River, Blood, And Corn

Hunted

2012-02-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Kim Shuck

This morning is an ambush predator
Begins late with
Sirens and alarms that spin over the
Hills there is damp the
City raccoons bumble deceptively and
Dangerously on the
Porch kitten and I both with
Lifted hackles take some comfort in hot oats
Strawberries and sweetgrass
Smoke tufted slippers the rising
Hum of central heating kitten
Captures a brace of packing peanuts and
Gradually we subdue this hour together the dark
Lifts streetlights will blink their firefly impulse
Draining even now even
Now the armament of experienced
Early browsers makes smooth this edged thing this
Day curled against the core of vicious
Financial institution highwaymen and fear led
Pathologies of greed

Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kim Shuck is a writer, visual artist, curator, frustrated mom and recovering sarcastic. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry, Smuggling Cherokee, was published by Greenfield Review press in 2005 and won the Diane Decorah Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Recent work has been included in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and I Was Indian. In June 2010 Kim had a month long co-residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Visit her on the web at www.kimshuck.com

Altar of Unknown

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Lisa Marie Rollins

I have two rituals before I unpack the first box to set up in anew house. I start at my front door, light a stick of sage, walk around fromfront to back door, to front again. I walk each room, speak aloud to my newhome, speak words to what kind of life I want to live in my new space. I walkevery corner, closet, doorway, bathroom until my space is filled with the sweetsmell of cleansing sage. After the sage, I choose where I will build my housealtar. My altar hosts photo images of my ancestors, glass jars or bottlesfilled with water from beaches and rivers I have visited, and colored stonesfrom walks in the mountains. There is a gourd I found, scrubbed, oiled andwrapped about its neck a white and copper rosary a friends mother gave me backin 1994. There is a ceramic and steel crucifix I bought in Mexico when I was 26and a photo representation of Ile Orisha Oya surrounded by copper and rustcolored fabric.

The ancestors on my altar change. This year as I re-center myhome, clean and dress my altar, I add photos of more of the dead. As I addthese photos, I think about who could appear on it soon, and about those whom Ihave never met.

I have never been an adopted person who obsesses about my familyof origin as a child or adolescent. While in many ways, I was isolated from myfamily and the community that I grew up in, I dreamt more about running away tofar away ancient lands, and other countries. I lost myself in the myriad ofbooks I constantly read, or conjured up my own fantastic stories of sciencefiction or earth or moon magic to project me away from the circumstances I wasin. I didn’t spend hours upon hours wondering who my birth mother and fatherwere or what they were doing.

I’m not sure when I started making connections to the absences ofwhat I held as ideas of mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother orgrandfather in my family of origin, to absences that live in my heart, shadowmy spirit. The experience of something ‘nagging’ or missing is common for meand for so many of us who have been disconnected from our families of originthat it seems natural to everyday life. I live with empty spaces where bodiesshould be in photos. I travel with ghosts of the unknown. I walk with blanks onthe story of my conception and birth. I reconcile what only lives in myimagination, the stories I collect from someone who has memory, and the storiesI construct from timelines I make, from other’s memories, stories to tellmyself.

Like many adoptees, there came a day when I sent away for copies ofmy adoption paperwork. I remember the day the first round of documents from theWashington state department of social services came in the mail. It was thecommon, brown manila envelope, thick with paper, heavy with implications. Ifound it tucked inside my mailbox, I took it inside, placed it in the middle ofthe kitchen table and went to turn on the teapot.

While the water started to steam, I opened the envelope, andexamined the sheets, about 40 pages of information I had never read before.Alongside discoveries I found pages and paragraphs that reveled more secrets,hiding specific words, names and full sentences blocked out with a big blackmarker. Things I am never allowed to know. Information and memory that is lostforever.

How do I construct my altar when my ancestors are hidden from me?What blanks will remain when my birth father, who is alive now, but couldbecome an ancestor very soon, passes on? What stories will they tell me once heis gone, about how I have his hands, or his chin and what photo will they giveme, if any, to place alongside the other photos of ghosts that I know?

My altar has become a reminder of reconciliation of spirit, and anacceptance of the unknown. Each time I cleanse it with sage, or dust it off, orclean it fully, redressing it with fresh flowers, new colors or add new or oldimages of found / lost ancestors, it represents more than who has come beforeme. Its construction reconciles the absences, faces them as living fears, andacknowledges them as unknowns. It is a living structural way to heal, way togrow and be whole and fill the empty spaces.

On my altar lives photos of my ancestors. Photos of those who aregone in my family like my grandfather Macan on my mother side, my cousin Mandywho died in a car accident, and of my birth grandfather Arino, whom I neverknew, but whose wrinkled forehead I see in the mirror. A blank card holds spacefor ancestors whom I will never know from my families of origin. There areimages I have claimed of my chosen family, a group that includes mentors,scholars and people who made impacts on my life and whose voices I still hearin my head when I write, make decisions, or meditate and pray.

This new year, I cleanse my altar again, dusting each trinket,resetting them into place, I am full of fear my birth father’s family willcontinue to keep my body a secret from him. I fear I will remain a ghost intheir photos and he will die before I know him. I fear there will be anotheraddition to my ancestors, another addition to history of unknowns I mustreconcile. I pray and burn sage, ask for courage to face fear and to dive intothese blanks, into the absences that live in photos with and without me inthem, these unknowns that ground me as much as they unsettle me.

The prayer I give today is a prayer for you, too. Here’s to all ofyour and my absences being filled with light, and to the acceptance of theunknown inside the shadows, my friends.

Copyright © Lisa Marie Rollins

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lisa Marie Rollins is a Black/Filipina writer, playwright andperformer and a leading voice in transracial/ international adoption educationand advocacy. She is one of Colorlines magazine’s “Innovators to Watch” for herwork around reproductive justice / global adoption and race. She is a VONAalumni in Poetry and recipient of the James Irvine and Zellerbach FoundationsIndividual Artist funding for her acclaimed solo play, “Ungrateful Daughter:One Black Girls story of being adopted into a white family… that aren’tcelebrities”. Her most recent publications can be found in the anthology “OtherTongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out” and her new short chapbook, “Splice”.

You can see more of her work and contact her atbirthproject.wordpress.com

From the Editor

2012-01-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

Thank you, and heartfelt appreciation to our readers, our contributing writers, and to those who have been kind enough to follow us.

My starting point, and goal with River, Blood, And Corn is promoting community and strengthening culture so the link continues from person to person, from one community to another, from one generation to the next. Included in our themes are the Elders whose lives informed, instructed, shaped and changed ours.

We publish one or two poems or prose pieces each month. A variety of writers, age groups, backgrounds, communities and view points are presented here.

Thank you for your voice continually widening the circle.

Terra Trevor

"If there was ever a time to dare, to make a difference,

to embark on something worth doing, it is now.

Not for any grand cause necessarily, but for something that

tugs at your heart, something that's your aspiration,

something that's your dream.

You owe it to yourself to make your days here count.

Have fun. Dig deep. Stretch. Dream big.

Know though, that things worth doing seldom come easy.

There will be good days and there will be days when you

will want to turn around, pack it up, call it quits. Those

times will tell you that you are pushing yourself, that you

are not afraid to learn by trying. Persist.

Because with an idea, determination, and the right tools,

you can do great things. Let your instincts, your intellect,

and your heart guide you. Trust.

Believe in the incredible power of the human mind. Of doing

something that makes a difference. Of working hard.

Of laughing and hoping. Of lazy afternoons, of lasting friends.

Of all the things that will cross your path this year.

The start of something new brings the hope of something great.

Anything is possible. There is only one of you. And you will

pass this way only once."

--Author unknown

Cedar Songs, Left Behind

2011-12-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Linda Boyden

She stayed behind, the mother of my grandfathers,

not by choice, his or hers: theirs.

Singled out, she was, by soldiers

spared, they told her, by yaller hair, blue eyes

spoilt tho' she was, still no kind of fate

for a white woman, this trail

this Removal.

In the guile of their final night,

in the lull of the dark, they slept,

the mother of my grandfathers and her man,

her red earth man

his skin in rich opposition to her pale,

they lay entwined until he woke.

Stirred by the cadence of boot-heel crunch on gravel,

thethick man-scent rising in the air,

whiskeysmokesweatwool

he woke.

My grandfather’s father

crossed to the rough-hewn mantle for his flute,

the smoothed cedar flute,

which under my living fingers

delivers still the songs;

the haunting cedar songs,

gifts left behind by the Tree People

in the branch

he carved so long ago.

The mother of my grandfathers taught her son,

then her grandson, the songs he played that night.

In time, he taught his granddaughter,

child of pale hair and red earth skin.

Told her, too, the story:

Played me awake that night, she said,

with my fingers one by one on his;

played into them the cedar songs, one by one,

until the soldiers came.

As they broke down the door, as they dragged him away,

I faltered once, she said, but did not stop.

I released the cedar songs instead of tears

as they pushed my man from the dawn, from my arms

I played for him the songs,

for the son born after, for the grandson of my old age….

Now as grandmother I tell her words.

I, the girl blessed with Grandmother’s name and hair,

Grandfather’s red earth skin,

I play the sweet cedar songs,

the haunting holy gifts of the trees

he left behind.

First published in The People Who Stayed, Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal 2010, The University of Oklahoma. Also in a self published chapbook, “Cemetery Plots” 2006. Winner 2006 5th Annual Pleasanton Poetry Festival, Adult Poetry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Of mixed-blood Cherokee/Irish and French Canadian ancestries, Linda Boyden has spent most of her adult life leading children to literacy. From 1970-1997, she taught in primary grades, receiving her master’s in Gifted and Talented Education in 1992 from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. In 1997, Linda decided to change careers and abandoned full-time teaching for full-time writing. Her first picture book, “The Blue Roses”, debuted in 2002. It was the recipient of Lee and Low Books’ first New Voices Award, the 2003 Paterson Prize, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers’ Book of the Year, Children’s Literature, 2002-2003, and was included on the prestigious CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) 2003 Choices list of recommended titles. In 2007 she wrote and illustrated her second picture book, “Powwow’s Coming” published by the University of New Mexico Press. She has also written and illustrated “Giveaways, an ABC of Loanwords from the Americas” published also by the University of New Mexico Press in 2010. In 2011, Giveaways was the recipient of three Finalist Awards from the International Book Awards.

Linda is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She enjoys doing author visits and storytelling at schools and libraries as well as presenting workshops at writing conferences around the country. Visit her on the web at www.lindaboyden.com

AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: Lost Children, Lost Ones, Lost Birds

2011-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

Jump

By Trace A. DeMeyer

I jump with evolution

As a child of the stars,

a witness to human frailty

I study the masters,

Mystics, prophets, poets

to absorb their magic

I propel mountains of knowledge

But fall back, poisoned by pollution

Broken by my own ignorance and innocence

My blood stores so many memories

every horrific mistake, every genocide,

Things I would just as soon forget.

So I pray myself well.

Copyright © Trace A. DeMeyer. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Trace A. DeMeyer (Cherokee-Shawnee) writes poetry when the quiet voice wakes her. She is working on her first chapbook. Her memoir “One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects,” published in 2010, describes her search for adoption history, her identity and birth-relatives. Trace is former editor of the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing. Visit her on the web at her journalist blog www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com

Native American Heritage Month Braided with Thanksgiving: An American Indian Perspective

2011-11-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Terra Trevor

Wind, smelling of wood smoke rattles the yellow leaves off the peach tree.

I adjust my glasses, button my coat. My son bounds from his classroom to greet me. Eyes filled with brown warmth, he peeks out from under a cap of shiny dark hair; it’s the kind of black that shines red in sunlight.

“Mom, something about this isn’t right.” He is holding a construction paper headdress fashioned with hot pink and purple feathers. I nod, and run my hand through his hair, pushing the bangs off his forehead. Out of the corner of my eye I see children clutching construction paper pilgrim hats.

With his eyebrows curved in question marks my sons asks, “Have you ever seen an Eagle with pink and purple feathers?” And then we both giggle at the absurdity. It’s both funny, and not funny. My son understands the seriousness of regalia, but at age seven it’s not his job to carry the weight. As his mother that responsibility belongs to me.

November, the season of damp leaves, slanted sunlight and Thanksgiving is braided with Native American Heritage month. What started at the turn of the century to recognize The First Americans simmered on the back burner until 1990, when President George H. Bush approved a joint resolution designing November as “National American Indian Heritage Month.” Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994. But thus far, the majority of those I meet within mainstream America continue to be unaware there is something to acknowledge other than the story of "The First Thanksgiving."
I say this not only in sorrow, but in disbelief.

Why do so many parents, families and teachers continue to dedicate the month of November with a focus on perpetuating this myth year after year after year?

Native people are connected to history, to family, to land, culture and community. We are still alive. We are still here; we have not disappeared into the past, like the pilgrims did. All of the Elders I know tell me Native People have been giving thanks for as long as people have existed. After the corn was all dried, pumpkins sliced and the wild plums brought in it was a time for “giving thanks.” When the food was together for the hard winter months and when the work was all done, they gathered.

Yet after the “Thanksgiving” holiday was coined and continues to be celebrated based on a story that does not include factual Native American history, "Thanksgiving" has become a time of mourning for many Native People. It serves as a period of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many Native people from disease, and near total elimination of many more from forced assimilation. As celebrated in America "Thanksgiving" is a reminder of 500 years of betrayal.

I’m within the assemblage of American Indians whose family and Native friends celebrates Thanksgiving. But our focus is not on pilgrims. We don’t turn our lives topsy-turvy by making lengthy lists of things needing to be done for what has come to be known as Turkey Day. We aren’t in the throng of those who go commercial in the planning and then grumble about the fanfare involved. Our celebration is deep-rooted in the simple tradition of honoring, remembering our ancestors, our history, with a focus on celebrating the harvest. We feast and pray for the healing to begin. Our thoughts turn to the Wampanoag people.

Each year when the platters of cracked corn, green-chile turkey soup and the pies are brought out, I remember my grandmother’s words. “Child,” she said, “We’re Indians, our culture has been scattered into odds and bits, yet Indian People are determined to keep our life ways alive.”

Since no one knows when the "first" thanksgiving occurred, if it were up to me, I’d dedicate the entire month of November focusing on National Native American Heritage, to teach the rich histories of Native Peoples, and I’d let the pilgrims have a day all of their own, in December.

Reprinted by Indian Country Today

The University of Arizona Press

NAFCC

The Huffington Post

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Terra Trevor is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices On Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). Trevor's memoir Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story published in 2006, is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web at www.terratrevor.com

Oyate - working to see that Native lives and histories are portrayed honestly

Thanksgiving
Recommended books from an Indian perspective
Primary sources from a colonialist perspective

Thanksgiving: A Native American View by Jacqueline Keeler

WE STILL LIVE HERE Âs Nutayuneân

This film tells a remarkable story of cultural revival by the Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts. Their ancestors ensured the survival of the first English settlers in America, and lived to regret it. Now they are bringing their language home again.

Oyate: Deconstructing the Myths of “The First Thanksgiving”Oyate is a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed honestly, and so that all people will know our stories belong to us. For Indian children, it is as important as it has ever been for them to know who they are and what they come from. For all children, it is time to know and acknowledge the truths of history.

Pride in Our Heritage. Honor to Our Ancestors

What started at the turn of the century as an effort to gain a day of recognition for the significant contributions the first American made to the establishment and growth of the U.S, has resulted in the month of November being designed for that purpose.

Early Proponents – One of the early proponents of an American Indian Day was Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian, later the director of the Museum of Arts and Science in Rochester, N.Y. He persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the “First Americans” and for three years they observed such a day. In 1915, which declared the second Saturday of each May as an American Indian Day and contained the first formal appeal for recognition of Indians as Citizens.

