Native American Songs and Poems (3 page)

[INUIT]

 

A small ptarmigan sat
in the middle of the plain
on top of a snowdrift.
Its eyelids were red
and its back streaked brown.
And right under its cute tail feathers
sat the sweetest little rump.

Sherman Alexie [SPOKANE / COEUR D'ALENE]

All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms.
Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food.

 

The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably
from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory.

 

If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender
and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man

 

then he must be a half-breed, preferably from a horse culture.
If the Indian woman loves a white man, then he has to be so white

 

that we can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers.
When the Indian woman steps out of her dress, the white man gasps

 

at the endless beauty of her brown skin. She should be compared to nature:
brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water.

 

If she is compared to murky water, however, then she must have a secret.
Indians always have secrets, which are carefully and slowly revealed.

 

Yet, Indian secrets can be disclosed suddenly, like a storm.
Indian men, of course, are storms. They should destroy the lives

 

of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love
Indian men. That is always the case. White women feign disgust

 

at the savage in blue jeans and t-shirt, but secretly lust after him.
White women dream about half-breed Indian men from horse cultures.

 

Indian men are horses, smelling wild and gamey. When the Indian man
unbuttons his pants, the white woman should think of topsoil.

 

There must be one murder, one suicide, one attempted rape.
Alcohol should be consumed. Cars must be driven at high speeds.

 

Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions
if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian

 

then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry
an Indian deep inside themselves. Those interior Indians are half-breed
and obviously from horse cultures. If the interior Indian is male
then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man.

 

If the interior Indian is female, then she must be a healer, especially
if she is inside a white woman. Sometimes there are complications.

 

An Indian man can be hidden inside a white woman. An Indian woman
can be hidden inside a white man. In those rare instances,

 

everybody is a half-breed struggling to learn about their horse culture.
There must be redemption, of course, and sins must be forgiven.

 

For this, we need children. A white child and an Indian child, gender
not important, should express deep affection in a child-like way.

 

We should all be reminded that we are children. We should learn
about geometry: circles and squares, parallel lines and intersections.

 

In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,
all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.

Sherman Alexie

 

old crow of a woman in bonnet, sifting through the dump
salvaging those parts of the world
neither useless nor useful

 

she would be hours in the sweatlodge
come out naked and brilliant in the sun
steam rising off her body in winter
like a slow explosion of horses

 

she braided my sisters' hair with hands that smelled deep
roots buried in the earth
she told me the old stories

 

how time never mattered
when she died
they gave me her clock

Duane Big Eagle [OSAGE]

 

Two Hearts are always first
to send blankets and food to a sing.
Two Hearts know that stolen objects
always go back where they belong.
Two Hearts keep silent when they have
nothing to say, but gossip travels like an arrow.
Two Hearts stay up late at a 49 dance
¹⁴
and wake up bleary-eyed with the sun.
Two Hearts bring venison at mid-winter
to the wind blown lodges of the elders.
Two Hearts die in heat-shimmering prairie grass
and are buried facing east
under piles of red rock.
Two Hearts raise the sun with their prayers
and call deaf-eared rain with gesture
old as rain itself.
Two Hearts never do what they're told
and their children grow up strongly steady reeds
impervious to wind.
Two Hearts camp under late summer cottonwoods;
their gray smoke lifts
soft white seed to the sky.
Two Hearts read the winter in a spider web
leaping against its anchoring strands
in the first cool wind of autumn.
A Two Heart life is the journey of a star
from blue evening through black night
to red dawns' horizon.
Two Hearts know we all must leave this world,
yet they laugh, they laugh, they laugh.

Duane Big Eagle

 

The town crier's first bell sounds
calling dancers to get dressed
and head for the arbor.
Soon drums and singing
will float across these wide fields.
I sit for a moment
on a wood splitting stump
by the low concrete porch
and remember how the houses
are built practically on the ground,
and how the rivers and creeks
have their own distinct smells.
How it feels to be so far
from a main road
that you see fifty miles
across low hills and gullies
covered in prairie grass
rippling in a breeze
all the way from Nebraska.
Meadowlarks whistle sunlit melodies
and a single shrill hawk's shriek
arouses my heart.
Tourists may see gas stations, farms,
cattleguards across red dirt roads,
and asphalt highways
speeding through one street towns.
But if you look carefully,
you can find another land hidden here,
the invisible vertical to this horizontal world.
Rising up as a high school
in the middle of nowhere,
glimpsed in the blue flash of a thunderstorm,
it's an older land where war honors
are still being sung,
where cooking fires still send out
a warm invitation of good smells,
where eagle feathers stand upright
in fields of undisturbed snow.
I feel it at the dances,
on the evening of the third day
during the last songs,
when the circle of women singers
stand up from their chairs
and sing behind the men.
Drumsticks swing up like
beating wings of an eagle;
dancers circle, then face in to the singers
as a shimmering column
of sound and light
rises out of the drum
and races toward the sky.

