"Poetry is a way of reaching out to what is reaching for you" -- Survival This Way, Interviews with American Indian Poets, Vol. 15 by Joseph Bruchac / The Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie / Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan / and others

Cliff, Michelle

To begin: Before Contact; there were in the Western Hemisphere of this planet an estimate

When a people are destroJred where does their sound go? Where does the noise of their poetry escape to?

Whose dreams are cut intc> that rock, a spiral, a flute-player, a snake bird?

I can stare into the landsc;spe of this country and not lmow what I am looking at.

I am watching the news on Memorial Day. Amid the excitement of D-Day, the spectacle of now-old men scaling the bluffs along Omaha Beach, the anchorman offers his viewers a surprise. A new head is being dynamited into Mount Rushmore. The head is Crazy Horse; he will be completed by the turn of the century. Any irony--that this is Memorial Day, that the Omaha were among the 2000, that Crazy Horse was one Indian who refused to have his image captured by the whiteman, that in Indian eyes the blasting into this particular landscape is sacrilege--is lost on this anchorman. Th camera pans to the almost-finished head, *title quote from Simon Ortiz, i.n an interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way. where a generic redman looks out over the Black Hills. Ersatz Crazy Horse might as well be on a baseball cap, a football helmet, in the doorway of a tobacco store, cast in iron, as hood ornament. To add insult to injury, look who he's got for company.

Actual Crazy Horse believed that the worid which is apparent to us, the world which we wake to, is not the real world at all. He believed that to enter the real world one had to enter one's dreams. He took the name Crazy Horse for himself because in the real world of his dreaming the horses were out-of-control, wild, unbroken--crazy.

Lance Henson, in Joseph Bruchac's collection of interviews with Indian poets, Survival this Way, speaks to dreaming.

"I...like to deal with the relationship between growing darkness and growing light, the dusk and the dawn, those times when there is a chance to see transition....The dream is a connection, another transitional time. An example would be light coming into the world at dawn. In dreams we sometimes can see resemblances of where we really came from, whether we can explain it or not."

Dreaming may be a glimpse into the Great Silence out of which we come, it may be a way into memory, past. Dreaming may be a way to wrap the imagination around an unimaginable history. The Indian writer needs to reckon with the past again and again. Re-enacting the past is part of the process of decolonization. To confront this history means oniy survival, as Simon Ortiz notes:

There are still those preseures on Indian people to hide and not to allow ourselvee to see....I know that when you tell the truth it's a political ect. When you acknowledge history and point out euch thinge as Sand Creek--maybe nobody wants to hear about Sand Creek--it is a politieal statement and the truth. It is neceseary to tallr about it beeause it is a political statement and the truth. It is necessary to tallr about it because it's a part of how we are going to live, how we are going to fulfill ourselves on that journey....If we don't, there will always be a black blot, e dark spot in our minds. There will be a continued sicknese if you don't tallr about it.l

When Ortiz casts his imagination back to Sand Creek, he places himself in the landscape and time collapses. Sand Creek is now and he is there.

At the Salvation Army

a clerk

caught me

wandering

among old spoons

and knives,

sweaters and shoes.

I couldn 't have stolen anything;

my life was stolen already.

protest though,

I should have stolen.

My life. My life.

She caught me;

Carson caught Indians,

secured them with his lies.

Boud them with his belief:

After winter,

our ourn lives fled.

I reassured her

what she believed

Bought a sweater.

And fZed.

I should have stolen.

My life. My life.