The year before, Red Fox James, a Blackfoot Indian, rode horseback from state to state seeking approval for a day to honor Indians. On December 14, 1915, he presented the endorsements of 24 state governments at the White House. There is no record, however, of such a national day being proclaimed.

State Celebrations – The first American Indian Day in a state was declared on the second Saturday in May 1916 by the governor of N.Y. Several states have designed Columbus Day as Native American Day, but it continues to be a day we observe without any recognition as a national legal holiday.

Heritage months – In 1990, President George H. Bush approved a joint resolution designing November 190 “National American Indian Heritage Month.” Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994.

Source: US. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Chapter Four #49 Bear Child Blvd.

2011-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Kimberly Roppolo

10:30 pm. Swoosh, tha-thump, swoosh, tha-thump . . . he came by this time every night. She lay there in her bed, warm under the Pendleton her grandpa had given her last spring, hearing his skate board swoosh and thump down the sidewalk, past the big spruce tree, down to his house. But to him, she was just T.J.’s little sister . . . background. She wanted to be spotlight. She wanted to be like a jingle dancer everyone noticed at a powwow, full of grace and beauty, quick and fluid, but she only wanted that everyone to be him.

6:45 a.m. The moon shone barely through the basement window. She struggled to find the clock, shrill in the dark. She just wanted to stop it in time to keep it from waking her little sister snuggled under the other quilt next to her, her little brother in the next room, still snoozing in the bed T.J. had vacated almost an hour earlier. It was hard here in town without Dad, without all the aunties and uncles, grandmas and grandpas, all the cousins.

She stopped the clock . . . Mom had it harder though. She had to work so much now. Melanie knew it was hard on her, hard for her to leave when her children were sleeping, hard for her to be without Melanie’s dad, to be alone. Melanie tried to help all she could, but even at thirteen, even with the tiny love she was beginning to feel, she knew that nothing could replace the man a woman loves with her whole heart, her whole mind, her whole body, her whole spirit. That had been clear in her mother’s face, in her eyes, every day her dad had been alive within Melanie’s memory. It was clear now in the wounded woman who worked herself to death to feed her children, to offer them what she felt was a better life, here in town, off the rez with all the relatives, all the traditional ways that remained strong, all the love, and all the pain.

Melanie pulled the chain on the lamp, glanced over at her mother’s empty bed against the next wall with its neatly folded blankets, stumbled to the washroom and flipped on the switch. The bare bulb above her glared in her eyes as she stared in the mirror. She opened the medicine cabinet to find her toothbrush, placed far enough out of the reach of the little ones that none of them would swipe it, at least not without too much scene and likely a loud catastrophe. She squeezed out the last of the toothpaste, knowing she’d have to cut it open for them before she fed them some breakfast. She turned the faucet, brushed her teeth, and splashed her face with some water. Drying it, she turned her face this way and that in the mirror, wishing Mom would let her wear some makeup. “Saaaa. ..” she’d said when Mel brought it up, “you’ll be wanting to wear high heels and short skirts next! What would your Dad think?” That’s all it had taken for Mel to drop the subject, probably permanently.

But these girls in town wore makeup, even the Indian girls. Not the ones at the Catholic school close by their basement suite, but the ones at the public high school she went to across town, across the river. She was good in school, and out on the rez, they had promoted her from Grade 1 to Grade 3 several years ago. When she moved to town, the white principal had doubted her.

“It’s just extremely unusual, Ms. Scout.”

“Mrs.,” Mel’s mother interrupted him.

He looked disturbed. “Mrs. Scout,” he said hesitantly. “It’s unusual that a student from one of the reserves would be able to succeed at a grade higher than his or her age-level. In my professional opinion, it would be best to enroll your daughter at the junior high. Give her a chance to succeed. You know, our curriculum is substantially more difficult than that of the Indian school. I just have you and your child’s best interests in mind, I assure you.”

But her mother had insisted that they test her. If they wouldn’t recognize the truth of her records from the rez, let Melanie show them she could compete with them on their own grounds. Melanie had felt uncomfortable with the whole confrontation. It was bad enough, moving to town, away from her friends and family, being out of place, alone. She had passed their tests all right, at least the ones on paper.

The school was huge, and there were few Indian students compared to the whites, even compared to the Asians. Indians only outnumbered blacks and Hispanics, who were almost invisible in the packed hallways, full of girls who wore tight shirts, tight jeans, had brightly-colored hair, and makeup, full of boys who looked at her and all the girls as if they were things, as though they had the right to judge each female who passed by.

Only her brother could be counted on, him and his old friends from the rez, others whose families had moved to town over the past few years for a variety of reasons. But they were older, and each day that one of them stayed in school, didn’t drop out to do non-existent work, sleep on their mother’s couches, was a miracle. She understood, but right now, they were the only thing that made her feel remotely safe in this place. That’s why she didn’t mind T.J. leaving as early as he did in the morning. He caught a ride each weekday with a Metis guy from up the block who worked construction across town and hit the gym as soon as the custodians would let him in. Basketball was all that kept him around. In a way, basketball kept him connected to Dad, Melanie supposed.

Mom would be in from her night shift at the hospital soon, to shower up, eat breakfast with them, and take them to school before she herself went to University. Sometimes she thought of moving down across the line, moving to the States where nurses made more money, Melanie knew. But here, she was able to help her people in one of the few ways she knew how. It had to be hard, Mel knew, working the emergency room during the night shift. She knew the things her mother saw couldn’t be pleasant—the rougher side of life was more apparent at night, at night when people tried to hide things, things the bright lights of the emergency room only made sadder, made uglier. Mel was just glad that it had been too late for Dad already when they found him, too late for them to take him in, too late so that Mom hadn’t had to see him like that. It was a horrible thing to have to be happy about.

Mel went back into the bedroom, turned on the light, and woke Kalie. “Go on . . . get up if you want a chance to get in the washroom before Dyl, you’d better get up.” Kalie reluctantly left her quilt, put her feet on the floor, and moaned her way to the other room. Mel picked up the quilts, shook them out, and folded them.

Kalie yelled, “There’s no toothpaste left in here!”

“I’m coming, just as fast as I can,” replied Mel. She walked in the other room, into the corner they used as a makeshift kitchen, reached in a jar stacked among groceries on one of the folding tables, and got out a steak knife, slightly bent at the tip from someone opening milk cans hammer-style, but still usable. She walked into the washroom, tip pointed down as Mom would never forgive her for forgetting something like that, and deftly slit open the tube.

“Groooooss!” Kalie exclaimed.

“Gross, but still good,” Mel replied. “Hurry, Mom will be here in just a minute, and you know she needs to wash up. DYLAN!” Mel yelled, her usual quietness broken by the need to speed up things.

“I’m up, I’m up . . .” Dyl groaned from under the blankets.

“You’ll have to make your own bed this morning,” Mel said, coming back around the corner out of the washroom. “I’ve got breakfast to cook, and Mom should be in any minute. You know she has to be to class on time. Get ready.”

Mel got tired of taking care of other people. She didn’t know how Mom did it. Melanie’s mother had decided to become a nurse soon after high school, soon after her best friend died way too soon. That part Regina admitted to her. The rest, Mel had heard. Around here, people talked about each other so much that you even ended up hearing stories about your own parents and your own siblings. There had been that guy. Her mom’s first love, the way that Anastasia had told it. They had even been married, Indian way, anyhow. He had lived with her at Aaah’s house out in Laverne. Anastasia said his Grandpa had been a big time Indian doctor, a highly respected ceremonial person, before he passed on. They had all had big hope for that boy, that boy her mom had been in love with. But that one, he must of have turned out more like his dad, Anastasia said. Apparently got messed up on drugs or something and broke her mother’s heart.

Now her mom’s heart was broke again, Mel thought.

“I wonder if it’s worth it,” she thought to herself.

She had heard older women sigh, “Men . . .” so many times, but what they should be sighing is “Love,” Mel thought. That was the part that got you in trouble, made you foolish, got you hurt. Mel thought of that old story, one of the several about Chief Mountain, about that heartbroken chief’s daughter that threw herself off it so long ago. Mel thought that that story probably wasn’t the right one. Still, she thought, there were old stories about girls who killed themselves because they couldn’t marry the boys they wanted to, for one reason or another. Sometimes, it was because of their parents. The parents had other plans. The Old Folks used to say that love made people crazy, and it certainly wasn’t a smart reason to get married to someone. Sometimes, it was because the boy a girl was in love with hadn’t proven himself to be a man yet, hadn’t had any success in battle or sometimes even hunting. Even though the two might be close in age, the Old People would have thought that she was a woman, but that he certainly wasn’t yet a man. Mel thought those stories were sad. It was sad that people were doing things like killing themselves even way back there in the olden days. But she was starting to wonder if they might not have been right about love.

She heard Mom’s keys rattling at the door.

. . .

A chapter from a novel in progress, Quilt Like a Night Sky.

Copyright © Kimberly Roppolo. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Kimberly Roppolo is an Assistant Professor of English and an affiliated faculty member with Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She has recently become Director of Native Writers Circle of the Americas and serves as Vice-President of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She is one of the co-authors of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (OU Press), named one of the most important books in her field in the first decade of the 21st century by NAISA. She is currently revising her manuscript Back to the Blanket: Reading, Writing, and Resistance for American Indian Literary Critics—winner of the NWCA First Books Award for Prose 2004. She has written and published poems, stories, articles, book reviews, and reference entries for anthologies and for publications from Studies in American Indian Literatures to American Indian Quarterly to News from Indian Country and Talking Stick Arts Newsletter. Her areas of interest are Native critical theories, contemporary Native literatures, (particularly women's literatures), Native rhetorics, and Native creative writing.

Once Upon A River

2011-09-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Tiffany Midge

We were the kids trading marbles and penny candy at the Friday night Grange Hall meetings. We were the deaf shopkeeper at McDougals who said the comics would set ya back two bits, and the digests two bits and a George Washington. We were the Pillager kids from your dad’s class who had you over for supper, who horrified your mom when Mrs. Pillager wiped the rain off her hounds with a dishcloth, then covered the fried chicken with the same cloth.

We were the voices of the evening church bells chiming every sunset and the Rutherford sisters who graciously invited you into their doily-drenched parlor for hot water and honey and taught you how to play Hearts.

We were the hippie mom of the kid you played with, who stored the umbilical cords of her children in the back of the freezer, and the waitress at the Silver Spoon who dished you free bowls of vanilla ice cream on slow nights. We were the man who convinced you he was going to commandeer a raft all the way to Hawaii and who you swear you saw on the TV news, safe and triumphant after he’d mysteriously left town.

We were the junkyard dog next door whose owner was jaundiced and sported a hook for a hand, and the Davenquist boy who you traded your Girl Scout Mints for a litter of baby mice that all died because the house was too cold at night, so your dad replaced them with tropical fish.

We were the general store where you ran to fetch the mail every afternoon from Box 70 and spent your ten cent weekly allowance on a candy bar, and the girl named Rudy whose newborn sister had pierced ears and whose dad smoked from a hookah pipe, and Brian Osterday who was your perfect first love and who had a brother named Royal, the name of your orange cat.

We were the Snoqualmie Bull’s Saturday baseball games your dad coached and the fat catcher named Moose who later died from a broken leg. We were Brownie meetings in the basement of the library across the street.

We were the occasional shrieking of the firehouse alarm alerting your dad, in the volunteer squad to run up the block and help save distressed babies or car engine fires, and we were creek crawdads and guppies and the steady stream of bull fish hooked from the banks of the Snoqualmie River.

We were the long days that existed solely for the pleasures of swimming in the lagoons of that river, and the sandbar where some fishermen gave you your first can of beer and where you traced pictures in the sand and buried costume jewelry and brooches stolen from your mother’s dresser.

We were the sticker bushes alongside the banks where you harvested quarts of blackberries and traded to Mrs. Higgenbottom who made you a blue pie.

We were Mary Chesum whose parents were Yakima Indians and we were the Friday night when she was abducted from the house she was babysitting at, taken to the river where she was alternately chased, then stabbed, and chased again, repeatedly—her blood and clothing spilling across the lengths of the rocky bank—by a high school senior who she’d been refusing to date.

We were Mary Chesum’s younger sister Lisa, your friend, your classmate. You were the only two Indian girls in school, the only ones with that long black hair that wrapped around your shoulders like shawls. The only two girls who knew they were different, who knew they’d be singled out; girls who paired up for safety and refuge, for shelter; ones who knew how to flee to the banks of the river, instinctually, by memory.

We were there, that day on the playground when your shoelace had broken and Lisa without hesitation unbraided her lace and gave it to you.
We watched as she bent over and threaded the lace into the grommets of your shoe, then went for the remainder of the day with her one shoe loose and undressed.

Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.

Once Upon A River appeared in “Native Literatures: Generations," 2010.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tiffany Midge’s book “Outlaws, Renegades and Saints, Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” won the Diane Decorah Poetry Award. She’s most recently been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review and the online journal No Tell Motel. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux and MFA grad from University of Idaho she lives in Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College. Visit her on the web at http://breakfastattiphanys.blogspot.com/

Mexico and the USA: My Motherland and Fatherland

2011-08-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

By Aurora Garcia

The USA is the country where I live. While the United States is not my motherland, it is the country where I have lived the longest and the country that gave me a new life, and a son. It is not the country where fate would have me be born in, but where I actually and consciously chose to become a citizen. But of course without renouncing to my Mexican citizenship.

For the longest time I rejected the idea of acquiring a new citizenship. I felt like a traitor. I don’t know when it started to grow into me. At first I thought, well, nothing will change the facts. I was born in a house with the scent of Lime and Plumeria. I grew up in a home where I would quietly stare at the clouds and the leaves of the Lime tree. Nothing could erase the memories of the smell of my mother’s cooking or the smell on a rainy day in my beautiful homeland, and the games and the joy. This love will remain untouched.

When I came to the USA everything was new to me—the smells, the places, the language, and the people. I felt so alone and out of place for the first couple of years. Then I don’t know how or when it started. I began to have a sense of belonging. I learned the language, studied, worked, had wonderful friends, and all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like a traitor anymore. I understood. I was no longer confused. For the longest time I’d had a fight within myself on where I belonged, and which country I owed loyalty to. Then one day, out of the blue, it came to me, and I clearly understood that there is no reason to choose. How can you answer to the question, who do you love the most, your mother or your father? Both, and you don’t have to measure it, you don’t have to explain it or compare it.

I know the feeling of my attachment to the US started before I had my son, but it became stronger after he was born. All of a sudden we were creating memories together. His childhood moments were so different from mine, but equally beautiful, and I immersed myself into it.

Mexico/USA! Yes, I own one of each flags, but I don’t display them everywhere I go. It is my belief that you mostly carry those feelings within your heart. When I lived in Mexico, I don’t remember ever displaying the Mexican flag other than at appropriate ceremonies and at institutions, and in a very respectful manner. These beautiful countries mean and represent much more than their politics and their unfortunate situations. They represent the smells, the laughs, their beautiful scenery and their natural resources. These countries are the people who don’t make the headlines, but instead keep a low profile and spend their time raising a family and working hard.

So, let the eagle continue to devour the serpent and ask for divine power for that eagle to wide spread its wings. And let the stars shine brighter and us not be blinded by the glow, but instead hold on to some of that light. There is plenty love, space and time for everything and everybody.

Copyright © Aurora Garcia. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aurora Garcia is a nonfiction writer and essayist who was born in La Piedad, Michoacan, Mexico. She moved to California in 1989, when she was 14 years old. This is about the time when she began writing, but throughout her teen and young adult years she kept her writing to herself for fear of being exposed. Although fluent in English and Spanish she instinctively writes in Spanish, as it is her native language. Aurora lives with her husband and 12 year-old son. She loves life, nature, art, music, and diversity, admiring the contrasts and richness of her homeland culture, as well as the beautiful language that Spanish is. Aurora believes her passion for writing was inherited from her father who wrote songs and poetry.

