Ghost Dance

By Chip Livingston


I think I’m going crazy when I see my reflection in the camera’s lens.  I’m surrounded by the dead.  Jimi, Marilyn, Joan — face covered in cold cream, hand holding wire hanger high above her head.  The Halloween Parade has paused for television crews in front of The Revolver on Duvall Street in New Orleans.  I duck inside for a drink, take the elevator to the thirteenth floor. 
I walk inside the club without ID.  Tonight I don’t need it.  Tonight I’m invisible.  I pass witches, goblins, boys dressed like ghouls.  Once we were two of them.  Once we both joined the annual masquerade.  But tonight is different.  Tonight I don a plain white sheet with ink.  Circles traced around holes cut out to see through.  Another hole through which I drink, from which I breathe.
I wasn’t coming out tonight.  Didn’t plan or purchase a costume.  Wouldn’t wear one hanging in your closet.  What led me to the linens then, to quickly cut a cotton sheet into a kid’s uniform?  What drove me to this?
Beneath this sheet, your medicine bag hangs around my neck, the tanned leather pouch you made me promise never to open.  This is the first time I’ve worn it.  But no one can see it.  No one can see me.
I finish my drink, scotch neat, with a gulp, sing the invisible song you taught me, set the glass on the black wood rail, and, still singing, step onto the dance floor.
Beneath this sheet, I imitate you dancing.  My feet, awkward at first, soon find your rhythm, and my legs bounce powwow style in the steps we both learned as kids.  The steps that never left you.  I dip and turn between, around the fancy dancers in their sequin shawls and feather boas.  I shake my head like you did when your hair was long, the way you flipped it, black and shining, to the heavy beat of house music.  The music hasn’t changed much in case you’re wondering.  I dance in your footsteps; sing the invisible song; close my eyes.
When I open my eyes, I swear I see Carlo.  Impossible right, but he’s stuffed inside that Nancy Reagan red dress and he’s waving at me, sipping his cocktail and smiling.  He’s talking to Randy, who’s sticking out his tongue that way he always did whenever he caught someone staring at him.  I start to walk over but I bump in to Joan.
She’s glaring at me.  Or it may just be the eyebrows, slanted back with pencil to make it look like she’s glaring at me.  She reaches past me and grabs Marilyn by her skinny wrist and pulls her away, but Carlo and Randy are gone.  Where they stood are faces I don’t recognize.  Faces dancing.  Masks I realize.  Faces behind masks.
The DJ bobs furiously with pursed lips, headphones disguised as fiendish, furry paws, in the booth above the floor.  He introduces a new melody into the same harping beat, and I remember to dance.  I remember you dancing.  My fingers slide across your sweaty chest, and I find your necklace.  The sheet clings to my body in places.  The new song sounds just like the last song but I’m suddenly crowded by strangers.  I can no longer lift my legs as high as I want to, so I sway in place, shuffle with the mortals on the floor.
Behind me someone grabs me, accidentally perhaps, but I turn, violently, jealously.  There are too many people in this equation.  Twos become one again and again, and ones become twos.  All around me real numbers add up to future possibilities.  Imaginary numbers.  It’s why we’re here dancing. 
A cowboy nods his hat in my direction.  But he can’t be nodding at us.  We’re invisible.  I think maybe he is a real ghost; he’s peering intently into the holes cut out for my eyes.  He looks like Randolph Scott, blond and dusty, so I look around for Cary Grant as Jimi lifts the guitar from his lips and wails.  Randolph Scott is coming this way and I turn my back and dance.
I want you back, Elan.  I want you back dancing beside me.  I start chanting this over and over to myself.  I want you back.  I want you back. 
You taught me the power of words.  I believed you.  I can even smell you now.  Sandalwood oil and sweat.  I turn and expect to see you. 
Not you behind me. 
Not you beside me.
Not you in front of me.
Not you anywhere around me. 
I make my way to the bar, but the bar is too crowded.  The barman’s face grimaces over hands holding folded dollars as he tries to keep the glasses filled. The air is thick with smoke.  It’s hard to breathe.  I make my way to the door, notice the cowboy trailing me.  In the elevator, I go down alone.
Into the rain on Duvall Street, we walk out together.  One set of footprints splashes our muddy way home, then, turning, I realize we are not going home, but passing more pagan tricksters decked out as holiday spirits. 
            The bells in the clock tower tell me it is midnight.  Squeaking from its hinges, the door to morning slowly opens and it’s All Saints Day, the Day of the Dead, and I am walking toward Boot Hill, to where you are buried.
We’re alone in the cemetery, and the wind lifts the rain in a mist rising up from the wet earth that is claiming me.  I remove my sheet in front of the cement memorial that holds your body up above the boggy ground.  I remove my shoes.  I strip off everything except your leather pouch around my neck, and I dance for you.  My legs are free and I whirl and sing.
I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now. 
I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now. 
I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now.
I’m dancing for you now, because you loved to dance.  I want you back dancing.  I want you dancing now.