(From "Sand Creek")

Edouard Glissant spealrs of the necessity that the writer engaged in a political struggle of imagination "introduce temporarily a form of despair which is not resignation. Exhausting this despair...means reopening the wound....Therein does not lie pessimism, but the ultimate resource of whoever writes and wishes to fight on his [herl own terrain."(2)

Sherman Alexie is a dazzling writer who does what Glissant describes. He lays bare a terrain of reservation housing, commodity food, 7-11s, fancydancing, pick-up trucks, tequila, IHS casualties. He joins past with present, as does Ortiz, as do many Indian writers; Crazy Horse works

in the 7-11, Crazy Horse, in Alexie's "Crazy Horse Dreams," Part III of The Busiltess ofFoncydancing, returns to the reservation from Vietnam: Crazy Norse asks the Bartender for a beer free, because he's some color of hen, although he doesn't know ifits red or white because there are no mirrors in the bush, only eyes tracing paths through the air, eyes tean'ng into the chest, searching for the heart. Cmty Horse selks his medals when he goes broke, buys a doz en beers and dn'nks them oll, tells the Barteluler he's short on time now, """"' """"" ("War All the Time") Eyes in a firefight searching to tear the heart from the chest, searching for the heart buried in the frozen earth of Wounded Knee where ghostdancers waited for his spirit to rise in the spring.

Crazy Horse tries to sell a pint of blood. The nurse in charge of such transactions interviews him:

across from the white nurse hoMi:ng pen and paper and she asks me my name and I teEl her Crary Horse ancZ she asks my birthdate and I tell her it was probably June 25 in 1876 and then she asks my ethnic origin and I tell her I'm an ndian or Native American depeding on your view of historE:cal accuracy and she asks me my reEigious preference and I teU her Iprefer to keep my religion entirely independent ofmy economic activities and then she asks me hour many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depelzding on youT definition of urhat I did to Custer and then she puts aside her pen and paper and she gives me the most important question she asks me if I still have enough heart,...

("Giving Blood")

In the poem following, Alexie goes deeper into the despair of which Glissant speaks, stripping away the humor he uses in some of the other dreams, stripping the wound to the heart.

I walk irrto the bw, after being gc,ne for a uhile, cl itls empty. The Bwtender tells me all the Indians are gone, do I know where they ulentl tell him I tlon 't know, and Idon 't Know, so he give!s me a beerjustfor being Indian, small favors, and I wonder where all the Skins disappeared to, and after a while, 1 leave, searching the streets, searching storefronts, untiE I walk iltto a pautn shop, find a sigle heart beating under glass, and I know who it used to belong t4 I know all of them.

("Pawn Shop")

Under severe conditions of erristence the movement into dream, especially if dreaming is a behavior and resource of the people, may accelerate, and the people may find themselves more and more in dreamtime in order to endure the harsher, unreal world. The blankets of the Navaho people became more complex i:n design during the decade of the long wallr, the 1860s, when the Navaho were imprisoned in Bosque Redondo.

One of their responses to the severity of the forced marches and imprisonment on the reservation was to expand the vision of the blanket, and their weaving exploded in beauty. This is dreaming as an act of survival.

The dream as concrete, something to hold. Something literally to wrap oneself in.

Dream may signify the begin.ning and the end of human life. Wendy Rose chose to introduce her interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way with the following pm.

TRUGANINNY

Truganinny, the last of the Tasmanians, had seen the stuffed and mounted body of her husband al it uras her dying wish that she be bun'ed in the outback or at sea for she did not wish her boly to be subjected to the sane indignities. Upon her death, she was, nevertheless stuffed and mounted and put on display for over eighty years. -Pall Coe, Australian Aboriginal Activist, 1972.

heir breathing stopped their eyes gone gTay.

Take my hand black into black as yellow clay is a slow meld to grass gold Ofe(Kth and I am melting back to t Dream.

Do not leave for I wouM speak, I woukE sing another song.

Your song.

They will take me.

Already they come; even as I breathe they are waiting for me to finish my dying.

We old ones take such a long time.

Please take my body to the source of night, to the great black desert urhere Dreaming was born.

Put me undeT the bulk ofa mountain or in distant sea, put me where they wiU not find me.