Reprinted from River, Blood, And Corn, July 2010

An All-American Korean American 4th of July

2011-07-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

By Terra Trevor

An armload of bulgogi covers the grill and a circle of friends surround the barbecue. Everyone has a pair of chopsticks in hand and turn slices of the sizzling beef. A picnic table is laden with platters of pindaettok, mandu, heaping bowls of kimchi, chap chae, and romaine lettuce leaves with red bean sauce for dipping. There is plenty of sliced watermelon of course, and three rice cookers stand ready in a row.

There is laughter around the table. After another helping of dry cuttle fish, after we eat as much food as we can hold, we find a grassy spot under a shade tree, pull out a folk guitar, stretch back on the grass, and sing. The familiar melody has me humming along, while the group sings the lyrics in Korean.

Most of the time I forget that my husband, our youngest daughter and I are the only ones who are not Korean. At these gatherings all my friends are Korean American, like two of my children. The afternoon leaves me with a contented feeling, a sense of belonging, like I have when I go to a family reunion.

However, my friends within the Korean community didn’t feel like family in the beginning, way back when we began attending a Korean church in 1987, when my kids were then four, six and ten. I needed to reach deep with faith, because in giving my kids the opportunity to grow up within an all-Asian group I also had to let go of them a little bit in order to allow them to find their place within the Korean community and to learn to identify and express themselves as Korean adoptees, instead of tying to fit into the stereotypical Korean model everyone expected them to be.

I’ve heard adoptive parents say they want the Korean American community to accept their family on the adoptive parents terms and not to absorb their kids. They don’t want them to take over. I’ve never felt this way. I wanted my children to have the same opportunity to be immersed in the Korean community and discover their identity, as I did growing up mixed blood Native American within Indian country. The difference is Korean culture was initially unfamiliar to me. We were making new friends and I was allowing them to take my children into a world unknown to me.

I remember my grandmother’s words. “Child,” she said, “We’re Indians, and our Cherokee, Delaware and Seneca culture has been scattered into odds and bits, yet Indian people are determined to keep our life ways alive.”

I wanted to give my kids what was given to me, to make it possible for them to gather bits and pieces of Korean culture and braid it into our lives, and show them how to hold their heritage high.

While my son and my oldest daughter explored the constantly evolving questions of what it means to be Korean American, and my younger daughter who is Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca and Irish, grew increasingly more diverse, my husband and I sank in roots and worked to build lasting relationships and to let our new friends know that our interest in doing so was heartfelt. Over the past 25 years our Korean community gatherings has provided me with some of the deepest sharing I’ve ever known.

At the picnic we rest just long enough for our food to settle, and then it is time to play games. There are sack races, three-legged races, a water balloon toss, followed by a scavenger hunt. Everyone plays, the grandmas and grandpas, even babies are encouraged to join in, and there is always someone willing to lend a helping hand.

I find it wildly wonderful that fancy equipment is not needed for our game playing. We have a ball, a blindfold, two gunnysacks and we have each other. Just people enjoying one another, a day of slowing down and relaxing at the park, it’s not always an easy thing to find.

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Terra Trevor is the author of the memoir Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story (KAAN), from which this article is excerpted. Visit her on the web at http://www.terratrevor.com

Orange Dream

2011-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Wang Ping

Orange trees have roots in the earth
We migrants have roots in our souls

When the autumn wind blows across the Three Gorges, the hills along the Yangtze River light up with ripening oranges. They have been hiding behind leaves like shy girls all summer, but now they burst out shamelessly, filling the valley with their sharp citrus fragrance and flaming color.

And the peasants get busy. First, they repair the road from the orchards to the villages, from the villages to the highway and the river. All the roads are narrow dirt roads. All zigzag along the river cliffs. They get muddy after a few rains, and are often washed away by landslides. But no matter, it’s the only way to carry the golden harvest off the mountain slopes in bamboo baskets, out of the villages and Sichuan Basin in boats, ships, trucks, planes.

Next they clear the yards to make baskets. Oranges are fragile, easy to bruise and get moldy. Bamboo baskets are the best and cheapest containers. Since each family has about ten to twenty thousand jin of harvest, they’ll need hundreds of baskets. The villagers buy the raw materials, and hire bamboo smiths to make the baskets. Bamboo smiths come as a family, husband and wife, children, cousins. They work from six o’clock in the morning till midnight, taking breaks only when they eat. For each basket, they make two yuan, and a good smith can make about thirty-five baskets a day. And the peasants pick oranges, pack them in baskets, carry them down the steep hills, sell them to buyers from Chongqing, Chendu, Shanghai, Beijing...Orange price fluctuates according to the market demand, traffic, weather, and the whims of the wholesalers. There are times when they can’t sell at all. When late fall comes rolling with rain, the fruit rots in the mud. Even pigs won’t touch it.

This has been the way of life for the peasants along the river for two millennium.

The oranges from the Three Gorges have been known since the time of the Confucius (551-479 BC), Warring States (475-221 BC), Qin (221-207), Han (206 BC-220 AD), Tang (618- 907) dynasties, during which orange production was just as important as the salt industry, if not more. There were salt officials as well as orange officials managing the trade and farming. At 15, Du Fu (712-770) got his first government job to take care of 40 mu of orange groves and 100 mu of grain fields in Fengjie, where he wrote many of his great poems and made the place known as Poetry City.

The orange harvest was used as a symbol for the rise and fall of China. When an emperor chose the right way to run the country, there would be a good harvest and oranges would ripen with the right taste, color and texture. That was because the Three Gorges orange was the best of all fruit, and would serve only the true heavenly son. If the throne was usurped, oranges would turn sour, or refuse to grow at all. Peasants regard oranges as lucky symbols because of its shape, color and sound. Ju (orange) is close to the sound of good luck—ji. A peasant bride would hide an orange cake, rock sugar and a mirror in her bra on her wedding day, hoping they would give her a good, sweet and bright life.

Dried orange skin is called chen pi. It cures gastric pain, clears phlegm, and revives the faint of heart. Oranges soaked in 65 degree liquor are served with hot fondues. It’s fire upon fire, burning the toxin out of the body. And the sweetest oranges grow on ancient graves. Beginning from the Three Gorges and down the Yangtze River, oranges form China’s citrus belt—Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang. Away from the belt, they change flavor, color and taste. The farther away from the river, the worse they fare.

Most migrants no longer grow oranges. Those who moved 100 meters above the hills have lost the land and climate suitable for the citrus bush. Those who crossed the river sit in high-rise apartments with a big mortgage and little hope for a job. Those who moved to Shanghai, Fujian, Guangdong, and Shandong are struggling with different dialects and cultures, with dire opportunities for jobs or schools. They’ve been farmers for many generations, and growing oranges and fishing are the only skills they have. Many old and middle-aged migrants can’t stand the homesickness. They steal back to their old homes and live with their relatives or friends illegally. Many men have joined bangbangjun—the army of porters on streets, and girls become “goddesses” in hair salons, hotels, dance halls.

The orange—soul of the Three Gorges. It haunts the dream of every migrant. Even those who have made it in their new places aren’t exempt. Almost every migrant said they missed the orange fragrance, its color and taste, missed climbing the steep hills along the river to the orchards, missed the backbreaking season of the golden harvest.

They sing “Orange Tree” to the tune of the popular song “Olive Tree.”
Don’t ask me where I came from
My old home is far far away
Don’t ask why I keep roaming
Roaming in this strange land
For the birds wheeling in the sky
For the gibbons calling from the riverbanks
For the fish that swim upstream to spawn
I’m roaming, roaming
For the orange tree in my heart
For the orange soul in my dream

Copyright © Wang Ping. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, a five-year project that builds a sense of kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food. With other artists and poets, she has been teaching poetry and art workshops to children and seniors along the river communities, making thousands of flags as gifts to bring to the Mississippi during 2011-12 and to the Yangtze in 2013.

Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), All Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze (forthcoming 2012), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose. Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translation with Ron Padgett, 2010 from Zephyr. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities, and in 2002, Random House published its paperback. The Last Communist Virgin won 2008 Minnesota Book Award and Asian American Studies Award. She had two photography and multi-media exhibitions--“Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges” at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and “All Roads to Lhasa” at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves, a film installation about the illegal Chinese immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. Visit her on the web at www.wangping.com/

Kinship of Rivers
http://www.kinshipofrivers.org/

From Michoacan, Mexico to California: A Latina Writer Reflects

2011-05-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Aurora Garcia

We hear it everywhere “we are one.” Do we really believe it? I personally struggle with my own demons of stereotyping, pride, fear and narrow mindedness. I force myself to think of me and everything else that surrounds me as a global matter. But I have to keep reminding myself of the type of person I want to be and the kind of example I want to be for my son. Not easy.

As a kid I would fear hearing anything that had to do with news. Perhaps all the catastrophes, political affairs, personal interests, unfairness, is what has made me be so scared. As I got older I realized that I had to be informed on relevant issues. Reluctantly, I watch and read “some” news.

I hear a lot about immigration and of course being a Latina, I could not turn my back on these issues. The first time I entered the United States, I did it with my green card. Do you think racist or prejudiced people know or care about that? No, they look only at my last name.

Thankfully my wonderful father did the work it took to make sure I did not have the need to enter this country illegally. This means, I did not have to suffer what people trying to survive around the world have suffered for centuries. People around the world have been displaced countless times. Also, in the United States think of the discrimination that in past decades- Irish, Chinese, Blacks, and Native American have been through, not to mention being called the Okies. Well, now it is the Hispanics’ turn – myself included.

The Spaniards came to America. They “discovered” America. My answer to that is no need to discover us. We knew we were here. The conquistadors killed Native people. They took ships loaded with gold back to Spain. They traded mirrors for gold. They destroyed writings, and a culture. If that had not happened, I would most likely live in my hometown and my last name would not be Garcia, but most likely a Purepecha name.

I feel a right to write about all this, because it hits home. As a Mexican, I see and hear all the trouble that immigrants from Central America go through in my own country. This is a shame. I have heard all kinds of criticism because in Mexico there is a large Argentinean, Chinese, Centro-American community. Well, we are the least indicated to say a word or mistreat anybody. And I don’t even want to get started on the terrible way society has treated and continues to treat Natives in my own country. This is a whole other topic.

Yes, the world would be chaotic if we all went back to where we came from. The United States of America would be filled with only Native Americans. The Mayans and Aztecs would have emerged as the great civilizations they were. The rest of the European countries that immigrated to America and that now call it their own would have stayed where they originated. But why are we so territorial?

There is a sense of ownership that people around the world acquire, but whose world is this? At the same time, we contradict ourselves in so many ways. We need to practice what we preach. When will we learn as a civilization that the world belongs to all of us, and that it is also our obligation to make it better.

WE ARE ONE. It would make the world a better place if we helped each other and stopped segregating. When God, or nature or whomever you believe in made the universe and earth, it was created with no borders, no names and no flags. Perhaps we could try to be more instinctive, more tolerant. And learn that the way the world has been managed for centuries is not working. I don’t have all the answers, but we could try together as a planet to avoid the mistakes that we keep repeating that have not taken us anywhere. Then again, I have been called crazy many times. Or like John Lennon said, “you may say I’m a dreamer.”

Copyright © 2011 Aurora Garcia. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Aurora Garcia is a nonfiction writer and essayist who was born in La Piedad, Michoacan, Mexico. She moved to California in 1989, when she was 14 years old. This is about the time when she began writing, but throughout her teen and young adult years she kept her writing to herself for fear of being exposed. Although fluent in English and Spanish she instinctively writes in Spanish, as it is her native language. Aurora lives with her husband and 12 year-old son. She loves life, nature, art, music, and diversity, admiring the contrasts and richness of her homeland culture, as well as the beautiful language that Spanish is. Aurora believes her passion for writing was inherited from her father who wrote songs and poetry.

She’s Awake

2011-04-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Dawn Downey

There are days when the elders speak directly to the heart.

A hospice assignment led me to a suburban ranch house. Nothing in its appearance distinguished it from the others that lined the block.

Squinting into the August glare, I climbed the front stairs and rang the bell. When Mr. Murphy answered, the sun danced across his smiling face. It spilled into the entry hall behind him. I would sit with his wife, who was bedridden and lost to Alzheimer’s, while he ran errands.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the rear of the house. “She’s awake today.”

I followed him into the den. Picture windows on three of its walls framed a manicured back yard. The brilliant day poured in. Cushions printed in violet and lime plumped up a white wicker couch and ottoman. Better Homes and Gardens lay on a glass-topped table.

The furniture was pushed aside to accommodate Mrs. Murphy’s hospital bed. It faced a television set tuned to a country music video station. When I leaned over to say hello, she smiled up at me. Her unlined face and pixie haircut belied the degeneration reflected in her toothless grin.

“Are you going to do my hair?”
“She thinks you’re the beautician,” Mr. Murphy said.
I played along. “I’d love to.”
“Expensive?” she asked.
“Nope, I’m free.”

Mr. Murphy pushed the controls that raised the head of the bed. The motor whirred until his wife sat upright. He reached for a cup on the nightstand. “Want some water, Honey?” Leaning down to her, he touched a plastic straw to her thin, cracked lips.

After replacing the cup, he returned the bed to horizontal, gave me instructions and headed off to the grocery store.

I straightened the blankets, searching her face for signs of distress. But there was no strain in her expression. No worry lines creased her forehead.

The television blared a beer commercial. I switched it off, pulled up a stool and sat down next to the bed. Mrs. Murphy seemed to study the ceiling. We chatted our way through an Alzheimer’s banter, a duet sung with two different sets of lyrics.

“I’m happy I get to visit you today,” I said.
She lay still as a corpse. “Where’s my coat? I’m going home.”
I patted her leg, which was barely discernible among the pillows and blankets. “Where are you in there?”

We both chuckled, sharing the cosmic joke.

The sun streamed through the windows, warming me as I sat beside her. When hunger rumbled through my stomach, I reached into my bag. “Do you mind if I eat my apple?”

“We used to have a big back yard,” she said.
I nodded. “We did, too, with roses and oranges and avocados. And apples so sour, only Mother and I liked them.”

“Did you make pie?”
I crunched the Granny Smith. Its tartness bit my tongue. “Gosh no. She wasn’t great in the kitchen.”

Mrs. Murphy drifted off to sleep.

I curled up on the couch to meditate. A river of silence wound through intermittent thoughts. When the dark behind my eyelids grew brilliant, I checked to see if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud. The sky, however, was clear as glass. I closed my eyes and once more, the darkness brightened. A second peek revealed that the light in the room remained unchanged. I returned to meditation. The radiance reappeared as though the shades had been raised, but calm stayed my curiosity and lulled me into a nap.

I woke with a sense of remembering, without knowing what had been forgotten.

My companion had also awakened, but her eyes were vacant.
“Did you have a good nap?” I asked.
She replied without missing a beat. “We both did.”

Her erratic clarity enchanted me. I yearned to follow wherever she led, but the front door opened and Mr. Murphy brought in the groceries.

I met him in the kitchen, heard about the prices on soup and baby food, and then returned to her bed.

She startled me with a gaze as deep as Einstein’s. Her eyes reflected mine, and mine hers, back and back through the ages.
“Thanks for keeping me company,” I whispered.
She said … nothing. Off to play in other realms. Her absence was no less gratifying than her presence. I stroked her translucent cheek, said goodbye to her husband and stepped into the afternoon sun. A surge of energy quickened my pace --- the satisfaction that descends when I turn the last page of a perfectly crafted novel.

Copyright © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.

First published 2007 in Alzheimer’s Anthology of Unconditional Love, by the Mid-Missouri Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dawn’s writing has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, ShambhalaSun.com, Kansas City Voices Magazine, Ink Byte and The Best Times newspaper. Her work has earned honors in competitions sponsored by the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, Oklahoma Writers Federation and the Missouri Writers Guild. She is currently completing an essay collection titled Stumbling Toward the Buddha: Stories About Tripping Over My Principles on the Road to Transformation. Visit her at DawnDowney.com

You might like to read: Let The Music In by Dawn Downey

Weeping Women

2011-03-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

By Rain C. Goméz

When we weep

Mothers cry with us.

