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison. In it, Jim comes with me to find La Loba*, in hopes she’ll resurrect his bones. But the wolf woman refuses, and we go to Paris and the Père Lachaise Cemetery. There, Jim’s dark monument, wrought with graffiti, commemorates him. I’d thought this story had ended when I left him there. But I was wrong. He won’t leave me alone. He pushes into poems and ignoring his burial, often joins figures from everywhere—ancient Greece and Eleusinian mysteries, wild and wooly creatures in my “frenzies” poems, and post-modern philosophers. Even today, he whispers to me when I stare at a waffled, red-lace sky filled with popcorn clouds looming above our foothills.

*Wolf woman. Bone woman. According to Southwest legends (from various tribes and Mexican cultures), La Loba works with angels to gather bones of humans and wolves, then resurrect them. 

Photo of Jim Morrison, found in The Collected Works of Jim Morrison (June 2021). 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Pushcart and Pulitzer nominee Lindsey Martin-Bowen’s fourth poetry collection, Where Water Meets the Rock (39 West Press 2017), contains a poem named an Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest’s 85th Contest. Her third, CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison, won Kansas Authors Club’s 2017 “Looks Like a Million” Contest, and was a finalist in the QuillsEdge Press 2015-2016 Contest. Her Inside Virgil’s Garage (Chatter House) was a runner-up in the 2015 Nelson Poetry Book Award. McClatchy Newspapers named her Standing on the Edge of the World  (Woodley Press) one of Ten Top Poetry Books of 2008. Her poems have appeared in New Letters, I-70 Review, Thorny Locust, Flint Hills Review, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Arsenic, Coal City Review, Phantom Drift, Ekphrastic Review (Egyptian Challenge), The Same, Tittynope Zine, Bare Root Review, Rockhurst Review, Black Bear Review, 15 anthologies, and other lit zines. Three of her seven novels have been published. Poetry is her way of singing. She taught writing and literature at UMKC for 18 years, MCC-Longview, and teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and other criminal justice classes for Blue Mountain Community College, Pendleton, Oregon. Visit her on Facebook and on Amazon.

Snapshots, a prose poem by Tiffany Midge (Me, as a Child Poetry Series)

Snapshots
by Tiffany Midge

I. April, 1969 “…they are fighting again.” ~ Walter Cronkite

They are fighting again. My plastic, green soldiers are marching across the dense shag carpet capturing POW Fisher Price animals and GI Joe action figures. They are fighting again. Barbie and Skipper are taken hostage by Ken and drowned in the bathtub. They are fighting again. My Black baby doll Tamu is tortured by the Velveteen Rabbit, her talking string gets stuck on one lonely phrase, sock it to me baby, sock it to me baby, sock it to me baby. They are fighting again. My Etch-a-Sketch draws a picture of military intelligentsia popping war buttons and planning strategic defenses. They are fighting again. The Brothers Grimm are cutting fillets of Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid and choking the princess on her pea. They are fighting again. Betty and Veronica turn Jughead’s and Archie’s top secret mission into Viet Cong Headquarters. They are fighting again. All sixty-four Crayola crayons grind the heads of the box of twenty-four in its built-in-sharpener, leaving no survivors. They are fighting again—they are fighting again—they are fighting again.

II. Halloween, 1972

It’s Halloween night. This year more than anything I want to be a real Indian. But my mother didn’t have time to make me a costume, so I wear a billowing, white sheet and go out as Casper the friendly ghost.

III. Birthday, 1971

It’s my birthday. I ask my mother: when I grow up will I be a full-blooded Indian?

IV. Cowboys and Indians, 1972

They are fighting again. It’s raining cats and dogs outside and they are fighting cowboys and Indians inside. I don’t know which side to take, either way I’m branded a traitor or renegade. I have no loyalty for either side. All I can do is sit divided somewhere in the middle of their war and wait for this damn rain to stop. Wait for the thunder to break and the clouds to separate into two equal parts that don’t add up to the confusion in my fractioned heart. Then, maybe the sun will come out and my parents will forgive the broken pieces of themselves.

PHOTOGRAPH: The author in 1972 at age 8, Snoqualmie Valley, Washington.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Snapshots” is a result of growing up cowboys and Indians in a small Pacific Northwest town in the Cascade foothills, where my father (white) taught middle school and my mother (Lakota Sioux) worked as civil servant for King County in the years before their marriage dissolved. Those formative years were gauzed with the kind of malaise that winds up as the raw material for future stories, as fodder. These “snapshots” are from a larger piece from my book Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press, 1994), which is a chronicle of my childhood in poems and prose poems.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tiffany Midge is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry for The Woman Who Married a Bear (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming) and the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award for Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press). Her work has appeared in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah, Yellow Medicine Review, and the online journals No Tell Motel and Drunken Boat. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux, she holds an MFA from University of Idaho and divides her time between Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country), and Seattle.

two-coyote day at Rinconada Canyon, New Mexico by Richard Vargas (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

two-coyote day at Rinconada Canyon, New Mexico
by Richard Vargas

black rock mesa walls
eternal gift from
distant volcanoes in
quiet deep sleep

high desert sage winter-dry
brittle skeletons anchored
in ancient dirt peppered
with rabbit droppings

etched into cold hard
flat rock surface
shapes and figures of
another time when

man heard wisdom
carried on the breath
of the mesa winds

at night listened as
the stars whispered
dark stories of
the beginning
and the end

SOURCE: Guernica, revisited by Richard Vargas, Press 53 (April 2014). Order a copy at press53.com.