IIIDiversity Is to Sameness As Chaobl Is to Order, As Crazy Horse Is to a Conquistador, As the Petrolyph Is to Mount Rushmore

On the American continents the Native writer, the Indian artist, inhabits what Glissant has called a cultural hinterland, an outpost of imagination at the edge of the mainstream. This cultural hinterland is dense, possessed of a Diversity which has always threatened the European, white version of things: for example, the sense of what makes art and who may be an artist; what makes poetry; what makes prose; what conditions are necessary for artistic creation; what controls may be applied to language, image, sound; who's available for colonization.3 Diversity is the basis of original American culture. This terrifies the European, the colonizer, who views Diversity as chaotic, disorderly, threatening, strange: a cultural landscape of crazy horses. The rattlesnake, unique to the New World becomes its cultural signifier, untameable, dangerous, with its patterned skin, its noise, sudden, threatening.

Diversity celebrates wildness, disorder; it is dynamic, constantly changing. Diversity makes room. Cacophony is at home on the range. The noise made by two thousand language groups; two thousand ways of entering dreams.

The European worships Sameness. Sameness is his comfort; it makes the world a less frightening place, and places him at the center of it. Sameness leads to an ordered existence, and mistakes itself for universality.

Sameness requires, as Glissant puts it, the flesh of the world to feed its claim.

When the European encounters the Indian, he banishes Indian culture to the edges of the American continent. He relocates it to a reserved place.

While the European seems to know no bounds, he is adept at boundaries.

In a place outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, called Little America, in a gift shop, I saw a piece of wood Nith several types of barbed wire attached to it: a souvenir, it bore the legend, "The wire that fenced the West." Nearby a baby rattler was trapped inside a lucite paperweight. The phrase "cultural hinterland" becomes literal as well as metaphoric. The European tells the Indian not only is his culture savage, he himself, she herself, is, and he and she are vanishing, even as we speak. Simon Ortiz speaks to this idea that his people have disappeared in Survival This Way.

In 1970 I went looking for Indians. This relates to your question about education. You know there are Indians becanse you grew up with Indiane, you were born with Indian parents, but formal, institutionalized United Statea education tells you in very clear, thoush sometimes subtle ways that there are no Indians. When I was a kid we weren't Indiane. The picture books ahowed you that Indians pere in teepees and rode poniea and there ere buffalo. At Acoma there are no buffalo and there are no teepees. There are poniee, but they are ueually ridden by Indian cowboys, ranchew, people who have cattle. Some, something tells you that you're not a real Indian. Then, further, the booke tell

you there are no Indiane i California. They all just disappeared. Where did they go There was this feeng that there were no Indians, that the Indians you were growing up with were not really Iedians. So, by 1970, I really wanted to find Indians again. I wanted to debunk the myth of the "Vanished American" finally, for all time, for myself. It was impdant to me. I wanted to see for myself.... So I went through the South, starting out from Arizona, through Texae and Oklahoma, throughout the South: Louieiena, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee. Indians all over the place-all over the place! ... So, once and for all the myth was ct aside. There are Indiane everywherer In one of my poeme, I say, "You're damn right, there are Indians everywhere!" As the Indian was displaced, declared vanishing, a Diversity of image and idea was erased and painted over, whitewashed, while ideas and images hostile to Indian culture, original American culture, were deployed across the continent, like the missiles deployed in the silos that dot the American prairie.

IIII"everything has a quantuminterconnectedness" -Roberta Hill Whiteman

The Indian becomes American ghost. American trademark. The Indian becomes missing link: someholw closer to paleolithic man than anyone else. The Indian as witness to prehistory; which makes one ask: Whose history? The Indian as lone rider, painted on velvet at the end of the trail.

The Indian as a piece of the landscape.

The Indian as acquiescent to white supremacy. The Indian as wily. The Indian as innocent. The Indian as witness. The Indian as drunb, his spirit Lost in spirits, his dreaming lost; in blackout. The Indian as F.A.S. mother, her babies speechless and slow. Shall we round up all the pregnant Indian women? The Indian crowding the ridge in the imagination of John Ford.

The Indian being sterilized without her consent in the I.H.S. clinic.