When we weep

Grandmothers pat their eyes.

Bits of blood and spit,

Dried salt and amniotic fluid

Make tears falling briefly,

Before we push them away--

As all weeping women before us.

Gathering strength from toes

Rooted in soil memories

And arms strong with

Carrying baskets

Of babies.

Carrying baskets

Of culture.

Weeping women cling

To the edge of dream

Crying for their lost children,

Crying for their husbands.

With sobs too deep and full

Of histories of biting back moans

That their tears fall as silent as death.

Against the rough periphery of memory

The whimper of ladies’ lamentations

Carve tributaries of grief inherent

In blood, from the fishing towns of

The Mississippi river to the

Buffalo plains of Saskatchewan.

Separated by geography.

United by blood.

They sing songs of sorrow

Into our unconscious actions---

Laced with brittle

Hope,

Survival,

Unstoppable Grace.

Copyright © Rain C. Goméz. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rain C. Goméz is a poet, academic, musician and spoken word artist. Currently she is a Sutton Fellowship Doctoral student in English at the University of Oklahoma. Her manuscript, Smoked Mullet Cornbread Memory (2009) won the First Book Award in poetry from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Work has appeared in various journals including Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Rain’s critical work focuses on (re)inserting Mvskogean and Creole Indigeneity into Southern Literary experience. Please visit her on the web at http://www.ohoyocreole.com/

Rosalia in her 90s

2011-02-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Kim Shuck

Off in those days of furniture forts

Curled under upended armchairs or

Broom handles stuck in the lawn

Draped with blankets with you it was always this

Architecture

As your fears take over we try to

Talk it out

Tease some sense from a new game

Cereal, mug, toast

Food become building material you

Push it more than eat the

Pills you take or bury in the mashed potato when

No one is looking the arguments

About baths

About dreams that have become for you so

Vivid about your cold cold hands about the dinner you

Cooked it years ago but can smell that soup and

Yearn

Yearn for it, I’m

Learning to overcook to use

Handfuls of black pepper a

Spell to summon that familiar raven’s eye that

Smile that says you knew I was teasing you.

Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

DEER-MICE SINGING UP PARNASSUS

2011-01-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

By Carter Revard

(for Bill and Lois Winchester)

Sally Carrighar, in a meadow one night, heard what seemed a bird trilling, then saw it was a deer-mouse. My friend Bill Winchester tells me that when deer-mice came into his house from the tallgrass prairie of Oklahoma, he live-trapped and released them in a nearby hedgerow, but they waltzed back in, singing an epithalamium. Add an O and a Muse becomes a Mouse, with poetic license to party on Mount Parnassus and drink from the Muses’ Spring of Helicon. Blake's Sunflower, weary of time, looked for that sweet golden clime where the Traveler's journey is done—but the little Deer-Mice got there before tourists with FOX2P genes did (NY Times 29 May 2009, p.A5: human “language gene” put into mice deepens their baby-cries, so Mezzo Mice may soon be singing).

In this “new” world they sing,
as we come down from the stars,1
like Milton’s Leonora singing
(aut Deus, aut vacui certé mens tertia cøeli),2
they climb up the stems
of sunflowers still not weary
of time, and they trill,
perching and swinging,
in meadow and glade, as if
a rainbow
trout might rise
to May-flies from their
music, as if John Muir and
Hetch Hetchy3
might come back
alive and listening,
anadromous as salmon or sabretooth
tigers, up time itself into the glistening
moonlit sonatas of
Sierra song.

1 In our Osage naming ceremonies it is said that we have come to this world from the stars. The words in one of our dawn-songs say of the Sun: “He returns, he is coming again into the visible world.”
2 Line 5 of John Milton’s Latin poem written in 1637-8 for the Neapolitan singer Leonora Baroni, whom he heard during a visit to Rome. In English, lines 4-8 of that poem, as translated from Latin by Lawrence Revard, say: “…your voice itself sounds God’s presence./ Surely God, or an emptied heaven’s third intelligence,/…glides through your throat,/…and teaches mortal hearts/ to grow accustomed to immortal sound.” See JOHN MILTON, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella Revard (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 199.
3 John Muir tried to save a Sierra vale, Hetch Hetchy, but the dam was built and now the people of San Francisco (St. Francis?) drink, shower, and flush with water drawn from that sanctuary—the moving waters at their priestlike task, perhaps.

Copyright © Carter Revard. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carter Revard, Osage on his father's side, was born in the Osage Agency town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma and grew up on the Osage Reservation there. He attended a one-room school in the Buck Creek rural community, won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, and was given his Osage name in 1952, the year he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After taking his B.A. there, he earned a Ph.D. at Yale and taught medieval literature, linguistics, and American Indian literature at Amherst College, Washington University St. Louis, and elsewhere. He retired in 1997 but continues to write and publish poems and scholarly essays. His books of poetry include Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), and How The Songs Come Down (2005). A collection of essays published in 1998, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, was followed by Winning The Dust Bowl (memoirs and poems) in 2001. Some recent poems, including "Deer Mice Singing Up Parnassus," was first published in AHANI: Poems of the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, The University of Arizona Press.

Shaking the Snow

2010-12-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

By Kimberly L. Becker

(for Susan)

In the night yard,
the old magnolia is
heavy
with all-day
fall
so I go and begin
lowering the branches,
pulling and releasing
just enough
for the snow to shake off
and keep the limbs from breaking
under unabated weight.

I walk around the tree
and when I’m finished
I stand inside the circle.
Just me and the tree
with the rim of cast-off
snow as boundary.
Beyond, the yard lies
pristine except for exuberant dog tracks.

What if someone took our
burden from us lightly?
Shook us just enough
that we let fall
whatever weighed
our spirit
down?

You did that once, for me.

I was frozen
and with your bracing words
you shook the sorrow
from my limbs
so that I stood centered once again
with the boundaries of my life around
and new.

Copyright © Kimberly L. Becker. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kimberly L. Becker is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Words Facing East (WordTech Editions, 2011) is her first book of poetry. Individual poems appear widely in journals and anthologies. The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD) funded her study of Cherokee language, history, and culture in Cherokee, NC. She was also awarded a residency at Hambidge Center in North Georgia. Current projects include adapting Cherokee myths into plays for the Cherokee Youth in Radio Project at the Cherokee Youth Center, also in Cherokee, NC.
Visit her on the web at www.kimberlylbecker.com

Doppelgängers: A Nativity Ode

2010-11-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

By Carter Revard

(if only Columbus had…)

By way of introduction: It has lately been discovered that, just as the first stanza of this piece narrates, at a certain time of year hellacious gales of wind blow from east to west through certain parts of the Sahara (the “Bodélé Depression”), from which they scoop great quantities of very fine minerals, sweeping them up into dark roiling clouds that are then driven high across the Atlantic, over Brazil and up along the Amazon and its tributaries, where the fine dust eventually settles down into the lush rainforests. (For scientific accounts of this, see Deflation in the dustiest place on Earth: The Bodélé Depression, Chad, in Geomorphology, Volume 105, Issues 1-2, 1 April 2009, Pages 50-58; and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, December 8, 2009, vol. 106 no. 49, 20564-20571.) It is thought that this Sahara dust constitutes exactly the fertilizing soils and minerals required to renew those rain forests, which otherwise would deplete the soils so extensively that eventually the forests would die. In this way, desert and jungle are “Doppelgängers,” orchid (“air-plant,” epiphyte) an apotheosis of hurricane (Hart Crane’s wonderful poem “The Air Plant” reversed), nectar an avatar of dust. If we had the ability of angels to see past and present and future simultaneously, we might see jungles that used to cover what is now the Sahara, and perhaps a desert that will cover what are now the rain forests of Brazil; but for now, I have painted only two brothers, African desert and Brazilian rainforest, in present time. Not dust to dust, but dust into nectar, is the story of Terra Nuova.

For my poem, I have put that story together with another of an infant’s finding his voice, first in weeping and then in laughing, which are also Doppelgängers, and have narrated this in terms of the Osage Creation Story’s account of our people’s having come down into this world from the stars. So the Infanta Nuova, made of stardust (though not named Ziggy), asleep in a dark house, awakes in pre-dawn darkness and cries, is cleansed, sung to, sings along with the strong-heart song, and is fed, then sees through the window the Morning Star and the Dawn, and hears a bird sing, at which (s)he laughs, and sings along with it the new/old song of joy, one of our Osage songs.

In my first year on Earth, my twin sister and I were taken care of for some time
by our Ponca aunt Jewell MacDonald in the village at White Eagle, Oklahoma. A lullaby she used to sing us, made by her blind great aunt, is the Strong Heart Song she sings in the poem, made to hearten the warriors in despair, driven from their homelands in the Dakotas down to White Eagle in Oklahoma. The old voice is Aunt Jewell’s mother, who waked again at dawn by the child’s voice rises and (like a Ponca Firebird) fixes sun-golden pancakes with honey and fresh butter for breakfast—something gold that sticks to the ribs, a contrafactum to the Frost lyric “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” (Contrafacta are lyrics sung to the same tune—in medieval times, maybe a pastourelle about a young girl’s wooing alongside a lament spoken by Mary at the Cross; or, in the case of the “Cuckoo Song”—“Sumer is icumen in”—an Easter hymn. In my poem, I have reversed Frost’s exquisite brief lyric, in which his line “So dawn goes down to day” implies a falling-off in beauty; my contrafactual version is that the ongoing life in the house, now filled with daylight, is a feasting and not a falling off.) And I have stuffed into the final line both Lycidas (in italics) and the Lord’s Prayer.

1.
It’s not exactly a Pentecostal wind or
Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, it’s
more a haboob or maybe simoom, truly
a burning desert blast at this time of the year—
down on the southern Sahara swoops a hellish
roiling hurricane-force wind that scoops
a hundred-mile-long rift-full of dusty crystals up
and up and drives them in dark flashing clouds westward
high and higher and out over the coastline of Africa, the grey
haze now streaming across the Atlantic over Brazil
and on up over the Amazon,
high above lush rain-forests until the fine
dust comes delicately down into an orchid’s apotheosis
of hurricane where a hummingbird
glittering sends its long tongue into
deep nectar, avatar
of Sahara sand.

2.
--In this dark house I hear the
shimmering of my Doppelgänger’s wings,
but I am crying, the voices say—
some time ago I came down like dust
from the stars into this house where the old voice says
he is crying, give him
some milk, it says,
and the young voice says
I have to change him first,
then hands come down and take me up,
remove the swaddling clothes and dip
me in chilly water, wash me clean,
and I am crying and the young voice sings,
I still myself and listen, I hear the words,
“What are you afraid of?” they say,
“No one can go around death.”
In this dark house there are no
stars but there is song, the hands
have warmed a bottle, there is milk,
but first I sing along, the young voice stops then
and I sing alone,
“What are we afraid of, no one
can go around death.”
My brother hears me and he turns
from the nectar and flies out
into the moonlight, and the stars
are over him. “This child
is singing,” the young voice says, and then
the old voice says,
“Give him the bottle, let him sleep.”
The milk is sweet and warm. Now
through silent window
the morning star comes nearer,
then fades away, the east turns russet and my brother
the orchard oriole, wearing the soft
colors of early dawn, begins to sing,
so I laugh and sing,
we sing together
without words his song of joy,
“The stars go home and now
the sun appears,”
then the old voice says,
“I guess I better get up
and fix some breakfast now”—
so dawn goes down to day,
its light-gold pancakes lifting off a tray
like little suns, butter and honey spreading,
black coffee’s bitter perfume rising while
Grandmother gives us (yet once more) our daily lives.

When I was a boy in the Buck Creek Valley on the Reservation, one spring and summer a pair of orchard orioles nested in the elms beside our home, and I learned to whistle their challenge-notes and the long cascading series of mellifluous notes of their song. Alexander F. Skutch (Orioles, Blackbirds, and their Kin, University of Arizona Press, 1996), studied them in their winter migration homes in Central America and says the orchard orioles were “most songful of all the birds I have heard….At dawn, young and old sang together in a many-voiced chorus of whistled notes delightful to hear” (p. 190).

As a final comment: I think it likely that creatures sang and danced before they spoke, and that communities were first made of song and dance: metronymic mouth, hands, feet, bodies. Birds do it, bees do it, octopodes and people do it. And I suspect singing began from weeping and from laughing, turned into choral tragedy and comedy, kept time with rhythms and rhymes of tropical sunlight and starlight, temperate blossom and snowfall. Without song, no nesting. Home, as the Frost poem says, is where, when you go there, they have to take you in, and it turns out our relatives are everywhere. So the tropical paradise in New Guinea with snow around it, in the crater of a long-extinct volcano called Mount Bosavi, a place where new forms of life have evolved in isolation (including a Bird of Paradise, arising from that extinct volcano like a Phoenix), rhymes well with the Osage Agency town where I was born, Pawhuska, which means “White Hair.” Now that song has put on feathers and become speech, we dance, sing, and speak with each other in Pawhuska, at the June solstice, to keep the Osage Nation alive. Our dances begin and end with spoken prayers. We hear Adam and Eve as Milton gives them to us, every dawn, if we are lucky enough to have birds as neighbors: for them at sunrise, I believe, the Paradise within is happier far.

Copyright © Carter Revard. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carter Revard, Osage on his father's side, was born in the Osage Agency town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma and grew up on the Osage Reservation there. He attended a one-room school in the Buck Creek rural community, won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, and was given his Osage name in 1952, the year he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After taking his B.A. there, he earned a Ph.D. at Yale and taught medieval literature, linguistics, and American Indian literature at Amherst College, Washington University St. Louis, and elsewhere. He retired in 1997 but continues to write and publish poems and scholarly essays. His books of poetry include Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), and How The Songs Come Down (2005). A collection of essays published in 1998, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, was followed by Winning The Dust Bowl (memoirs and poems) in 2001. Some recent poems, including "Deer Mice Singing Up Parnassus," will appear in AHANI: Poems of the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, forthcoming from The University of Arizona Press.

The Book as Village

2010-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Robert Bensen

The anthology of Native American writing that I edited, Children of the Dragonfly, was begun not long after my wife and I learned that our adoptive infant daughter was of Native as well as European ancestry. We had many questions about what to do. We wondered what that might mean for her and for us as parents.

Fast-forward ten years, and Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices On Child Custody and Education, appeared from the University of Arizona Press in 2001. The book collects writing by Native American people raised in adoptive and foster-care and other non-Indian settings such as boarding schools, as well as related fiction and poetry—the first such collection. Many people responded to calls I sent out to various Native e-groups, including WordCraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for original contributions. It would establish a new area of concern in American Indian literature devoted to childhood and family. I thought it could embrace traditional upbringing (as figured in instructive, older stories), as well as boarding schools and adoptive and foster-care homes, and a broad range of issues in trans-cultural adoption and child-rearing.

I wanted the book to help support, however modestly, organizations devoted to the well-being of Indian children and families. Royalties continue to aid the American Indian Community House (NYC), Native American Rights Fund, American Indian College Fund, AAIA, Running Strong for American Indian Youth, NICWA, and others. In the first years, royalties were sufficient to share among the authors as well.

I found the book could do all that and more: I found in it the proverbial village it takes to raise a child. This village is full of people who, at least most of them, have never met except between the covers of the book. Until they saw my call for people raised in adoptive or foster care settings to contribute their story, many of the writers told me they thought they were the only one. They thought they were alone.