Kim Blaeser [ANISHINAABE]

Beth Brant [MOHAWK]

A woman grows hard and skinny.
She squeezes into small corners.
Her quick eyes uncover dust and cobwebs.
She reaches out
for flint and sparks fly in the air.
Flames turned loose on fields
burn down to bare seeds
we planted deep.

 

The corn is white and sweet.
Under its pale, perfect kernels
a rotting cob is betrayal.
It lies in our bloated stomachs.

 

I lie in Grandmother's bed
and dream the earth into a turtle.
She carries us slowly across the universe.
The sun warms us.
At night the stars do tricks.
The moon caresses us.

 

We are listening for the sounds of food.

 

Mother is giving birth, Grandmother says.
Corn whispers.

 

Earth groans with labor
turning corn yellow in the sun.

 

I lie in Grandmother's bed.

 

 

We listen.

Fox Lake, Wisconsin

Joseph Bruchac [ABENAKI]

Inside an arch
like that of the sky,
(unlike that arch of mortared stone
with razor wire on top,
which we walk beneath
to find freedom within concrete)
inside the shell of the old turtle,
inside the body of our mother,
inside our memories
waiting to be born again
we hear the sound,
of flock after flock
their ancient calls
of welcome and question,
seeking relatives
after a winter's exile.

 

Hiss of water on stone,
and the cries of the geese
bark an answer,
their touch deep as bone,
speaking words never written
that always mean home.

Joseph Bruchac

The Owl, that was the name they called me
as I went without sleep night after night
in that autumn of my twentieth year
as I walked the halls of a college fraternity.
Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has

 

Sound in the forest of enemy feet
dark faces, the paint dry clay
then the old cry of warning—
Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has
The blood-deep name of spruce smells,
the balsam touch firm underfoot,
soft as wingspread the feathered wind
drawn back, drawn back the ancient song
which is my brother's name.

 

Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has
you waited in trees outside our village
you called to wake us when the pale Long Knives came.
The starlight glittered their metal of thunder
yet we had been drinking their bitter water
and we fell, our blood caught in their dreams.

 

The wolf Malsum, and Nolka, the deer,
walk beside our waters, my heartbeat stops there
at the wall of skin, the pain of cramped fist
trying to hold that bowstring tight
hearing a name called from sleepless nights
my footsteps echoing down oak halls
among young men who did not speak,
who could not sing the language of birds.

 

Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has Ko-ko-has
my own steps fell open, walking forward
into the past forever memory.
I tied one hair to the roots of an ash tree.
They could hold my soul in that place
as surely as they did not hear
that call from a spirit world others still fear
Ko-ko-has, the protector of our dreams.

Barney Bush [SHAWNEE / CAYUGA]
for Ryan

Out in the blue shadows of the porch
a 3 a.m. quarter moon the first
summer triad nearly done
I am who i am in this chilled night of
stars and imagine the voices of relatives
their flesh and blood melded with
Ohio River earth i hear their whispers
clustered among the smokey road of
the Milky Way I draw its breath
inside me and pray for the hour upon
us all

 

I am who i am who i was made to be
though i have recreated myself a hundred
times over one for each escape from
the tentacles of oppression and each
time i have smelled the fragrance of
broken earth gathered a mussels shell for
the long sleep for this oldest blood that
runs through our veins

 

Each night in this loneliness away from my
homeland i thank the spirit of this
D'neh landscape for its open door dens'gdawah
¹⁸
and the door to this house that
welcomes refugees from the American Dream
and the dark medicine of greed
self destruction and the dark vanity that
mumbles with the voices of chaos

 

Each morning i face the sun and pray its
giver of light to bless all the relatives
to bless all this homeland
all those caught between the razors of
men and women
to bless this day
this moment.

Gogsigi / Carroll Arnett [CHEROKEE]

Where all the good things are.

A redtail's nest
forty feet up the east side
of a white pine.

The old,
old whitetail buck who's
hunted me these twelve
Novembers—he's not the same
one, nor am I.

Chickadees
in their black caps, as
amiable as the bluejays
are belligerent, feed on
partridge berries.

Hemlock
more than a hundred feet
tall, mutilated years ago
by some fool's hacking
a large X in its north bark,
a sapling long before Columbus
got lost.

And how many
red squirrels chattering at
the west wind sifting through
tree tops.

Snyder is right:
the woods have time.

Nothing
can hurt me here.