Then, always, the Indian as poet, singer, male and female. The Indian poet crafting what Kamau Bra.thwaite calls "nation language," the language, the poetry emerging from underneath, outside, from where it's not supposed to come.

The other thing about nation language ie that it is part of what may be called total expression....Tbe oral tradition...makes demands not only on the poet but also oa the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds

that the poete make are responded to by the audience and are returned to him [herl. Hence we have the ereation of a continuum where the meaning truly resides. And this total eEpreesion comes about because people live in the open air, because people live in conditions of poverty, because people come from a historical experience where tbey had to rely on their own breath patterne rather than on paraphernalia like books and musenms. They had to depend on inunonenee, the power within themselves, rather than the technolosy outeide themselves.'

Too often the people of which Brathwaite speaks would become marginalia in books, and exhibits in museums. Better to stay in the open air.

Joy Harjo writes of her experience among a group of prisoners in Anchorage.

And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly native and 8Iack men, where Henry told about being shot at eight times outside a liquor store in LA., but hen the car sped away he was surpn'sed he was alive, no bullet holes, man, ancl eight caTtn'dges strewn on the sidewalk all around him.

Everyone laughed at the impossibility ofit, but also the tTUth. Because who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant to surviveZ

The sound of the story, the sound of the gunfire in the story, the sounds of the men in the room, the telling by Harjo of the story, the making of the poem, and the reading of it, all are part of what Brathwaite calls nation language. Harjo speaks about this poem ("Anchorage") in Bruchac's anthology.

. . I remember that one jail. I went in there three times and the place would get more and more packed each time that I came in becauee we would sit around and tell etories and--it was all men--and talk and laugh and they didn't want me to go beeause nobody allowed them to apeak. We would all be crying at the end, and I remember when Henry told the story, yeah, you know, we were juet laughing at him and saying, you're full of crap, yet the story waa really true.

We all knew it was absolutely true and it Ras eo sad that it had to be so funny.

We who originate in the Third World, whether inside or outside the United States, are used to the evaluation of oral tradition, so-called, tiy a western measure. The oral tradition-nation language is a better term for the coming-together of story, image, voice, memory; nation language

is an active term, where oral tradition is descriptive--the oral tradition, with its communality, the noise it represents, is always judged as less than the written tradition; it's not even in the same league.

But because art, like Harjo's poem, may originate in noise, in common experience, because it may need that experience to exist in the first place, does not mean that the poet does not possess a distinctive voice, and does not mean that each member of the group, each one of those men in the Anchorage jail, does not remain an individual, adding his story, voice, image, memory--his immanence-to the poet's own. This is part of Diversity.

The oral tradition, nation language, also means an honoring of the ordinary, the integration of art and the artist into the community. Art becomes an ordinary thing. Among many Third World peoples, art extends itself into usefulness. Art, poetry, takes as its subject everything, everyone. In Survival This Way, Joseph Bruchac cites Neruda: "Neruda speaks about writing a poetry of the impurity of the body, rather than a 'pure' poetry. A poetry as broad as the earth is broad, bringing all things into it." Again, Diversity.

Many of the poets in Survival This Way speak of the oral tradition not as if to justify it against claims of backwardness, but to explain its strengths, its character, its place in Indian culture.

Duane Niatum speaks of lthe fragmentation of contemporary art with so many boles that they can't be filled in by the imagination of the observer . . . it is not the same ae the oral tradition. Tbe oral tradition believed in the cloging of the circle, the holenesa, Ulat oolrre, tbat social and aesthetic value was an abeolute neceseity for anything to be exchanged.

Bruchac's anthology takes its title from a poem by Simon Ortiz, which describes the centrality of telling, of poetry, to Indian survival.

Suroival, I knour how this wcry.

This way, I Know.

It railrs.

Mountains ancE canyons and ,plants grow.

We travelled this ay, gracged our distance by storit!s and loved our children.

We taught them to love their births.

We toM ourselves over and over agairS "we shaU survive this way. " Ortiz speaks of the Indian. sense of art as a part of ordinary life, where

in the world outside Art is something extracurricular. Art is something you hang up on the wall.