And it took a child to bring this village together. The book has given back to the authors who wrote for it, who are also Dragonfly’s children. Some were published there for the first time. Writing for the book advanced everyone’s journey toward understanding who they are and where they came from. Among them are artists who have pursued their life-issues in new ways in Native galleries and museums. Others work in adoption and social services, or in community organizations related to child welfare and education. Some found a new direction and energy for learning the cultural ways that had been denied them. Some are writers for whom Dragonfly has opened new areas for their work, and who are leaders in Native writing circles, publishing, and mentoring.

In an old Zuni story, Dragonfly is the form an ancient spirit takes to provide for two abandoned children. As Carter Revard writes in the “Foreword,” Dragonfly lately made his body of the book, and within it and from it and surrounding it are a host of people who have, loosely speaking, adopted our daughter back in loving ways—so she has aunts and uncles and cousins from many nations, including Cherokee, Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Tuscarora, Shinnecock, Innu, Navajo, Osage, and Lakota and others. Those in the book sometimes led us to others as well. Some have passed into the spirit-world but return for her in ceremony and dream. Everyone has taught her something of her Native heritage.

Our daughter was at an Aboriginal dance workshop in Toronto last summer. Certainly she was the fairest of them all, though her hair has turned from blonde to brown as she’s grown up. A woman came to teach some social dances to the group, and had gathered the dancers in a circle to talk to them. She said that these dances were not sacred, so they could be shared, but that they were seldom, if ever, taught to non-Natives. She was looking at our daughter when she said this, and that she had asked the elders for permission, since there were non-Natives involved.

When she finished, my daughter replied that, while she may look non-Native to some on the outside, inside her heart was red. Though she was adopted, she had always learned all she could about her ancestry. She had been given a clan and a name. “And besides,” she said, “do you know the story of Goldilocks?”
“The old one?” the woman replied.
“No, the old Cherokee one,” she said, and told how, in Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey’s retelling, Goldilocks flees the house of the three bears and is soon tired and hungry. As she wanders lost in the woods, she smells some good cooking. She follows her nose to a clearing with some dark-skinned children and adults, and some log cabins and fires with pots cooking on them. Goldilocks doesn’t understand their language, but they understand her hunger, and so feed and shelter her.

Many days later a U.S. Indian agent comes around to enroll families. He sees a blonde girl playing with the dark-skinned children and asks the woman watching them if all those children are hers. “Yes,” she says, because she cared for the girl. The man marks them all down as “F,” full-blood Cherokees. As the story goes, the girl grew and married a Cherokee man. Among their children was one little blonde girl. And so it came to be that there is a Goldilocks in every Cherokee family.

That’s the story our daughter remembered from Children of the Dragonfly to tell at that moment, when her identity and rightful place were being challenged. That was one more gift of the village of the book. It has given her ground to stand on, among those who care for her. And who knows, maybe that’s why the worlds she makes hoop dancing never fall apart.

Copyright © Robert Bensen 2010. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Bensen is an invited member of WordCraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, whose poems and essays appear widely in U.S., U.K., West Indian and Native American journals such as Akwe:kon and Native Realities. His poems have been collected in five chapbooks (Orenoque, Scriptures of Venus, and others), and he has been awarded an NEA poetry fellowship and the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award. Since 1978 he has been Director of Writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. He teaches writing as well as courses in American Indian law and literature, and is the editor of
Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education, The University of Arizona Press.

Tomol Trek

2010-09-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

By Terra Trevor

Our classes are held outdoors under a bead-blue California sky. We work on a patch of green grass, an occasional hawk sweeping over with light shining through her rust red tail.

Back in 1997, when there was money available to be used for education, the Santa Barbara County American Indian Education Project began the series “Tomol Trek.”

After much hard work, the project put together an academy with federal
(Title V) funding. Each year the academy had a different focus. In 1997 the year’s final outcome was aimed at producing a modern-day recreation of a traditional Chumash tomol. The children and teenagers attending ranged from elementary through high school. Many were Chumash, but the kids represented a variety of tribes, all with a common bond: every one of these kid’s lives in an area that made up the traditional Chumash homeland. We all hold the culture, traditions, and history of the Chumash people in our hands and in our hearts.

The tomol, a type of plank canoe, is unique to the Chumash. Tomols were used for trips between the islands and Chumash settlements. Originally they were about thirty feet long, and could hold four thousand pounds. Usually they carried six people but could hold up to twelve.

Our modern-day tomol was built by the children under the guidance of Peter Howorth, in his backyard tomol building workshop. There is a perfect balance between master and apprentice as the children sand pieces of the vessel throughout construction. A dozen hands move slowly across the handle, moving towards the paddle end of an oar. Small hands, young hands, skin so smooth and maroon, peach-colored hands, muted brown, every child with a tribal memory circling her or his heart.

A kind of palpable energy surrounds the tomol project. People seem to want to be a part of what’s going on. American Indian students from Cal Poly and UCLA arrive to volunteer support. Before I know it, I’m one of those helping out. The more I sand, the closer I am to the tomol. Sometimes I stop in the middle of the day and am silent in respect to the ancient peoples who left the witness of their lives, their visions, the strength of their faith for us to ponder.

My son Jay, is one of those kids helping out. He knows about the pleasure found in working hard, and seeing the good results of that work. As he sands the pieces of wood I watch him find his relationship with the plank canoe he is helping to create.

Our real goal is not only the finished tomol; it is also the season long process of working together. Still, everyone eagerly waits the day the vessel will be launched. When the maiden voyage takes place, within the harbor, there is only a small gathering of people. Before the “official” crewmembers begin their training we get to know the tomol. Her name is Alolkoy—dolphin in Chumash. She is twenty-five feet long, and made of redwood. Conditions in the harbor are ideal. The sun is warm; a soft, steady sea breeze blows at our backs. We fill sandbags for ballast, and then one at a time, we each have a turn sitting inside the tomol.

Alolkoy is much lighter than I ever imagined. Slowly I become one with her. I only have to “think” of shifting my weight left, and she responds almost before I even move. By the end of the day I understand we should not take photographs while we are with her, not yet anyway. First I watch someone drop a camera into the ocean, and then the back of my camera opens, exposing my film.

Remembrance weighs heavy on my mind, as it does for most Native people seeking to affirm cultural identity in a high-tech world. There is a comfort in being with those who understand. Our kids do not have to trade in their Indian values for education; the project carried ancient memory and cultural knowledge into their lives today.

First Published in the winter 1997 issue of News from Native California, An Inside View of the California Indian World. © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Terra Trevor is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web http://terratrevorauthor.blogspot.com

Postscript
Some of the children who participated in the backyard building Tomol workshop, have grown up to become crewmembers and have made crossings from the mainland to Santa Cruz Island.

Read more in the article Full Circle: Chumash Cross Channel in Tomol to Santa Cruz Island by Roberta Cordero, member and co-founder of the Chumash Maritime Association.

Voices

2010-08-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

By Diane Christian

Late last fall, early morning, I heard the phone ring. I picked it up and heard my brother’s voice. He said, "Diane- Dad collapsed on Gram’s floor. He wasn’t breathing. He’s in an ambulance now. I’m on my way to meet him at the hospital."

I have no sense of how many minutes passed before the phone rang again. Somewhere in between the calls from my brother I phoned my grandmother. She said, "Dear, he wasn’t breathing for a long time. He’s gone now."

When my brother phoned from the hospital he told me that he was going to put the ER doctor on the phone. I needed to give my permission for my father to die. I did. I don’t remember what I said or how I said it - but he is dead now.

I have two daughters. Both are adopted from China. My youngest was adopted first, at age 2½ and was 6 when my father died. My oldest lived in China for almost 8 years before joining our family. She was 10½ when my father died.

The night of my father’s death I remember saying out loud, but to no one in particular, "I don’t know how to live without a parent."

My oldest daughter heard my cry. She came to my side, placed her hand on my shoulder and said, "You just do."

My youngest daughter refused to leave my side. A well of fear emerged from within her and she raged and wailed in anger at the thought of being separated from me. The equation was simple— if I could lose my father then she could lose me.

Somewhere in the first days of death, I remember hearing my oldest daughter say,"We should burn money for Grandy so he can buy what he needs in Heaven."

In the fog of grief many voices floated by. The voices of strangers, people at banks, cremation services, social security. Voices emerged from piles of letters that my father saved when he was serving in the armed forces in Korea. There were the voices of friends and family that reminded me that I was not the one who left... I was still here.

Sometimes in my dreams there was the voice of my father. Once I dreamed that he was in bed and struggling to get up. He was trying to talk to me. I reminded him that he was dead and that it was OK to leave me.

When the shroud of grief began to unravel, I asked my oldest daughter to tell me about burning money for the dead. She said, every year her village community would gather and burn fake money as an offering to their ancestors. Sometimes they would burn images of clothing and cars and whatever they felt like their ancestors might need on the other side.

On my father’s birthday we wrote letters to him. After we read them aloud, we burned them. We fed our words to the fire with hope that the smoke would carry our voices beyond.

Copyright © 2010 Diane Christian. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Diane Christian is a short story writer and essayist who is currently tackling her first novel.

A Copper Miner’s Great Granddaughter Reflects

2010-06-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

By Margie Perscheid

On the radio recently my morning commute offered up coverage of the horror of the Upper Big Branch mine tragedy and the woeful state of mine safety in the U.S. As I listened my thoughts quickly turned to something far more personal— my family which first came to America in 1898, were copper miners in Upper Michigan. My great-grandfather took a detour to Arizona to work in the copper mines there, and was killed in a mining accident.

My family never knew the whole story, but was only told he had been electrocuted by a piece of equipment and buried near Bisbee. His wife had stayed behind in Michigan, and all she could do was gather up the kids, my mother’s father and his brother, and go back to the old country. My grandfather, however, had been born in Michigan and therefore had U.S. citizenship. He came back to work the Michigan mines, and soon brought his wife and two children, my uncle and mother, to join him.

This story didn’t open up to me in bits and pieces, but rather as a whole, a kind of shared experience-recollection of and by the people who lived it, passed it on, and took it in. It seemed to spring up from some unconscious place where it had been resting, implanted by countless retellings stretching back to my childhood. I was a little surprised at how deeply connected I felt to this miner identity, since my life has been so different from those of my grandparents and great-grandparents. But there it was, just like the connection I felt to the thousands of others whose family stories look much like mine. Shared history makes us community. It meant nothing to me when I was a kid. My Balkan family and their stories embarrassed me; I yearned for lighter skin and hair and eyes, and a name like Miller or Moore. I wanted to be something other than I was, until I left and made my home in a place where the divisions of my childhood had no meaning.

As I grew up and moved away from home, I began to see the world through a different lens, and learned to appreciate the treasure of my family’s story. Years later, becoming a parent through adoption taught me the impact of its loss. The more I appreciate my family story, the sadder and angrier I become that my children have been denied theirs. With age I have also come to understand that family histories change with the passing of time. As memories dim and new experiences eclipse the old, future generations will learn a different story from the one I know. The important thing is that the history and the story are theirs to claim, just as the story I hold dear is mine. Whatever goes forward belongs to each of us in the same way our bodies do, and deserves the same respect.

Copyright © 2010 Margie Perscheid. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margie Perscheid has been active in the Korean adoption community in Washington, DC since 1989. She is the co-founder of Korean Focus, an organization for adoptive families with Korean children offering educational and cultural programs and services to families in the DC area. Margie has been a member of the Advisory Board of KAAN and was co-coordinator of the 2003 KAAN Conference in Arlington, Virginia. She was a member of the Board of the Korean Branch of the Washington Metro YMCA (now the Chung Choon Young Foundation); and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Washington DC Chapter of Korean American Coalition. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband, son, and daughter.

Common Sense of Fatherhood

2010-06-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

By Robert Villalobos

I remember reading a few books about parenting awaiting the birth of my first daughter. There are now so many out there and just like family and old wives tales everyone has an opinion. Did those books truly help? In all honesty what can truly prepare a person in a decision that will alter their lives forever. I know one certainty in that I am thankful to have two healthy and happy children that enjoy life.

This coming Father’s day not only am I thankful my Dad is still alive to give me his wisdom, I will be thankful in the knowledge his Grandchildren are also able to witness this gift. In our growth from infancy to adulthood somewhere along the way we think we know more than our parents. How many times are we often wrong? I remember a few times I was afraid to discuss my schoolwork,sports, or other trivial issues with my father for fear of not receiving his approval. Some children feared a spanking I feared my Dad shaking his head in frustration knowing I did not give my best effort. How do Dad’s know that? I also remember asking myself did he go to a special class or read a special book to learn this! Now I know that I am I Dad I know this is gift given to every Dad but it is up to each of us to make the most of this gift. Thanks Dad for teaching me this.

In the current news cycle thanks to reality television there are stories of Father’s putting there children at risk not for the child’s sake but maybe a goal or dream they never obtained. I remember teaching my daughter how to walk and wished I could buffer every room in the house because I did not want to see her in pain if she fell. When she got to ride the bus to school I wanted to call the school and mandate they put an extra bumper on the side of the bus and call for a police escort so there would be no traffic on the way. I never did any of the above because with every fall or tear I hoped would soon be followed by laughter. They continue to still amaze me as with many tears along the way there have been many more moments of joyous laughter.

Being a Dad is truly an amazing gift. The highs and lows and all the little valleys in between make for a unique lifetime experience. In this game of life there are no do over’s. I cherish everyday I am able to experience this reward. The tears and the laughter seems like I’ve been in this garden before. This time I remind myself to take the time and smell the flowers. I have been blessed and I can only hope like my Father before me I have planted a bountiful harvest that will be plentiful to last for generations.

Copyright © 2010 Robert Villalobos. All rights reserved.

Old Pictures of Mom

2010-05-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

By Jen Hilzinger

My mom died suddenly a month and a half before I turned 31.
She was 58. Glen and I had been married for 8 years and both of our older kids were home with us. She lived in Florida during the winter, but we had just spent a couple of weeks together over the holidays. Of course we were busy with the dealings of the holiday, she was busy traveling to all the relatives homes, trying to see everyone and catch up on all that she had missed since the last time she was here, and I was blissfully in the throws of being a mom of two busy little ones.

My mom always stayed to help, and by helping it usually meant holding baby E and now big sister M, reading books, daydreaming with me over coffee about what kind of people they were going to be. She loved bathing them and getting jammies on. She loved babies, especially at bath time. Johnson's Baby Wash was her favorite. I made sure to use it too. She loved teaching me all of the tricks and skills of caring for a baby and toddler. I loved listening to her. Of course I did not know that was the last time I would see her alive. I would have asked her more about letting teens make their own mistakes and always loving them though it all. And living with depression. She was expert at each.

I've been back through the photos of that holiday; I didn't get ONE good picture of her with the kids together. I can't believe I missed that. It was our first Christmas with son E home from Korea, and his birthday is December 25th. He turned one that year. My mom would be gone on February 12th without so much as a goodbye.

I now make a point to aim the camera at the adults in the room too, every once in a while. It was a hard way to learn that lesson. I learned a few other brutal lessons through losing her the way I did.

I remember the first day I was alone in our house after she died. All of the commotion of planning the funeral and burial were done, all the thank you notes had been written, although initially I was not sure what to thank people for. My pen hesitated on the first few notes, even toying with the idea of skipping this part. Perhaps that is why food is a part of funerals, you can thank people and feel grateful for at least the time and effort it took to bring food. It felt strange thanking people for coming to the funeral, although I did, as that as is the way you greet people. But really I wish they didn't have to add this to their day. I wished they could just go home and eat dinner after work, not fish around for last minute baby sitters for the kids, rummage around for something black (or dark blue, dark blue is OK right?) to wear. I wished I wasn't there and certainly wished my mom was alive.

After all of the planning, procedure and social graces of burying a mom (MY mom) were done, the kids back on somewhat routines, baby son E was napping (in small doses), daughter M back in preschool, I looked forward to being alone.
That first day back to 'normal' I just happened to look out the window when the mailman came to deliver a package for Glen for work. I opened the door before he rang the bell and already the tears were halfway down my checks. I instantly felt this stab of pain for everyone that did not know her and all she wasn't going to be able to see or do. I had big plans for her! The fierceness of that realization surprised me.

