OFI’ TOHBI’ IHINA’

By Jenny L. Davis

I didn’t carry my ancestors’ bones with me
to this Midwestern place.
I could not hear their voices.

I asked Rabbit to carry a note to them
but he baked it into cookies
and ate them with rosehip tea.

I asked Woodpecker to pound a song for them in cedar,
but the songs
could not cross the Mississippi.

I scratched a song in four lines for our ancestors
I wove a lullaby of yarn for our descendants, and
I stomped for all of us moving counter-clockwise in between.

Finally in the still of night
Cicada buzzed answers
in a tree beside my ear

“We left our bones
because we do not need them
to dance along the white dog's way.
           
You do not need them
to dance along
beneath us.”
  

Tethered

To the youth of Attawapiskat and our Native & Two-Spirit youth everywhere,
hold tight to the things that tether you.

Half a lifetime ago
I sat on the edge of a bed
holding cold gun metal until it turned warm
I sat there for hours.
Days.
Years.
I am sitting there still.

I could not move past the beings that tether me here.
You
are the beings that tether me here,
caught in a patch of briar so thick
I can’t break away without tearing a hole.
You are the beings that tether me here
And I hate you for it.

I can’t move past the beings that tether me here.
You
Are the beings that tether me here.
A sapling in the forest
Sharing water and gossip across our rooted toes.
You are the beings that tether me here
And I love you for it.


The girl who loves turtles
  
Summer is her favorite season
with its heavy shawl of water in the air
and sun that can scorch the skin in minutes.
But most of all
She loves summer for the turtles
answering the call to
come out from under shell arbors,
from behind winter aprons
and spring cotton ruffles.
Loksi’! Loski’! Loksi’!
Such strength in the way their legs move,
hips and shells rolling with each step
to rhythms old as the ground itself.
No sharp edges, just
the curves of muscle and bone and
light bouncing across browns, reds, and yellows
in the heat of summer when
turtles are called to each other to dance.
  

Let Us Rest
  
My people
were no strangers to disasters—
the fires, tornados, floods, and droughts
that scorch, bury, and reshape the earth
where they laid our ancestors to rest.

So dig up the bundles.
Test samples from bones,
cloth, and clay—
for the good of science,
toward that next publication,
or a new grant.

But don’t pretend that
it’s what my ancestors would have wanted.
We interred our loved ones
under our homes or within the great
mounded houses of earth
knowing, when the time came,
they’d be returned
to the water, mud,
and to the stars.

© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and originally from Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she lives with her partner and spends most of her time tending her cats (and cat-sized Chihuahua), plants, and the students in her American Indian Studies and Anthropology classes. Both her research and activism center contemporary indigenous identity, indigenous language revitalization, and the Two-Spirit community.
WWW.AIS.ILLINOIS.EDU/PEOPLE/LOKSI




She is the author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance. 


Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue

By Aja Couchois Duncan

Adze:

I should begin with adik, with hearding mammals ranging across the boreal expanse. To know the geography of it, to start with its features.

Your face is this blur of fur and antler.

My story is the history of frontier, a wooded terrain. We could not see each other through the cacophony of trees. But I could hear you breathing. Some kind of wind the nose sings. Adze is stripping the layers of. When the skin is torn from muscle, cleaved from bone. 

Agawaatese is not sound but shadow. An interception of light.



Edawayi’ii:


There are many ways to tell both sides of it. It is a preposition.

The French mated their way through the colonies. The English claimed only their mirror image. Later the science of alterity would explain such predilections. Absent of Freud, native kinship systems did not distinguish between the progeny of. 

Halfbreeds have their own word for gichi-mookomaan, for white person, for butcher knife. Little bear girl took the knife and split herself down the middle. Little bear girl sits beside me on the rooftop, her hair scissoring the wind. Together we watch flora and fauna duck for cover. One is the hydrology of earthquakes, the other less tectonic, more personal. Gichi-mookomaan is nowhere to be found.

It is difficult to be part of a species. There is so little to distinguish yourself from. Sapiens traveled slowly across continents, moved from trees to terra firma. At which point did gichi-mookomaan roam?

They have paved the surface of our habitat, but someday they too will long for the upper canopy. Bipedalism is a fetish of the imperial view.


Optics:  


The science of sight ignores the spirit of mescaline, of cactus, of natives of the new world.

After the earth split, there were two, 
old  and new. The old world was heavy with      everything  
that began it. The new world was fecund, 
virile.

When the first people came out of the trees they found themselves on a wooded island already crowded with bear and wolf. Stripping bark from the trees, they built canoes and paddled to the other side.

When light moves through solid particles it loses pieces of itself. It is altered once it reaches its destination.

Omoodayaabik is shattered, a piece of broken glass. Before it could have been anything, a lantern, window, a bottle of whiskey. The science of sight does not trouble itself with such inquiries. There are only the intricacies of the eye, its mechanics of doing. The eye does not know which side of the earth it is on. The eye cannot see the birthing folds, the suckled nipples beneath the limbs of trees. The nose is far less complicated. There is no discipline dedicated solely to its mysteries. But it is the nose that remembers our disastrous origins. We are sentient. We are this scent of things.

© Aja Couchois Duncan. All rights reserved.

Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue, is included in Restless Continent, published by Litmus Press. An earlier version was published as a chapbook by CC Marimbo Press.  


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aja Couchois Duncan is a Bay Area educator, writer and coach of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent. Her writing has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press,) Bay Poetics (Faux Press) and Love Shook My Heart 2 (Alyson Press). Her most recent chapbook, Nomenclature, Miigaadiwin, a Forked Tongue was published by CC Marimbo press. A fictional writer of non-fiction, she has published essays in the North American Review and Chain. In 2005, she was a recipient of the Marin Arts Council Award Grant for Literary Arts, and, in 2013, she received a James D. Phelan Literary Award. Her first book, Restless Continent, is forthcoming in the spring of 2016 from Litmus Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and a variety of other degrees and credentials to certify her as human. Great Spirit knew it all along. ajacouchoisduncan.blogspot.com

Riot Call

By Kim Shuck

Ravens have been loud for a few days
Riot call and mutter
Look out through every coin and
Obsidian mirror every
Scrap of light
Every bead every
Combination lock
Bis morgan fruh
Raven's eyes in
Dew on the jasmine blossoms I
Noticed on Sunday they're blooming again
Fly high
Fly far we're
Planting rhubarb in the garden this season if this
Hot overcast breaks if the
Leaves survive I've
Put your chair out again the
Unfinished puzzle on the
Basement table staring back
Raven's eyes it's ok I'll
Finish it there are books and
Tea there is
History I will hold it here in my
Left hand I will hold it there is
Smoked tea and I will find some
Blackberries your shoes are there in the
Bag on my rocking chair if you like we can
Walk on Sunday


© Kim Shuck. All rights reserved. 















ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Shuck is a wide-eyed iconoclast and baker of cookies. She
holds a fine arts MFA from San Francisco State, raised three humans, one bird and an array of furred, feathered and finned beings, and has official documentation declaring her everything from a hero to a nightmare. She wanders her home town on foot most days, organizes a regular poetry series at Modern Times Bookstore, and teaches studio art and Native short form lit. She is a lousy housekeeper. Kim has three books currently in print, the latest is Clouds Running In from Taurean Horn Press. www.kimshuck.com




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