You can enjoy it only if you can afford it. That's a 6leparetion from reality. The idea becomea: I don't have time tg appreciate art, I don't have time to appreciate poetry, much less write it. . . . [Poetry iel suspect becauee it has nothing, supposedly, to do with your real life. Knowledge and intellect and aesthetic tastes are over here, removed, eomewhere else, far removed. . . . I think the fact that Indian people are very artistic people . . . is evidenee of art being a part of life and not separated. The act of living is art.

Linda Hogan tallrs about poetry as Lance Henson tallrs about dream.

... most Indians know time and space well enough from the heart to know that life is for living. Because we are short in our span here and we are not the most eignificant of lives on earth. We share the planet with plants and animals equal to ourselves, and we are small in the universe. So the daily strivings fall into place. I teel that poetry is a procees of uncovering our real knowledge. To manipulate the language merely via the intellect takes away the strength of the poem.

A worldview that does not elevate the human above all other forms of life is a worldview that is able to understand that art is an ordinary human activity, accessible and absolutely necessary. And if something, Indian culture, for example, is accessible and ordinary, it does not mean it is simplistic; it may still hold an appreciation bf the mysteries of existence, a sense of awe. In the following poem Lance Henson explores the nature of the whirlwind, what he calls a "microcosmic reflection of the universe." hi vo di das so '

whirlwinds of Eight the earth 's open hand is spinning them the lohirlwind is an ancestor returned to look at you a whirlwincl is a red spider the white man calls dust devil because the white man said it it became so

the WhiTulind is the mirror of the great mystery caught in the eye ofa startled rabbit whirlwinds oflight the earth's open hand is spiltning them

A microcosm of the history of the New World as well. The red spider renamed, demonized.

Henson makes the point in his interview with Bruchac that the Cheyennes in their Sun Dance recognize and celebrate the sun as the center of our solar system, the source of all light. They have done so for centuries.

As Galileo and Giordano Bruno both know, the European was loath to come to the same conclusion, placing earth (and man) at the center.

Roberta Hill Whiteman:

I sense that Indian peaple have an awareneee of . . . a different sort of tne and a different sort of epace. . . . thie connection oi a moving, living, and alive time, an alive space, a sense oi everything being alive is so much part of what I kncR, what I senee, and I find it in s lot of Indian writers and and lot of Indian poete. . . .

one of the connections that I ense ie one which I find in a lot of contemporary writing on physice. . . . Tbere's a man by the name of BeU Bell's thearem tbat just ame out in 1965. What he eays is that everything has a quantum interconnectedness Pauehs Whieh is something thrrt Indian people have been seying all along. That thinge are inetantaneou6l. That space between stars ie not just empty space, that there'e really no eucb as empty space, that it's all filled with somethine, dust or energy ar wbatsver you want to call it. Indian people have an awareness of the earth and of the llniverse.

IVI"I have balanced my bones between the petroglyph and the mobile home" --Wendy Rose

Everything is contiguous. Everything is connected in time, space. Therefore there are no boundaries. The petroglyph and what it signifies exists with the mobile home and what it signifies. The Indian writer reckons with these relationships.

Gerald Vizenor:

AURAS ON THE INTERSTATE

follow the truckroutes homewardboun in darkness

noise tired from the inteTstates tTucks whine through our families places of conception

governments nue half the corners we have known houses lLprooted sacred trees deposed municioal machines plow down ollr generation vines tn'bal doorsteps condominium cultures foam low stain the n'vers overnht thin auras hold our space in dreams cut the interstates from the stoop bedtoom window ruins

noise tired we are laced in dark anns until morning The interstates slice relentlessly across the American landscape. Nothing is sacred in their path. In almost every line in this poem the past and present witness each other, for Contact, the collision of the natural and the technological, is an ongoing thing. The concept of a world where time

and space flow into eachother is interrupted by the concept of a world of boundaries, from which the only reiease is into dream, immanence.