If a living body gives off energy and other human bodies receive that energy, it makes sense to me that there is a certain level of that energy that remains within the receiver and I believe that energy is located in the middle of the throat. It stays there.

"I'm sorry you didn't meet her. You would have loved her." I said to the friendly mailman just doing his regular route, trying to smile, hoping these pale words would comfort him even a little. I didn't want the realization of her loss to break him—he had to finish his route. After all he was missing out on his life would not be the same as it would have been, even if he had just met her for a brief moment. Her kindness was palpable; her ability to see people without judgment was healing in a sometimes broken world, and her willingness to do for others at times, pathological. The butterfly effect had made its brutal impact on this mailman, and so many thousands, maybe millions of others.

Mom often stayed with us for a few days, and she did on that last trip too, although the details of that stay forgotten the minute it was over. She often stayed with us long enough for her to get into the routine of our lives, which several times a week involved receiving packages for Glen's work. It is just faster for him to get them at home vs. being routed through the mailroom, since he was traveling so much, the package could sit on his desk until he needed it. Mom would have met the mailman eventually. Perhaps she already did.

"It's OK." He said, clearly confused about my awkward comment and my tears. He didn't do a great job of convincing me that it was going to be.

© 2010 Jen Hilzinger. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Jen Hilzinger and her husband are raising 3 active kids ranging in age from 3-15. Jen has served on numerous adoption, Korean American and Asian American philanthropic and educational organizations including the Council of Asian Pacific Americans and Sae Jong Society of Metro Detroit. Jen co-founded Families with Children from China - Metro Detroit in 1996 after they adopted their daughter from China and is currently on the Families for Children Board, a 30+ year old support group for adoptees from Korea and their families as well as KACE: Korean American Cultural Exchange. Jen writes at Attemptedmother http://www.attemptedmother.blogspot.com

A Note From the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation

2010-04-06T21:40:00.001-07:00

From: all-employees-bounces@lists.cherokee.org [mailto:all-employees-bounces@lists.cherokee.org] On Behalf Of Chad Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 11:13 AM
To: All Employees (mailing list)
Subject: Wilma Mankiller

Dear Friends,
Our personal and national hearts are heavy with sorrow and sadness with the passing this morning of Wilma Mankiller, our former Principal Chief. We feel overwhelmed and lost when we realize she has left us but we should reflect on what legacy she leaves us. We are better people and a stronger tribal nation because her example of Cherokee leadership, statesmanship, humility, grace, determination and decisiveness. When we become disheartened, we will be inspired by remembering how Wilma proceeded undaunted through so many trials and tribulations. Years ago, she and her husband Charlie Soap showed the world what Cherokee people can do when given the chance, when they organized the self-help water line in the Bell community She said Cherokees in that community learned that it was their choice, their lives, their community and their future. Her gift to us is the lesson that our lives and future are for us to decide. We can carry on that Cherokee legacy by teaching our children that lesson.

Wilma asked that any gifts in her honor be made as donations to One Fire Development Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to advancing Native American communities though economic development, and to valuing the wisdom that exists within each of the diverse tribal communities around the world. Tax deductible donations can be made atwww.wilmamankiller.com as well as www.onefiredevelopment.org. The mailing address for One Fire Development Corporation is 1220 Southmore Houston, TX 77004.

Wilma Mankiller: Speaking About Her Life In Her Own Words
www.wilmamankiller.com

Wilma Pearl Mankiller Remembrance:
Watch video by clicking on this link.

. . .

Opening The Door For Change: Thoughts on Death By Cancer

2010-04-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

By Terra Trevor

“Why do you suppose when a person dies from cancer they say he lost the battle?” My son asked. His face was pinched with confusion.

I blinked in surprise.

“Don’t worry Mom, I know dying is not about losing.” And with the zeal of a kid determined to restore order to the universe he announced, “Heaven is filled with winners.”

In 1999 my fifteen-year-old son faced a cancer diagnosis and received medical treatment of outstanding quality. Still the tumor gained ground rapidly. Courage, like love, requires hope to flourish. Jay found his way through the stages as they came up. He held life in his two hands and was squeezing out its sweetest juices. Having a positive attitude was important to him. As ill as he was, he gave the impression he’d outlive all of us. But suddenly his condition worsened.

Following my son's death I received stacks of cards I treasured from earnest friends. Their sweet messages almost restored my courage, yet nearly all contained the lines, "We're so sorry Jay lost the fight."

Everyday since I have begun to witness numerous random acts, and lives lived for which I call winning. The child on chemo who reassures a new friend that "her hair will too grow back." The teenager who drags his IV pole from his bed to sit outside with friends. The young mother who allows a Hospice nurse to help her wash her hair and take a bath. The father, neighbor, teacher, your friends and mine—everyday ordinary people are called upon to do extraordinary things, like finding pockets of happiness, reaching deep, loving wide and living a good life in the midst of a cancer diagnosis—even when sometimes it appears life is coming to a full circle closure.

Perhaps not cancer, yet each one of us will die one day. What I know for sure is my son and dozens of others I’ve loved who have lived long and short lives following a stint of cancer have proved it’s time to challenge and reject cancer-clichés that speak in terms of winning or loosing. Because isn’t life about how we play the game?

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Terra Trevor, of Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca ancestry, is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She has led workshops for The Society of Southwestern Authors, volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, has worked with American Indian Health & Services with HIV and AIDS programs, with We Can Pediatric Brain Tumor Network, Hospice, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web www.terratrevor.com

Washing the Blankets

2010-03-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

By Kimberly L. Becker

After your fever breaks

and you’re headed back to school,

I strip your bed

to wash the residue of flu.

Pillowcases, sheets, blankets

all heaped into the wash.

I think of other blankets,

other outcomes.

Add bleach to the load.

Aim to get the blankets white, white, white.

First published in Crab Creek Review, Summer 2009
© Kimberly L. Becker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kimberly L. Becker is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers. Her poetry appears in many journals and anthologies, such as Diverse Voices Quarterly, Future Earth Magazine, I Was Indian (FootHills), Pemmican, Platte Valley Review, and Poets and Artists. Finalist for the DeNovo Award (C&R Press), she received a FY10 grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD) to study Cherokee language, history, and culture in Cherokee, NC. Current projects include adapting Cherokee myths into plays for Cherokee Youth in Radio Project at the Cherokee Youth Center in Cherokee, NC.

Words Facing East (WordTech Editions, 2011) is her first book of poetry.

Visit her website at www.kimberlylbecker.com

The Spirits Need Us As Much As We Need Them

2010-03-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

By MariJo Moore

And when the last secret of the world is known
life will begin again.

When time has crawled inside itself
and discovered it never existed,

when the river spirits blacken into
the bluing mouth of the sky
then we shall know there is,
there always has been

a sacred place where the spirits gather
to pray for us all.

© 2009 MariJo Moore

MariJo Moore (Cherokee/Irish/Dutch) is the author of a dozen books including Spirit Voices of Bones, Confessions of a Madwoman, Red Woman With Backward Eyes and Other Stories, The Diamond Doorknob, The Boy With A Tree Growing From His Ear and Other Stories, and the editor of four anthologies including Genocide of The Mind: New Native Writings and Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust. The recipient of numerous literary and publishing awards, she resides in the mountains of western North Carolina where she presides over rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING.

Fatherhood: What It Takes To Be A Hero

2010-02-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

By Robert Villalobos

A parent is not just a person we are associated by blood, but someone that truly has poured their heart and soul and all the little parts that make each of us individuals into a great unknown. If you were to buy a lottery ticket tomorrow would it matter that you won or would you appreciate it even more because you embraced the hope and possibility you could win?

There are many of us that chose to take a greatest gamble and become parents. What a wonderful journey into the great unknown. Only in time will we truly know and appreciate the impact we are able to have on someone greater than ourselves. I am sure any Dad out there knows this feeling, if it was not sports, maybe it was music or dance, if not maybe it was a simple board game or a time or place that a great moment was enjoyed. Ask any father out their when they remember the birth of their child or when they first received their adoptive child and I am sure the majority of the time you will see a smile, often times hear a story describing the experience.

The life lessons that, as parent we can contribute to the future generations is insurmountable. Often time my daughters will tell me tidbits I still find amazing they remember at their young ages. It also takes me back to a fond memory of a kid when my family camped by the lake or beach. I used to pick up a rock or pebble and throw it in the water. Sometimes that rock would sink but if you were able to skip it just right that piece of Mother Earth danced upon the water and left a great ripple effect. It doesn’t take just being a Dad or parent to appreciate this act but to learn a great lesson along the way only enhances those memories. Whether you are the rock or if maybe you were the water enjoy the moment and always remember to be thankful for experience because that truly is what living is about!

In life sometimes through our trials and tribulations many people will look for the easy way out or try to find an excuse and blame others for their own shortcomings. Life truly is what we make of it. All the wonderful and sometimes not so wonderful memories we experienced as a child in our development helped us become who we are today. This lesson in life became even more apparent when I first became a Dad. The responsibility of a parent will always remain enormous, but the joys and sorrows can never be replaced even if that time was shorter that we could have wished for. Enjoy the moments.

I am currently shopping for a new television, there are several choices out there and I will make my best choice once I have seen all the options. Once I purchase this product it comes with a manual, yet I never received one once I became a parent, nor did my parents. I am sure at times they wish they had volume control or even better an on or off switch. I know that was on my wish list for some of my brothers and sisters.

Life I think has always been a great unknown. The future is an even greater unknown, but our future will be what we make for it ourselves. I miss the area I grew up in especially the beaches, but I also remember walking on the beach and seeing footprints of someone in the area before me, I also remember looking back at the imprints I created and asked myself if the next person that came along this path would interpret in the same way I did. The contributions are out there for each of us to individually make, but will we chose the path to become a hero?

© 2010 Robert Villalobos

We Are Community

2010-01-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

By Terra Trevor

When my three kids were growing up we began gathering weekly with other parents in our community. In the winter we took turns meeting at each other’s homes for potluck dinners, and in the summer we met every Thursday at sunset for picnic dinners at the park. We had frequent Saturday swim parties, and twice a year we all camped together at the beach, or along the river at Sage Hill.

With a few families banning together to do the planning and hosting but letting burdensome details fall, away allowed everyone to share in the joy of the day. We were willing to float those friends whose presence we enjoyed, overlooking the fact that their lives were always too busy to host. For me the heart of the matter was the years when my son had cancer and I couldn’t stretch wide enough to cover all that needed doing. My friends did my share of the work. Now I give too many favors, knowing one day I may again need to join those who float.

I feel it is important to keep the old neighborhood tradition of families gathering. It is the element that gives a small community feeling to our big city life. Without this group of close-knit friends my kids would have missed out on knowing what it was like having cousins and aunts and uncles living nearby. When our friends group went camping and my son had grown healthy again after rounds of chemotherapy, and had reached the age that allowed him to be among the older children and teens who sauntered off and played flashlight tag until quite late, nothing made me happier than knowing that this gathering made it possible for him to run with a pack, to attain that brass ring of adolescent acceptance. Yet I suspect his real joy was reading to little kids already tucked into sleeping bags at dusk, then sauntering off with the older kids.

Getting to repeat the things that remind my kids of their early childhood, then moving on to the next rank, is an important rite of passage. Although my oldest daughter preferred to stay on the fringe of the group, sometimes appearing withdrawn, twenty years later I’ve discovered that she was indeed absorbing and learning from the group’s dynamics. She joined our family through adoption and became my daughter at age ten. Our friends and neighbors gave her belonging in those tender first years we were together, a safe harbor.

We need a community of close friends to grow, laugh, cope, deal and celebrate with. Over the years a number of us have become extended family to each other. A single bracelet does not jangle; the connectedness we have to each other is so much a part of our lives, it can’t be distinguished from our lives. It’s apparent in the emails we send each other full of the schedules we make, and the routine of the phone messages we leave each other. Our lives are braided as we walk the same sidewalks, bring food when there is a death, and watch each other’s children and grandchildren grow. My heart fills when we gather, knowing it will permeate my body and cling to my soul as a reminder once I leave the circle, of what I can feel so clearly when we are all together.

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Terra Trevor, of Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca ancestry, is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She is a contributing writer for Adoption Today magazine, has led workshops for The Society of Southwestern Authors, volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web www.terratrevor.com and at In Writing Motherhood http://inwritingmotherhood.blogspot.com

Transracial Adoption Then and Now

2009-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Terra Trevor

In 1984 I received a long-awaited phone call from my social worker. “It’s a boy.” I was outside watering sprouting morning glories, and before I answered the phone I had one of those knowing feelings and knew it would be the adoption agency telling me about my soon-to-be child.

Four months later on a crisp December morning in Seoul, Korea, a wide-eyed baby was readied to leave his homeland. Dressed in a pink bunting to keep out the winter chill, one-year-old Kook Yung was carried aboard Korean Airlines, and he set off for a new life; adoption in the United States. When the plane landed in California, Kook Yung was placed in my arms, and I felt awareness deeper than the ocean, grasping the loss his first mother endured. That boy became my son, Jay. The one who would later pick purple and yellow wild flowers for me, and bestowed me with the title of adoptive parent and the pleasure of being his mother.

It was before e-mail was widely available, in an era prior to the common use of FAX machines and computers. My kitchen telephone and the family calendar was the nerve center of our household. Adoption documents were hand-carried overseas whenever possible. Jays’ referral photo and my monthly subscription to OURS magazine arrived by surface mail. My mailbox, located near the curb and surrounded by tangle of magenta geraniums, was my lifeline. The group of adoptive parents my husband and I had befriended gathered on a regular basis to tell stories and share information, meeting face to face.

Where are all those mothers and fathers who gathered at the kitchen table and told stories around the stove? We are sitting at our computers, of course. It makes things faster going in terms of getting information and meeting new friends. And yet we’ve gained and lost. Without cell phones and computers we had the luxury of time. Yet the Internet has without a question of a doubt enriched my life. Without e-mail I certainly would not be able to stay in contact with the Korean adoptive parents I met when I was invited to speak on a panel comprised of four American adoptive mothers and four Korean adoptive mothers at the 2006 KAAN Conference held in Seoul.

And the other day while I was writing the first draft of this story, sitting at my desk on the west coast staring at the screen, I decided to query Carrie in New Jersey via e-mail, and ask her opinion. She wrote to me saying that she feels there have been many positive changes since the first generation of International adoptees arrived. But the pendulum has begun to swing too far the other way, and that does a disservice. When I questioned her further she said adoptive parents today want to be given a checklist of things they should do, or not do, in order for their child to turn out all right; meaning whatever OK is for that parent in order to meet their own parenting expectations. She added, “Five years ago I was working my way thorough the checklist and today I am trying leave it behind and listen to the needs my kids have and respond to each of them with what they need.”

I can breath a sigh of relief because my kids are already grown and have been for years and years, and I didn’t even know there was a checklist. We had talked with our kids about adoption early on. My husband and I were open to having contact with birth parents. We acknowledged loss and grief. Our children grew up within a circle of friends who were also adopted. And we lived a racially diverse lifestyle. Was there more I needed to know?

I asked my friend Mark because it is always good to get a second opinion. Especially since he was adopted transracially and is a father, and he has great parenting sense. “Even if you are the best parent in the world, children will still need to explore until they find an identity fit that feels right for them.” He explained. “It goes with the territory, all transracial adoptees will have varying degrees of identity issues.” I chuckled. “And so will their parents.” I added. “And that includes me.”