Ghost Dance, was first published in Boulder Planet  and is reprinted from "Museum of False Starts" by Chip Livingston (Copyright 2010). Reprinted by permission of Gival Press.



Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of two collections of poetry, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS, and a collection of short stories, NAMING CEREMONY, Lethe Press 2014. Chip has received fiction awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip grew up on the Florida-Alabama border and now lives in Colorado, where he teaches writing online, and is a faculty mentor in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico. 

Orange Dream

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/

Driving Toward Yes


By Dawn Downey

The desert wind whispered yes as it blew across Dad’s brow. In the summer of 1964, he and three of his teenagers (my older sister Michelle, younger brother Bill, and me) waited impatiently at the edge of the Mojave. Our road trip interrupted, because our family cat was having kittens in the back of the station wagon.

Five days earlier, at age forty-three, Dad closed up Bill’s Body Shop, his car repair business. He waived goodbye to relatives and friends, and drove away from Des Moines, leading a four-vehicle caravan down Route 66, off to California in pursuit of dreams.

Only a high school graduate himself, Dad insisted his kids would go to college. He had five children, number six on the way, and no means to finance all that education. But he’d read the University of California was tuition-free for the state’s residents. The fact that no job awaited him in the golden state—he’d work that out later.

He drove the station wagon and pulled a U Haul trailer. Michelle, who’d earned her driver’s license two weeks before, drove a second car. She towed a VW Bug, which Dad planned to sell in California. Bill and I rode shotgun.

A water pump or two broke along the way. An eighteen-wheeler mangled the trailer hitch. And Dad and Michelle parted company for a while—he following the arrow on a detour sign, she driving around the sign and heading toward Canada. But the four of us ended up together at the edge of the Mojave. While waiting to cross it in the cool of the night, we watched Cass birth her kittens, while the sun painted the sky pale pink, then navy blue. As we fussed over the cat and complained about the heat, Dad towered over us, as big as the desert.

Early the next morning he delivered his brood—three kids and five cats—to Pasadena. (The kids went on to college; the cats did not.)

Long before our cross-country trek, my father had outgrown his life in Des Moines. Between pounding out fenders, he’d written his first novel on a legal pad. A year after the move to California, the Santa Barbara News Press hired him, on the strength of an article he submitted. He was their first African American reporter. He walked into the interview straight from his job as a mechanic at the local Ford dealership, his muscled six-foot frame stuffed into a pair of blue coveralls.

While working at the paper, he typed his second novel during lunch breaks, in the back of his camper.

He stretched the newspaper job from obituary writer into outdoor columnist. Every week, he expanded Gone Fishin’ beyond the expected descriptions of the best camping spots and the latest model boats. His readers got to know his old Uncle Russell in Ottumwa, and his brother Al, a TV weatherman in Des Moines. When Uncle Russell got sick, he received hundreds of get-well cards from all across the country. I suspected then that Dad might be more than just the guy who grounded me.

After a ten-year stint as newspaper columnist, he transformed himself into freelance writer and then again into published author, with five books to his credit. He supplemented his income by teaching memoir writing through adult education. And that’s how he became a guru. Others taught; Dad cheered, encouraged, cajoled, nudged, nagged, poked and mesmerized. One of his students described the classroom experience as a cross between a quilting bee and a revival meeting.

Repeaters were common. Many took his course five years in a row. One returned fifteen times. On the rare occasions that illness kept him home, Dad learned that his substitutes had been greeted with surly expressions and sarcastic complaints. My father had groupies.

Over the thirty years he taught, he told his students to take more risks and write to their edge. After he died, a group of loyalists continued meeting, reserving an empty chair for him.