Glissant believes that the western notion of "realism"-"the theory or technique of literal or 'total' representation"-is "not inscribed in the culturEll reflex of African or American peoples....The misery of our lands is not only present, obvious. It contains a historical dimension (of not obvious history) that realism alone cannot account for." Indeed.

Landscape in Indian writing is alive, is character. Landscape has dream.

It has spirit. Landscape drowns in history. It remembers. Whites entered the landscape of Linda Hogan's ancestors, And the men so quietly moved block walnut trunks to the edge of the workl transfonned dark wood into the sleek handles ofries.

12ees whose wood fZash light. Trees, bealltiful trees who can kiU (1 man like the faUen wings of crows.

Landscape is as alive as the human beings who inhabit it. Again, Glissant: "The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creatin history. Laadscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings must be understood." And with these meanings one must reckon with damage, violence, what Glissant calls the "misery of our lands." As writers it is our task to translate the landscape.

What happens when the trunks of black walnut trees become gunstocks, to the memory, to the spirit of the landscape? To the people on whom these guns are trained, witnessing Vacant spaces where te dark vertebraes of trees pushecE sugar rising up from tnutks.

What is done to the terrain when behind a fence "nitrogen and oxygen are splitting apart"? (Hogan, "Remembering the Lightning").

The Indian writer does not approach history, memory with a nostalgia for halcyon days; he and she approach history with an eye and an ear to understand the "not obvious history" and its deepest meanings.

When Sherman Alexie reconstructs the Periodic Table according to the terrain of the reservation, here and now, he reckons with the process of Contact, ongoing.

A RESERVATION TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS

Aluminum

Standing outside the Tn'bal Trading 4ost dun'ng a blitzard, there is nothing more beautiful than snour fallen onto the dark hair and braids of these Spokane Indians, nothing more beautiful than snow faUen onto the stray dogs and beer canS still on the sidewalk. IfIEightaFre in the dumpster, everything will change, transfonn, reinvent itself: IflightafiTe in the dumpster, the Indians will dance and forget the cold. If light a fire i the dumpster and throw beer cans ilS they wiU burn untiE their brand names are gone and the Spokane Indians will sing all night long, will sing all night long.

Neon

Ifyouput your ear realEy cEose to the buuing beer sign hanging in the window of the Pozowoul Tavenz, you can hear horses thunden'ng, you can hear rifles, you can hear a cavalry swonl leaving its scabbard.

Copper When the pipes frore last winter

on the reservation I crawled beneath

the HUD hose with a blowtorch

and discovered America.

Oxygen An ndian man drownect here on my reservation when hepassed out and fell face down into a mud puddle. There is no other way to say this.

(First Indian on the Moon) As the reservation of Alexie's writing becomes a character, so does the landscape of Linda Hogan's work.

Her novel Mean Spirit tells the story of the discovery of oil on Indian lands in Oklahoma in the 1920s. "The earth bled oil." The landscape does not take kindly to the invasion of wildcatters and oil companies. "Up the road from Grace's sunburned roses was an enormous crater a gas well blowout had made in the earth." The community is flooded with oil, whitemen, I1oney, and the things it can buy. The balance of this world is out of whack. Chickens nest in grand pianos. Huge Buicks roam the landscape. The drilling into the earth has many consequences: "The water was gone from that land forever, the trees dead, and the grass, once long and rich, burned black." The atmosphere of the novel and the place Hogan describes is carnivalesque; realism cannot contain the story, were realism an option. It is not. Hogan brings to the telling an Indian sense of the quantum interconnectedness of things, apparent, invisible, real, and dream.

Outsiders come from all over to hawk their wares, get in on the action, and Indians are being murdered, and other Indians are being blamed on account of their natural resource. Violence is being done to the individual, the community, the landscape: the effects on each are inextricable.

Belle Graycloud comes upon a truckload of eagle carcasses in a scene where the collision of two worlds becomes absolutely clear.