The biggest change that has taken place is the fact that today we have former children who came home to their families as babies and toddlers who are now grown up. They are parents and grandparents, mature adults who have been informed by their life experience. Funnily the tables are turned. Instead of the quizzical stares and oddball comments from strangers that trailed me when my kids were young, today the insensitive comments I hear asked slip from the mouths of adoptive parents, and are directed toward adopted adults. Adoptive parents both create and reflect adoptive parenting attitudes and social values—and yet so do adopted adults. However, too many adoptive parents are slow to grant adopted adults the custody of their own lives and voice. The result is a metamorphosis of adopted people often viewed as a dependent group. Yet we must realize that some of those who came in the first wave of adoption from Korea will soon be nearing retirement age, and because we need to respect and learn from our elders, and bridge it with the strong community of young adopted adults speaking out, which now includes those born in China giving voice, I take heart in knowing more change is on the horizon.

Thankfully families created in the last twenty-five years through transracial adoption have benefited from what was learned during those twenty-five years: that acknowledging race and ethnicity is important. However, when I think of transracial adoption today, pictures of segregated groups of people float into my consciousness as I watch it fast becoming too polarized. We've broken ourselves down into enclaves of Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Latin American and many other adoption groups. I believe that while ethnicity and heritage is important, and is core to me as a Native American woman, our strength is also in coming together as a blended community of voices including people of all ages and backgrounds, banding together and bridging our experiences, instead of segregating.

“We had come so far from where we started, and weren’t nearly approaching where we had to be, but we’re on the road to becoming better.” Maya Angelou wrote, and from my perspective her words also speak to transracial adoption.

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Terra Trevor, of Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca ancestry, is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She is a contributing writer for Adoption Today magazine, has led workshops for The Society of Southwestern Authors, volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web www.terratrevor.com and at In Writing Motherhood http://inwritingmotherhood.blogspot.com

Juanita Centeno

2009-11-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

The story of a Legend, My Grandma

Grandmother to All
By Robert Villalobos

I am blessed to have many historical documents relating to the history of my family and stating the origins of my heritage as one of the original families of California. My Grandmother, Juanita Centeno, left a legacy that will be remembered and respected for generations to come.

My Grandmother was a unique individual not just in spirit; she would do anything for someone she didn’t know, not because they needed the help but because it was the right thing to do. This was in essence of her statement or belief, “Do unto someone as you would have done onto you.” I remember as a young child seeing the display of a ceramic on her back doorframe. This monument stated “Don’t judge a person until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.” What an amazing impact a little tribute can make on young child. What is astonishing today is how I wonder how few of these accolades were around reservations back then, but most importantly how many people showcased them in the days before being Indian was accepted and valued. I may never know the story of how she obtained it but one thing I am certain of I know she lived it.

Although my Grandmother gave several interviews in her lifetime, she did not wish to be in newspapers or national magazines she was there to protect the origins and footsteps of our Elders. She did not only teach the culture she lived it. She and another Elder not only lived this life but also came to define it. I have witnessed articles in the area relating to teaching, and I wonder what it must have been like for the parents of non-native children to discuss this situation with their kids. Please remember this was a time not so long ago before political correctness was even a term. How, I wonder, how must it have felt when their child came home and discussed this culture which they may never have known about before Juanita’s classroom presentation? I am sure many were able to relate to the love of family, others unfortunately saw the ugly side of prejudice, because too many adults fear the unknown.

There are several personal stories I could tell which would help people to relate to a time or place, or maybe just fond memory. These stories will be told to future generations not from just my own experience but hopefully to all who were able to be a part of their great heritage our those who were able to experience a little from this exceptional woman. Today I challenge everyone not just to tell an experience but instead to recount the guidance of a unique individual. I was fortunate to live this life firsthand, tenfold. For many others I am sure there was a teacher, a counselor, or another mentor who taught you, and now it is your turn to pass it on.

Every day as we get older we leave behind something, but what many forget to realize is the delight of our childhood in its innocence. My Grandmother not only knew this but also was able to transcend children of every race to what it must have been like when she was a child. She did this by appealing to all the senses. Children were able to see, hear, touch, smell and taste items they may have never seen before and her presentation table was a unique experience. There were no winners or losers because I will never know who received more enjoyment from this interaction the children or my Grandmother.

There are many articles written about great figureheads and those that were pioneers in the equality of individuals. Juanita was a true pioneer, she taught in school classrooms because it was a chance to enrich lives. There have always been perceptions about Native Americans and this issue still remains today. If you were to ask children in schools today their perception of an Indian, I am sure they would raise their hand to their mouth and make a whooping sound similar to early perception in television and movies. Adults and children alike still due this today at football games of the Florida State Seminoles or Atlanta Braves baseball games and do “The Tomahawk Chop” with some type of whooping sound. My Grandmother made sure that the children around her were able to learn while in her presence and become one with her. They would then take the lessons learned home to family. She didn’t care about fame or press clippings, her mission was to teach. It was up to us to gain knowledge from her lessons.

There were no boundaries when she was a child. She would look up to the stars at night and know the stories of her ancestors and a freedom that we might never know. How lucky were we to experience just a minor part of her love for this world and her heritage. I am certain a lesson for all is no matter our age we never stop learning especially from our children, but most importantly our actions today will have a profound effect on not just our children but future generations.

My Grandmother was a great trickster, but she always did this in a positive way. There are times I still laugh at today of how my Grandmother would make the excuse that she was going into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and the next thing I knew she would come out with a plate of beads of different colors and ask me to separate them. It took me well until my adult years to realize she didn't just get a cup of coffee she went to separate some vials of beads and put them on a plate for me to separate. In my task of separating the beads I learned patience, perseverance, and most importantly those intimate moments with family that a holiday cannot express.

I will tell a story my Grandmother told me and I have passed on to my children and it is the story of the Hawk. When I was a young child around the age of ten I would sometimes take trips with my Grandmother and as we were driving she would point out a hawk many of which are seen greatly on the Central Coast. I would always fall for this trick as she did it to me and I would look up at the hawk, she would then point out to me that “the Hawk was laughing at me.” I would just smile but would also train my eyes to try my hardest to see the expression on the face of this majestic creature. My Grandmother would then again tell me “he is laughing at you” and I would say “no he is not.” She would smile and sometimes laugh because she got a reaction. I would strain my eyes harder to try and see if the hawk was truly laughing at me as my Grandmother said, unfortunately I was never able to witness this act. When I would finally give up in despair she would impart on me her great wisdom and as she sometimes did and this would be in a question. “Do you know why the hawk is laughing at you?” I would always say “no Grandmother” and I would see the smile appear and then she would state. “He is laughing at you because you can not fly.” I remember being upset as a child because I could not fly like the Hawk. Then we would both look at each other and laugh and enjoy the moment we created.

I may not be able to fly like a Hawk but I still to this day I am able to see the beauty of his flight. Most importantly the lesson she was teaching that we are one with nature. I am grateful that I am able to look at something so pure as the flight of a hawk and see beauty of this creature how he is at one with wind currents and a gracefulness that I would have never known had it not been for this amazing “Grandmother to All.”

Copyright © November 2009 Robert Villalobos.
All rights reserved.

Teaching The Children

By Terra Trevor

On a June morning I stood with Juanita Centeno. She was an integral part of Chumash cultural revival; a culture many people thought was lost forever. Born in 1918 and raised by her grandfather in the Indian way, she learned early that her calling and life’s course was to teach the traditional Chumash way. Materials were the ones Mother Earth provided. She made certain nothing was misused and care was taken to teach even the youngest child to take from the earth only what was needed.

We stood near the creek in a place lightly touched, almost rural, under a sky so clear it had no end. Juanita turned to me and said, “My cousin is teaching with me today. It’s time, and he is ready.”

Tables were set up near a sedimentary sand stonewall; the stone masonry brought by father Junipero Serra’s Franciscans. The beige-pink stone stood the same as it did a hundred years ago. It talked to you, told you its stories. You could feel it more than hear it.

On this day our project was to make the musical instrument called wansak', made from a partly split stick of elderberry wood.

Juanita’s skilled knowledge did not take the upper hand. You worked side by side with her as an equal. I watched her look each elderberry tree branch over carefully to make sure she got the right one to start with. Then she took a knife out of its sheath, and handed it to my eleven-year-old daughter.

It was a lot of work scraping the bark off, getting it all smooth and down to the same thickness. The smell and the taste of Elderberry worked itself into the palms of our hands. It took a long time to saw the tree branch down the middle, leaving a handle-sized piece at one end, just the way it ought to be. Things were going along fine, and then the branch began to split. Someone offered to finish the cut, but Juanita said, “No. The child must learn to do for herself.”

Awkwardly my daughter finished at a wider angle. As we gathered weekly I came to feel like a granddaughter to this wizened woman in the summer of 1992, the last summer of Juanita’s life.

Recently while in the midst of packing up and moving into a home of her own, my daughter pulled the wansak' out of the box where our hand-made things are kept.

My daughter is an adult now, and her skill with a sharpened knife is exact. Gingerly she slid her fingers across the smooth wood of the Elderberry. Then she slapped the wansak at her thigh and beat out a rhythm. The misguided cut sent out a snapping sound instead of the traditional hollow clap. There was a flicker of childhood past in her eyes,“Remember.” She said,
“Remember, I cut this whole branch by myself.”

Powwow Spirit: A Gathering of Tribes

2009-10-02T09:01:00.000-07:00

By Terra Trevor and Robert Villalobos

Powwow is a modern day word. All of the Elders I know tell me that before the First World War they were called gatherings. After the corn was all dried, pumpkins sliced and the wild plums brought in it was a time for giving thanks. When the food was together for the hard winter months and when the work was all done they gathered. After World War I these “gatherings” were held to honor those servicemen who came back. Today it is a reunion for many Native families, clans and tribes spread apart in different cities or reservations. There is the exchange of news, ideas, song, and dance, and it’s a time when Native people reflect on traditions.

Personal Reflection: I am gathered with friends and family under a bead blue California sky, my shawl is folded over my arm, and although we’ve been laughing and joking all afternoon, now we are quiet, silence is our conversation and it tells me more than words. We are careful to sit with our feet and knees a safe distance away from Eagle feathers and other peoples regalia. First there is a Ground Blessing, then the flag bearer’s lead in with the American flag, the state flag and an Eagle Staff. Next the Grand Entry; the dancers represent many different tribes. After all the dancers are in the Arbor a Flag Song is sung, a Prayer is offered, followed by a Victory Song. I feel the heartbeat of the drum. Hundreds of soft moccasins dancing, young men, women and girls Fancy Dancing, the Elders who barely move staying close to the earth.

The drum is one of the oldest memories an American Indian has, it has always been with us, and is the single most important element of a powwow. The dance arena or arbor is sacred and is respected, like the inside of a church. Many Native families travel hundreds of miles to attend powwows across the continent. Time and distance are not relevant; it is the renewal of traditions, which is of paramount importance. It brings a long heritage back into the framework of real life. While growing up I was taught each person has her or his own personal observance for dancing, drumming, singing and for being present at a powwow. Native people gathered around the arena are not observing - we are participating as we form a circle around the drums, singers and dancers.

Visitors are welcome, but powwows are an Indian event and are usually not directed toward non-Indians. Listen carefully to the Master of Ceremonies; this is a time for utmost respect. If in doubt ask for instructions, and remember a powwow runs on Indian time, which means it will begin when all the drums and dancers are ready. Ask before you photograph. It is polite to ask permission from the dancers before you take a picture if they are away from the arena. It is necessary to ask because some do not want to be photographed due to our longstanding traditional beliefs. No permission is needed for photos of the dancing inside the arena, except for the Southern Plains tradition of the Gourd Dance. This is a ceremonial dance done only by members of the warrior societies or those who have been invited in. Usually no photos can be taken of Gourd Dancing, although last weekend at our annual community powwow it was announced that it was OK to take photographs, so it is always best to pay careful attention to the Master of Ceremonies because the protocol can change from one powwow to the next.

If you are able, stand during the Grand Entry, Flag Songs and Invocation. And if you are lucky enough to be asked to dance the Two-step (a social dance) do not turn down an invitation by others, especially Elders.

"I began writing this story after being asked to explain the history and purpose to a group of school children and parents prior to attending their first powwow. But I was hesitant because it is such a great responsibility, yet I knew that I must begin, so that others can finish telling the story, so that the link of knowledge continues from person to person, from one generation to the next." —Terra

—Robert writes, “A gathering is full of many lessons, such as respect, honor, integrity, tradition, and passing on to future generations, and most importantly respect to the Elders. Many of today's youth would truly benefit from these traditions, which they may not be aware of or they may have forgotten.

I don't remember if it was my Grandmother who asked me to do this, but I'm sure it was. As a young child similar to my daughter's age I was asked to close my eyes and listen. I vividly remember the wonderful sound of the drums and then I was asked to visualize what it would have been like several hundred years ago. I was able to transcend myself to a time long ago, to the essential reason why many Indians where there to honor the past and be proud of our future. Some chose to do it in their own way such as become dancers and others chose to become drummers, and others were able to link to their great history in other ways. Each and every person was connected not just to the past and with the Elders, but was able to make a statement that we are still here. This is our celebration of life past, present and future.

I will leave you with a quote from my Grandmother,"If anyone has children, they better teach their children to follow traditions that we are leaving behind because it is later than we think with all that is going on." She stated this in an interview shortly before she passed away, I still find it amazing how true it still is today.”

Let the Music In

2009-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Dawn Downey

I tore open the unexpected package from my brother and a curled photo dropped into my hand. A slow breath slipped through my lips, when I recognized the teenaged girl whose fragile image I held. The wrinkled collar of a tan shirt framed her sallow face. She looked away from the camera into the void. On the back of the picture, my mother’s handwriting noted, Dawn – 1966 Age 15. I longed to forget this girl. But the mysteries behind her gaze crept into focus like an uninvited song remembering itself.

“High yellow bitch,” high school classmates screamed as they followed me home.
“You ain’t shit,” they yelled. But I already knew it.
“Do somethin’ with that pitiful head!”

We’d moved that year from Des Moines to Pasadena, California. The other girls taunted me for reasons I didn’t understand, and called me names I’d never heard before. As I slunk home with my eyes focused on the sidewalk, the voices stalked me like a pack of feral dogs.

Threats and P.E. were the joyless bookends of my 10th grade existence. And the dismal luck of the draw gave me first period swimming. The water turned my hair to sheep’s wool. I hid it under a brown headscarf until the end of the day. Once home, I headed straight for the bathroom to fight my hair.

“Dawn, what are you doing in there?”
My mother would not leave me alone.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you have homework?”
“No.”
10th grade was the year I got straight D’s.

So they shipped me off to Upward Bound, an academic summer camp for urban teenagers. We were destined to be the first in our families to make it to a university - that is, if we made it through high school. I lived at Occidental College in Los Angeles, with 49 other red, yellow and brown-skinned misfits. The federal government labeled us “high potential low achievers.” It was a kinder description than what I heard from my parents.

At Upward Bound, we spent our days in class, learning how to learn. We spent our evenings on field trips, learning how to live. One such journey introduced me to the ballet. When we stepped off our school bus at the Hollywood Bowl, the scent of night-blooming jasmine hung on the cool California air. The summer sky had not yet fully blackened. We marched, in too-tight shoes, to seats so far back that I couldn’t tell there were swans in Swan Lake. Miniature figures clad in bright colors leapt and flew and spun across the stage. Tchaikovsky seduced me. My tentative spirit unfolded to accept his embrace. At first I squinted to see the dance—then closed my eyes to imagine.

Worlds outside and inside me unfolded that summer. I released the breath I’d been holding all year.

Teachers introduced me to culture, but girlfriends introduced me to “cool.” They taught me the power of black eyeliner. They helped me cough my way through my first cigarette. I learned - if a boy smiled at me - to look at him sideways, scowl, and walk away—slowly.

On the afternoon of our first chaperoned party, we gathered in our lounge to trade clothes and do hair. We tossed skirts and dresses across the couches. Bottles, jars and shoes littered the floor. The room smelled of nail polish and perfumed lotions.