Decades later, I feel him pushing me too. Through divorce, lay-offs and career changes, he's challenged me to take a risk. When I’m typing against a deadline in the middle of the night, I catch sight of him standing at the edge of the Mojave. And I remember Dad driving toward yes.


Copyright © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.

Dawn Downey, an essayist, finds inspiration in everyday situations. She writes about topics ranging from her pursuit of the perfect purse* to her search for the meaning of life--with jealousy, prejudice, guilt and inadequacy thrown in for good measure. She views them through the lens of a spiritual path that has wound through the teachings of the Buddha, around to non-duality, and has stopped for a while at devotion—a kinder, gentler relationship with the sweet goofiness that makes us human. She secretly wants to be a rock star, but since she can't sing, settles for reading her stories at coffee shops, galleries and book stores, anywhere there's a microphone and an audience. She lives in Kansas City with her husband, aka groupie, roadie and driver. He spoils her rotten. She reciprocates. 

Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation. www.dawndowney.com

The Cherokee Word for Water

by Terra Trevor

I grew up within in a large extended Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca family. With grandparents and great-grandparents, with roots in Oklahoma. Great-grandma could fix a meal to feed fifteen of us and I loved to sit beside her coal black stove, listening to her stories. I’m the granddaughter of sharecroppers, and I was born to a teenage mother and father in 1953. When I was young, we were poor—but we had water. 

Having water meant we always had plenty to eat. We had fresh running water to rinse, soak and simmer pots of pinto beans and black-eyed peas.

In the summer when rainfall was not plentiful, since the water table was usually high, we could turn the hose on to soak the apple and peach tree and their fruit fed us in return.

There was water for pie baking, and when the sun seared overhead water to mix with Kool-Aid to freeze into popsicles. Home canned goods must be put up in hot, sterilized jars and we had water for boiling before we used them. We had water to wash our hands before pressing a tortilla on a hot skillet, and it was clean and safe to drink.

 

When no one else believed in them, they believed in each other. 


Set in the early 1980s, the story of The Cherokee Word for Water begins in a small town in rural Oklahoma where many houses lack running water. The film tells the story of a tribal community joining together to build a waterline by using traditional Native values of reciprocity and interdependence and is told from the perspective of Wilma Mankiller and Charlie Soap, who join forces to battle opposition and build a 16-mile waterline system using a community of volunteers. In the process, they inspire the townspeople to trust each other, to trust their way of thinking, and to spark a reawakening of the universal indigenous values of reciprocity and interconnectedness. This project also inspired a self-help movement in Indian Country that continues to this day.

The Cherokee Word for Water” is dedicated to Wilma Mankiller’s vision, compassion and incredible grace, and tells the story of the work that led her to become the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. The film was funded through the Wilma Mankiller Foundation to continue her legacy of social justice and community development in Indian Country.  

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe


Exploring Quantum physics in relation to Indigenous peoples' understanding of the spiritual universe, this anthology includes writings from 40 Native writers from various nations. 

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time, a brilliant anthology, explores an uncanny tension between
 Indigenous understandings of a moral, interconnected universe and the edges
 of western science and philosophy that -in time- come to the same 
conclusion.

Included are stories by Suzan Shown Harjo, Gabriel Horn, John Trudell, Dean Hutchins, Lois Red Elk, Suzanne Zahrt Murphy, Amy Krout-Horn, Jack D. Forbes, John D. Berry, Sidney Cook Bad Moccasin, III, Trace A. DeMeyer, Clieord E. Trafzer, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Bobby González, Duane BigEagle, Carol Wille`e Bachofner, Lela Northcross Wakely, Georges Sioui, Keith Secola, Mary Black Bonnet, Kim Shuck, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Dawn Karima Pe`igrew, Stephanie A. Sellers, Natalie bomas Kindrick, Basil H. Johnston, Barbara-Helen Hill, Alice Azure, Phyllis A. Fast, Doris Seale, Terra Trevor, Denise Low, Vine Deloria Jr., Jim Stevens, ire’ne lara silva, Susan Deer Cloud, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Tony Abeyta, MariJo Moore.
This anthology does not reveal secret “how to's” concerning the ceremonies of Indigenous peoples, neither does it reveal the “power” of medicine people, nor reveal knowledge meant to be kept in tribal protection. There is certain sacred knowledge from all Indigenous cultures that should never be written, which should only be passed on orally to those who are capable of the responsibility. Regardless, this anthology gives credence that Indigenous peoples have put into practice (for millenniums) what most physicists and scientists have considered only as theories. Exploring Quantum physics in relation to Indigenous peoples' understanding of the spiritual universe, these essays and poems include personal experiences, traditional stories, fictional and nonfiction ponderings, beliefs, and explorations.