They were golden browa birde, with blue-white membraneEl of death cloeed aver their eye.... She stared at the dead, sacred eagles.

They looked like a tribe of small, gone people, murdered and taken away in the becb of a truck.

The hunters were buey beside the truck, counting the eaglee.

There were three hundred and seventeen carcassea in all. . .

. She screamed, "You naholiesl What have you gone and done this time?" She began removing the dead eagles from the truck. She placed one on a plot of grass. She was crying and tallring in a language they didn't understand. They tried to stop her, but even three men could not hold her back. She was ruining the eagles they planned to sell, undamaged, as souvenirs.

"They're just birds," one of them eaid.... [The hunters] piled the eagles into wooden boxes. The boxes contained dry ice. When they lifted the wooden lida, smoke rose up, erasing the hunters' faces. In that wisp of pas, they looked foreign and strange, like visitors from another world, a world that eats itself and ufles up the earth.

A ridiculous world, that devours and then declares whole species endangered. A world that kills something and then declares it a national symbol. A world with no sense of irony regarding its own behavior. Sherman Alexie imagines a government pamphlet on "How to Obtain Eagle Feathers for Religious Use," a response to the Federal law "protecting bald and goiden eagles [which] makes provisions for the use of eagle feathers by Native Americans for religious purposes." Page 1 Picture an eagle orpaTts ofan eagle. That has nothing to do with it. Remembec

I am the ndian who wrste the obituary for the obituary editor and have come to know these things. Often, I stood in places where nothing has happened For ins tance, the summer I worked forestry for the BA and found a s trand of barbed wire fence still nailed toapine tre. Stapled to the barbed wire was a hand-painted sign: NO TRESPASSING. lNl3lAN LAND. 1876. I have no menory of the artist.

Index Arrowheads and Alcoho BIA and Basketball, Commodities and Clear Cut, Department of the Interior andDogs, Erors andEagles Forgiveness and Fallcydancing, Gasoline and God, Hell and Heroes, Indians and Ignorance, Jerky and Jllmpshots, Keno and Kerosene, Love and Lust, Mothers and Madmen, Necklaces and Notebooks Orgasms and Oranges, Roaches and Receiving Docks, Sin and Snburn, Terror and Toutels, Underanns and Underachievers, VictoTies and Variables, Weed and Wonder, X-Rays and X-Ratet, Yesterday and Yollt Zemes and Zip Codes.

Page 7 Applications for a pennit to acquire eagle feathers for religious use may be made by completing the macaroni & cheese dinner, by opening the bag ofcommodity noodles, y shredding the commodity cheese.. . .

(First Indian on the Moon) Sherman Alexie's worb brims with irony and with tragedy in encounters like the one he speahs of above, between the eale feathers of ancient rite and the commodity cheese of modern-era imprisonment.

We're poised at the ed of something. Linda Hogan says: All eruelty is aeedless. AIl fighting.... Now do we need to build real estate in the hrerglades or on the migration lande or drill the earth? We have everything evailable to us for full, good lives, for peace. We must just simply step iato it. . . . I juet etarted thinking that being silent was in eome way not being honest and that IPid not want to be silent about the things that were very important and that our survival is verg important. We've gone on--this pro gression is a very straight line progression into total deetruetion, and we're just on the border now. Like the earth is square again and we etand on her edge.

With her words she speahs not only to Indian survival, but to the survival of the rest of us.

Notes: 1. The Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864, in which American soldiers murdered and mutilated hundreda of Cheyenne men, women, and children as they waited for word from the governor of the Colorado Tenitory to whom the Cheyenne had petitioned for peace. In a precaution Chief Black Kettle had raised

the white flag over their camp. 2. Edouard Glissant, Can'bbean Ocollrse, University of Virginia, 1989, p. 104.

3. The capitalization of Diversity and its opposite Sameness is Glissant's.

See Can'bbean Discourse, op. cit., pp. 97 ff.

4. Kamau Brathwaite, "History of the Voice," Roots, University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 273.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul 1995
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