A dark-skinned junior from Jefferson High School turned my damaged “do” into a proud and towering Afro. I sat on the floor between her legs while her fingers danced across my head. When her knees pressed against my shoulders and her hands tug at my hair, the acerbic voices of the past year receded.

Conversation filled the room like soul music on a pricey stereo. Citified soprano sassiness played against the low slow rhythm of country drawl.
“You tender headed?”
“Gi-i-r-r-l-l that is so cute on you.”
“M-m-m, that boy is fi-i-i-ne.”

And then they taught me how to dance. On the radio Martha and the Vandellas wailed, "Nowhere to run to Baby, nowhere to hide," and everybody jumped up. With rollers in my hair and boys in my head, I stepped steps I never stepped before. The high yellow bitch disappeared. The feral dogs retreated

At the party that night, when Stevie Wonder sang I Was Made to Love Her, a short, skinny boy took me by the hand. He strutted onto the dance floor and I trailed behind him. When he turned to face me, the music told my body what to do. The borrowed dress swayed around my legs and I forgot to be afraid.

Decades later, I taped the photo to the frig and traced the sad, pre-Upward Bound cheek with my fingertip. The dancers-actors-writers I became whispered thank you—for those first brave steps that let the music in. I glimpsed my reflection in the glass cabinet door - the face lit by fiery crystal earrings and a scarlet blouse. Stevie Wonder played in my head and a molten rhythm oozed through my hips. I danced through the rest of my day.

First published in Skirt! Magazine. © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.

Dawn Downey is an award-winning writer. She is a member of the Writers Place - Midwest Center for the Literary Arts, and belongs to the Kansas City Writers Group and the Missouri Writers Guild. Visit her website at www.dawndowney.com

To Know The Past

2009-10-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

By Terra Trevor

I grew up with two Grandfathers. One gave me a life time of storytelling. The other ignored my questions about his childhood, school days, and boyish pranks. He never talked about growing up in Oklahoma. At age 19, he packed two shirts, left his hometown and hopped a freight train bound for California. His stories began when he moved to California, got his first job, married, bought a house and raised my dad.

"Our family lived in vast open land called Indian Territory." Aunt Lydia, Grandpa’s younger sister, explained. "We picked dandelions for our greens. There was one year when instead of a roof, we had a tarp stretched across the four walls of the house. But on clear nights we slept under the sky."

The day I heard this story for the first time I was sitting with Grandma shelling peas. I was seven, brown haired and freckle faced.

Later that night, Grandma sat in a rocking chair near the big, white front door. It was summer and the door was open. My mother said, “Play a tune for us Grandma.”

But Grandma didn’t want to play the harmonica; didn’t want to take out her teeth — not in front of so many people. The house was filled with relatives. Perhaps she sensed my disappointment. She told me a story about crossing the prairie in a horse-drawn wagon when she was a little girl.

“Oh, Grandma. Weren’t you afraid of Indians?” I said, wide-eyed.

“Child, we’re Indians.” She replied with twinkling eyes shining back at me.

I remember almost nothing of the horse-and-wagon story—only the part where she said “We’re Indians” stayed with me. Grandma's words reminding me, making sure that I know who I am.

And I also have my other grandfather, who gave me a life time of storytelling. His banjo playing came to mind the other day and wouldn’t leave.

Pappa played the banjo in the kitchen with the door closed, or in the bedroom with the door closed. It isn’t that he didn’t want anyone to hear him, although he did treasure his alone time with his music. While I cling tightly to my Indian-ness passed on to me, banjo music is also my deepest felt heritage.

While the cousins and my auntie and my grandma shouted, “Pappa close the door.” I sat on the floor drawing and coloring and cutting out paper dolls with my ear tuned to Pappa’s banjo playing.

My grandfather had a long neck Plectrum built in the late 1920’s, thre tenors and one old five-string plectrum. He liked to experiment with different tuning and kept each banjo at a different tune. While everyone in the family liked hearing my grandpa’s banjo playing, I was the only one who liked hearing it all of the time. The rhythm of the banjo speaks to me. I don’t feel drawn to play, my pleasure is in listening. I feel the tang of each cord, every song seems to float in it’s own color. Four Leaf Clover is silver-green. Waiting For The Robert E. Lee is brown, the calm color of dry weeds and grass, and Carolina Moon is bluer than Morning Glories.

My grandfather got his first banjo in 1922 at the age of ten. It was a five-string banjo bought for five dollars out of the Montgomery Ward mail-order catalog. He earned the money by milking cows and selling the cream. He taught himself to play it by looking at songs in old school music books he found at the thrift shop.
After studying the song, he would shut the book and try to match the tune.

“I left my first banjo in the coal shed at the house on 28th and Race Street,” Pappa explained. “We moved and I forgot to get it. But it was just a cheap one and by the time we moved I had a good Paramount banjo.”

“Is that the same house where you slept on the back porch in the summer and could hear mountain lions and coyotes”? I asked. Then it dawned on me that Elbert, Colorado is fifty miles south east of Denver and not at all near the natural world.

“Pappa, if you lived in the city how did you hear lions at night?” I asked.

My grandfather peered at me over the tops of his glasses. We were both silent, our conversation about banjo music seemed to have been left on some beautiful mountain on the other side of the continental divide.

Pappa answered slowly, “Our house was a block from the City Zoo.”

First published in The Four Directions American Indian Literary Quarterly.
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Terra Trevor, of Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca ancestry, is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She has led workshops for The Society of Southwestern Authors, volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web at www.terratrevor.com

Race and Identity: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

2009-09-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

When asked, my friend Julie will say she is Chinese. People ask her what she is all the time. You can’t guess by her outward appearance because she is Mexican, white and Chinese. Yet she feels closest to her Chinese ancestry and it is how she identifies herself.

I’m mixed blood Native American, like my friend Leslie, who was adopted by a Japanese American father and a Caucasian mother who valued her racial make-up, and understood that she needed to see herself reflected in community throughout her growing-up years. Many of my close friends are mixed race like I am, and their children, like mine, grew up surrounded and influenced by people of color.

My group of women friends also include adoptive mothers who are white women with Asian children, like mine are. They also understand their children need to see themselves reflected in community, and to be with people of color on a frequent basis in settings where dark skin is the majority and Asian eyes are the norm, and to have plenty of opportunity to be in places where people of Caucasian ancestry are the minority. We know that actions speak louder than words. We participate in our children's racial/ethnic community because we value the diversity, and recognize how we live shapes our children’s identity and their relationships with people of color. We don’t have racial/ethnic community involvement just for our children’s sake; we take interest because we are a multiracial family.

“And just when I thought I had it all figured out,” my friend Terri said, “We adopted two more kids.” Terri had a son and daughter who were both teenagers adopted from Korea, and when she decided to add more children to her family she chose domestic adoption within the United States and became the mother of a sibling pair who are white.

It didn’t take long for my friend to figure out her new children had been raised in environments that did not respect people of color. She was faced with teaching them about her own racial values beginning immediately. But she also discovered that while her newly adopted kids were making good progress at home with their Asian siblings, they were fearful when away from home, afraid to venture with their family into the Asian community or to go anywhere that was not predominately white.

What my friend experienced is similar to what I often find when I’m invited to speak at adoption conferences or participate in round table discussions on the topic of transracial adoption. Usually I meet white adoptive parents, who have children of color, and the family is living in a predominately white area of town, and they want to begin making changes to bring racial mixing into their lives, but their children are dragging their feet. However, recently an adoptive mom and dad who are raising a family of all white children sat in on our session and wanted ideas on how they could begin to embrace a more racially diverse lifestyle.

When kids have been coached to feel safest within the confines of a Caucasian boundary they can be afraid of change, just like we adults sometimes are. What can we do to increase their comfort level and expand their mindset? Normalizing race and culture happens best when there is an inheritance of ideas and attitudes conveyed from family or the people we choose to become friends with, and invite into our home. Usually I tell those who ask for my advice to begin with baby steps. First become a tourist in your own town. View your surroundings with new eyes. If you suddenly realize that you live in an all-white area, begin to look for ways to step out of your comfort zone, and add one new thing you can do each week that will bring changes so that your family will have the likelihood of being around people of color. Children learn about life from watching their parents interact with people, it has a direct impact on how they view themselves, and where and how they find their identity and racial comfort zone level.

Kids also need to see people of color working as professionals on a regular basis, instead of only in service jobs. Yet make sure they understand that blue collar and white collar jobs deserve equal respect, and are not defined by a person’s race.

If someone makes racist statements in your presence disrupt the offensive joke. If your child is present and you stay silent you are teaching your child it’s okay to make fun of people of color. How we respond will shape our children’s values.

How do I know? My earliest memories encircle me; watching Grandma sew beads on Uncle Elmer’s deer skin leggings. Realizing that I’m white and American Indian and what that meant. By observing that I am treated differently depending on if I was with a group of all white, or with all Native people. Figuring out that it was important for me to know who I am, and not to let my skin color define me. Not to let it define the way other people perceive me when they don’t know my story. Yet I can only speak from my own experience.

If you are a white person understand that you receive white privileges that people of color do not have. Help other white people understand their privileges. While I never deliberately try to pass or cross over, having light skin means that white society automatically grants me white privilege, something denied to my darker skinned family members and friends who are never mistaken for white.

It takes years to begin to understand a racial group of people that we were not born into. Don't buy into racial stereotypes. Accept that others may stereotype you. Do your best to acknowledge your own prejudices and work towards loosing them.

If you live in an area without racial diversity and can’t consider moving, then travel and spend vacation time in ethnic locations. Teach children not to judge others. Help them learn to value difference. Let them see there are many ways of living and being and to appreciate a multiplicity of unique ethnic characteristics. If money does not permit you to travel, then travel from your armchair. Watch films with your children that will bring racial diversity into your lives. Subscribe to magazines that offer photographs and articles with an ethnic point of view. Eat ethnic foods regularly. Let your kitchen be filled with a variety of scents and flavors, and allow those flavors to influence the music you listen to.

Talk with your older children frequently about world current events and what’s happening outside your hometown. Give your children permission and the freedom to think about someday going away to college in the city of their choice, and let them know that it’s OK to outgrow the racial limitations currently imposed on them. Consider the idea that your child might some day date or marry or partner with a person of color.

ALL families benefit from racial diversity. Yet some people minimize the importance of race and therefore fail to reduce racism in their own communities or within their own family. Allowing children to grow up ignorant of ethnic groups is also a form of racism. Living racially diverse is as important as a good education, because it is an education, yet fusing a multiracial way of feeling and being does not happen with a few social outings; it’s a life process, a series of small steps gained over years and requires us to use the same perseverance we needed in the adoption process that brought our children to us. It’s a false notion to believe our children will ask us to lead them into matters of racial concern. We parents must provide direction.

First published in Adoption Today magazine.

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Terra Trevor, of Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca ancestry, is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She is a contributing writer for Adoption Today magazine, has led workshops for The Society of Southwestern Authors, volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web at www.terratrevor.com and at In Writing Motherhood http://inwritingmotherhood.blogspot.com

When a Child Dies

2009-07-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Living With Loss, Healing With Hope, by Terra Trevor

Following my 15-year-old son’s death, my plans for parenthood sat like scenery on an empty stage. I needed to come up with a new life for myself. But how could I choose a destiny when I couldn’t even buy a new sweater without exchanging it twice before deciding on a color and the right fit. I was starting my life over from scratch, and I was terrified of making decisions, even little ones. I didn’t think I would ever care about anything ever again. My mind felt glued shut, and my heart was beginning to feel like it was laminated, sealed in plastic to keep out further pain.

Then I had a soul bleaching moment when I understood that I didn’t want to stay closed up and hollow feeling forever. There had to be a way to allow myself the space and years to grieve deep and fully and feel every ounce of the pain and yet continue to walk forward.

My son and youngest child, the pole star of my life— had passed. I would never get over it. Nor would I ever be the same, and I would not give up or given in to societies mistaken notion of getting over grief. I would find a way to learn to live with it and not allow it to hold me back.

The answer came as I stood before Mt. St. Helen’s. I stared at the way she looked years after her summit was removed by a volcano eruption. That day I watched the slate blue dusk blend into ragged peaks and lava domes. A friend once had a cabin perched on a bluff overlooking the lake, surrounded by gigantic pines. I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt, my face strained into the wind. Fireweed and purple-red flowers dotted the level earthen floor, in a place where a forest and the cabin once stood. I walked, circling the crater, and saw wild violets blooming.

The mountain had been scattered and sundered into bits, and she survived.

I swallowed a clotty grief deep inside my throat. A grief so wide it gave me laryngitis. Bold and enthusiastic thoughts of Jay filled me. I’m breathing proof he was once more than a photograph. I shuffled out into the empty field of my mind to find enough words to make it through another winter of writing. Nothing quits. My life had changed into something I didn’t want, and I began gathering the pieces that were left of me, and coaxing them into growth. I was starting out again, but like the mountain I’d lost all of my big trees.

The horizon was still mine. I felt myself part of the mountain with hills catching the sunset through a furious wind, dust devils kicking up dirt. All my senses became alive, out on the edge. I imagined fireweed blooming on the burned over land in my heart, beginning purple petals.

When a child of a loved one dies you may feel helpless and ill at ease. You can help, though. Here are ten practical ways to really help a grieving parent.

1. Don’t avoid us. Be the friend you’ve always been.

2. Listen if we want to talk about it.

3. Cry with us and don’t try to find magic words to ease our pain.

4. Don’t say, “Call me if you need anything.” Most bereaved parents won’t feel strong enough to pick up the telephone. Instead offer to do something specific.

5. Give special attention to and offer to take care of our other children. Siblings have not only lost a brother or sister to death, they have also lost their parents to grief.

6. Remember: Grief is exhausting. Grief feels like fear.

7. Marker events, the first day of school, birthdays, and holidays remind us our child is absent. Pay careful attention to us on Holidays. Most bereaved parents dread holidays. Follow your heart and take a leap to reach out to us because we are deeply hurting. If we say no, ask us again year after year. Eventually we will feel strong enough to say, “Yes.”

8. In the days and especially in years ahead share a fond memory and mention the name of the child who died in conversations as casually as you would any living friend or family member.

9. Acknowledging the date our child died by sending us a card or flowers is a wonderful way to remind us that you are remembering our child and we need not walk our grief journey alone.

10. There is no timetable for grief. Be patient with us. We don’t recover from the death of a child, we learn to live with it, and over a process of years we begin to find a new normal.

Terra Trevor is the author of the memoir Pushing up the Sky: A Mother’s Story (KAAN), from which a portion of this article is excerpted.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Terra Trevor, of mixed blood Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca ancestry, is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press) and The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (The University of Oklahoma). She volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, has worked with American Indian Health & Services with HIV and AIDS programs, with We Can Pediatric Brain Tumor Network, with Hospice, CASA, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky, A Mother's Story (KAAN 2006) is widely anthologized. Visit her on the web http://terratrevorauthor.blogspot.com

Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond to War

2009-07-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Award-winning author MariJo Moore asked women from around the world to consider the devastating nature of conflict—inner wars, outer wars, public battles, and personal losses.

Their answers, in the form of poignant poetry and essays, examine war in all its permutations, beginning in 60 CE and continuing into the 21st century, from Ireland to Iraq and everywhere in between - a Blitz evacuee, an ex-slave, an incarcerated mother, former military personnel, survivors of domestic violence, those who have battled drugs and disease, and many other courageous women willing to share their unique and timeless insight on the realities of war.

With contributions from from Paula Gunn Allen, Carolyn Dunn, Lee Maracle, Linda Hogan, and numerous others, this moving anthology encompasses a wide range of voices, including River, Blood, And Corn, award-winning contributing writers Kim Shuck, Linda Boyden, Kimberly Roppolo, Terra Trevor and MariJo Moore.

Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond to War
(Fulcrum Publishing)