Tiffany Midge "Outlaws, Renegades and Saints"

Being a mixed-blood is no easy road, and Tiffany Midge makes her art from the collision of irreconcilables. The writing is sometimes funny and heart stopping at the same time: “It’s my birthday. I ask my mother, ‘when I grow up will I be a full-blooded Indian?’” Midge’s poetry is informed by an in-your-face refusal either to romanticize her life, or to accept the place that has been “assigned” to Indian peoples: to accept extinction: “listen/can you hear the dead talking?/They are saving and resurrecting us all.” ~ from Oyate

At the Oil Celebration Powwow

i.

At the oil celebration powwow give-
aways are the gift that keeps on giving.
The Indians true to their traditions continue
to give what the whites have taken from them—

ii.

food when they were starving
blankets when they were freezing
clothing when they were naked

iii.

Ethel Iron Thunder gives a Pendleton wrap to Minnie Spotted Elk/
Minnie Spotted Elk gives a star quilt to Silas Tail Spins/
Silas Tail Spins gives 20 lbs of frozen venison to Victoria Walking Child/
Victoria Walking Child gives a case of chokecherry preserves to John &; Myra Two Feathers/
John & Myra Two Feathers gives Cain Long Bow $100 towards his college tuition/
Cain Long Bow gives Alice Brought Plenty 10 yards of bargain basement fabric/
Alice Brought Plenty gives Ruby Savior a plastic bag of accumulated Copenhagen chew-top-lids/
Ruby Savior gives Mary & Victor Red Wing a beaded cradleboard for their new arrival /
Mary & Victor Red Wing gives Scarlet Comes At Night their family’s secret frybread recipe/
Scarlet Comes At Night gives Ethel Iron Thunder insulated rabbit fur slippers and matching blue mittens and scarf.

iv.

Define Indian giver in 10 words or less:
All of the above.

v.

Grandma Iron Thunder tells me
that Giveaways are to Indians
what Christmas is to white people.

~Tiffany Midge "Outlaws, Renegades and Saints"


Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.
First published at breakfastattiphanys.blogspot.com


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

Lord Have Mercy for These Days

By Alice Rose Crow Maar’aq

We chugged down the Kusquqvak the summer before I turned five. I didn’t wear bright yellow rain gear, a puffy orange life jacket, or black rubber boots with red bands circling high on my calves. I didn’t wear a qaspeq. I was dressed for the occasion of boarding a hulking white ship with a booming Norwegian at its helm to head downriver to greet our Japanese trading partners. 

I went up the rope ladder in a cotton mail order dress Ma chose for me. My raven hair, precision straight, caught the breeze. A length of vibrant red yarn was knotted tight above one hand for protection. The wind blew. I strained to steady my hands and feet on each wooden rung of the slack rope ladder as it banged against the towering white hull. I climbed to Aunty Josy. 

On that part of our journey, in wintertime, Aunty Josy wore an elaborate Akulamuit style atkuk made with dozens of arctic ground squirrel skins and other carefully accumulated materials according to precise patterns handed across generations. She wore her atkuk over a flowery qaspeq with an imported milky square scarf knotted under a strong chin. 

As kids, it was familiar to eagerly await Akula women, like Aunty Josy, reaching generous strong brown hands into deep qaspeq pockets to bring out gentle, warm hands, a tissue, a piece of gum, a dollar. 

I was taught to sew long sleeves narrowing down to our wrists, and roomy hoods to draw tight with a simple bias tape scrap or fancy thumb-braided yarn string cinched with pony bead adornments tied to each end. I was taught to sew qaspiit designed to conveniently protect and pull out what is needed, long enough to cover our bottoms, to keep stinging mosquitos and gnats from vulnerable yet busy necks and arms. The women who taught me sewed and dressed themselves in qaspiit in celebration of who we are, to show where we are from. 

Times have changed since I was a little girl learning to make qaspiit. Only a few of us still sew, swim upstream, know by instinct to try to reach home. 

These days, on this part of our journey, qaspiit are sold by the thousands to be worn by women and men migrated from the tundra to a life of school, meetings, office work, and welfare. Qaspeqs are bought by politicians, and made for legislative staff to don on “Kuspuk Fridays” televised statewide on 360 North. Qaspeqs are worn by immersion students, school teachers, professors, and corporate leaders who don’t pick berries by the five gallon pail or put up fish by the hundreds to feed their families. Many qaspiit don’t have a drawstring to keep nuisances away, aren’t worn with the hood up anyway. Some kuspuks are loose misinterpretations without hoods, with misshapen pockets. It’s not easy to tell where a person is from by the qaspeq style they wear. Not like the ones Ma taught me to sew and wear while travelling the rivers and sloughs of our world. 

On this journey, we are admonished to remember the ones from before, the ancestors who brought us here, what was brought to them, now us. Studied informers are paid a stipend of bagged fruit and pocket money, but how does this help anyone traveling our sloughs and rivers? We name the sequence of sensations: the sting, the heat, the pulse, the itch. 

We join in to intone the triple recitations, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.


Kaapaat


Inside an elongated brown oval box are kaapaat Granny made. Even after all this time I bring up the lid to catch her scent in the heap of perfect black knots she tied. There is the oil of silver hair she braided to the very tips down past her waist before collecting strays between her palms and rolling stray hair into a careful tickly bundle she then stored with the rest. Her Ivory fragrance lingers. A whiff of iqmik brings her full smile close. When I bring up the lid, Granny smiles through warm knowing eyes, tobacco-stained teeth worn down by a lifetime of chewing skins.

Kaapaat are handmade embellished hairnets worn by southwest Alaska women, mostly Russian Orthodox, to signify marriage. It’s been over 30 years since Granny made my first kaapaq. Granny repurposed Popsicle and Creamsicle sticks to act as mesh gauges. She hand-strung red seed beads and blue bugle beads onto thick black thread. She continued to hand-knot the thread to create a vee pattern big enough to contain my long hair. Then she strung the net to black elastic to keep my hair in place. 


Granny went ahead on February 11, 1987. When I open the box and bring her kaapaqs to my face, Granny’s scent grounds me. It’s not really her scent. It’s mine from when my hair was long and raven black. It’s mine from when I coiled my hair around and around my hand to fold it into the kaapaq Granny made for me.


Copyright © Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq. All rights reserved.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alice Rose Crow~Maar’aq, was born and raised in Bethel, on the Kuskokwim River in southwest Alaska. She lives in Spenard, a westside neighborhood near water and where planes take off and land in southcentral Alaska. Ali is a momma, granny, lover, ilung, relative, and friend. She is a member of the inaugural class of the Institute of American (Indigenous) Arts low-rez MFA in Creative Writing Program, studying under the guidance of Chip Livingston and Elissa Washuta. 

Her memoir An Offering of Words is underway. In it, she explores what holds Central Yup’ik Eskimo and Athabascan people of the Kuskokwim steady in these times of rapid change and anomie. Ali is a member of the Orutsararmuit Native Council and is an original ANCSA Calista and Bethel Native Corporation shareholder.

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