Published by rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING


Edited by MariJo Moore and Trace A. DeMeyer
Dedicated to Vine Deloria Jr


Red and White . . . and Blue

By Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

The church was full.  I sat next to my husband on the back pew and opened my hymnal to the designated page.  It was the Sunday before the Fourth of July; all the hymns were patriotic.

The crowd stood and sang.  My husband stood in silence.  I tried to sing along, but my heart wouldn’t allow it.  They sang of liberty, of gleaming alabaster cities, and of gold refined.  They sang of pilgrim’s pride, the noble, and the free.  Thoughts flooded my brain about my Cherokee ancestors and how their way of life had been ripped away, their land stolen, all to give this new nation its “freedom.” 

A memory came to me.  It was my grandmother’s voice breaking as she told me how her father’s Indian land lay at the bottom of a man-made lake, taken for the greater good.  My great-grandfather moved the school house he’d built with his bare hands, piece by piece, to another location before the water took it all.

I thought about how I had been pulled out of line at London-Heathrow airport and asked what kind of name I had.  American Indian, I replied, hoping, knowing in my heart those words might work better than trying to explain my Choctaw name.  A man ushered me to an area where I stood next to a woman wearing a burka and waited my turn.  They searched my luggage and then they searched me.  I had been profiled for bearing my husband’s name – Hoklotubbe. 

I wanted to scream that my name is a proud warrior name, a name that existed before the United States was even a country.  I wanted to tell them that Hoklotubbe means “to listen” and “to kill” in the Choctaw language.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I submitted, just as my ancestors did so long ago to the invading Europeans.    

Gingerly, I closed the hymnal and placed it back in the rack.  As the others celebrated songs of Independence Day, I silently mourned.

I tell this story with mixed emotions.  My father was white; my mother was Cherokee.  I am proud to be Cherokee, but if the white settlers who raped the land and herded the Cherokees away from their homes in Georgia and Tennessee hadn’t eventually migrated into Indian Territory, I would not exist.  Or if I did, I would not have my father’s freckles and his hazel eyes.  I would not have his love of music or his storytelling skills.  I would not be me.  Why, then, is it so painful to sing of pilgrim’s pride?

Perhaps it is because Americans have conveniently forgotten the Native holocaust that gave birth to this country.  Today, the uneducated public describes treaty obligations as government handouts.  The government requires that we possess Degree-of-Indian-Blood cards to prove we are Indian, much like a show dog must have pedigree papers to prove its noble bloodline.  Native owners of restricted land, original land allotments, are required to seek permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to lease their land, and then the money is squandered by that very agency.

Quiet indignation stirs inside me.  It lives in conflict with how blessed I feel to live in a country with political and religious freedom.  My father, my uncles, and my husband are all combat veterans.  None of them were flag-wavers when they came home from their respective wars, yet my heart is full of gratitude, knowing they fought for my right to voice these very words, however blue and unpatriotic they may sound.   

The Best in Show winner of the recent Five Civilized Tribes Art Show was a striking clay sculpture by Troy Anderson titled:  "Halfbreed -- Am I Red and White or Am I White and Red?"  This piece of art spoke to me.  I identify with my mother’s Cherokee heritage and can trace our lineage to before the removal.  Yet, I cannot deny my father and his white ancestors.  They are part of me; I am part of them.

I’m glad the Fourth of July is over and those patriotic songs have been put away for a while.  In the meantime, I remain Red and White . . . White and Red . . . and Blue. 

Copyright © Sara Sue Hoklotubbe


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sara Sue Hoklotubbe is a Cherokee citizen and the author of the Sadie Walela Mystery Series set in the Cherokee Nation where she grew up.  The American Café, (The University of Arizona Press, 2011), the second book in the series was chosen as a finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Award by the American Library Association.  The book was also named as finalist for the 2012 Oklahoma Book Awards.  Sara was named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for Deception on All Accounts, (The University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first book in the series.  Both books were chosen and released by the U.S. Library of Congress as Talking Books for the Blind.

Visit Sara Sue on the web at: www.hoklotubbe.com

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