IMAGE: “Black Rock Mesa Walls” (Albuquerque, New Mexico) by Richard Vargas

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The petroglyphs on the westside of Albuquerque are mysterious and other-worldly. Animals, humanoid stick figures looking like crude drawings of space aliens, weird designs and scribbles. What did the artists really see, or were they just f**king around? Shamans high on ‘shrooms or a bunch of kids taking swigs from the bottle and doodling? No one really knows, and we probably never will. (Photo by Richard Vargas.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Richard Vargas was born in Compton, California, and attended schools in Compton, Lynwood, and Paramount. He earned his B.A. at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin and Richard Lee. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978-1980. His first book, McLife, was featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac in February 2006. A second book, American Jesus, was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2007. His third book, Guernica, revisited, was published in April 2014, by Press 53. (A poem from the book was featured on Writer’s Almanac to kick off National Poetry Month.) Vargas received his MFA from the University of New Mexico, 2010. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference’s Hispanic Writer Award, and was on the faculty of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference. Vargas will facilitate a poetry workshop at the 2015 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, and he has read his poetry in venues in Los Angeles, Chicago, Madison, Albuquerque/Santa Fe/Taos, Indianapolis, and Boulder. Currently, he resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he edits/publishes The Más Tequila Review, and will facilitate The Más Tequila Poetry Workshop this July at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference.

Ah, Ah, poem by Joy Harjo

AH, AH
by Joy Harjo

for Lurline McGregor

Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina.
Lands on the crown of the palm tree.
 
Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips.
We carry canoes to the edge of the salt.
 
Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin.
We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish.
 
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.
 
Ah, ah tatttoos the engines of your plane against the sky—away from these waters.
Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss.
 
Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by
on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.
 
Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.

“Ah, Ah” appears in Joy Harjo’s collection How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems:1975-2001 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joy Harjo was born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is of Native American and Canadian ancestry. Strongly influenced by her Muskogee Creek heritage, feminist and social concerns, and her background in the arts, Harjo frequently incorporates Native American myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry tends to emphasize the Southwest landscape and need for remembrance and transcendence. (Read more at poetryfoundation.org.) Visit the author at joyharjo.com.

PHOTO: “Crow and Palm Tree” by Max Clarke. Photographer’s note: This crow leaves the nest for a movie theater parking lot. Crows like sitting on palm tree branches. They enjoy riding the leaves that sway in the soft breeze. They also like hula music and drinks with tiny umbrellas. (Visit the photographer at photocosm.com.)

I Am Bear, Pueblo Indian Poem

I AM BEAR
Pueblo Indian Poem

I am a Bear.
In my solitude I resemble the wind.
I blow the clouds together
So they form images of my friends.

…from Many Winters: Prose and Poetry of the Pueblos, edited by Nancy Wood, available at Amazon.com

Sky Bear, Mohawk Indian Legend

SKY BEAR
Mohawk Indian Legend

Long ago,
three hunters and their little dog
found the tracks of a giant bear.
They followed those tracks
all through the day
and even though it was almost dark
they did not stop, but continued on.
They saw that bear now, climbing up
a hill, which glittered with new-fallen snow.
They ran hard to catch it,
but the bear was too fast.
They ran and they ran, climbing
up and up until one of the hunters said,
“Brothers, look down.”
They did and saw they
were high above Earth.
That bear was Sky Bear,
running on through the stars.
Look up now
and you will see her,
circling the sky.

…from THE EARTH UNDER SKY BEAR’S FEET: Native American Poems of the Land, a storybook for children 4-8 by Joseph Bruchac, with illustrations by Thomas Locker (Puffin, 1998), available atAmazon.com.

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)

Ah, Ah, poem by Joy Harjo

AH, AH
by Joy Harjo

for Lurline McGregor

Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina.
Lands on the crown of the palm tree.
 
Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips.
We carry canoes to the edge of the salt.
 
Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin.
We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish.
 
Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.
Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.
 
Ah, ah tatttoos the engines of your plane against the sky—away from these waters.
Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss.
 
Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by
on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.
 
Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.

“Ah, Ah” appears in Joy Harjo’s collection How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems:1975-2001 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joy Harjo was born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is of Native American and Canadian ancestry. Strongly influenced by her Muskogee Creek heritage, feminist and social concerns, and her background in the arts, Harjo frequently incorporates Native American myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry tends to emphasize the Southwest landscape and need for remembrance and transcendence. (Read more at poetryfoundation.org.) Visit the author at joyharjo.com.

PHOTO: “Crow and Palm Tree” by Max Clarke. Photographer’s note: This crow leaves the nest for a movie theater parking lot. Crows like sitting on palm tree branches. They enjoy riding the leaves that sway in the soft breeze. They also like hula music and drinks with tiny umbrellas. (Visit the photographer at photocosm.com.)