River, Blood, And Corn: A Community of Voices

At River, Blood, And Corn, we are promoting community and strengthening cultures with storytelling, poetry and prose. Established in 2010 by Native writers, our starting point, and our goal, is to honor and continue the work of Lee Francis III, and Geary Hobson, founders of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, working to ensure the voices of Native writers and storytellers past, present and future, are heard throughout the world. A variety of writers, backgrounds, communities and viewpoints are presented here. Included in our themes are the Elders whose lives informed, instructed, shaped and changed ours. 

 

While our primary focus is Indigenous writers, we have woven writers and artists from a variety of ethnicities and communities into our pages. Perhaps people of many ethnicities, including recent immigrants from throughout the Americas as well as other parts of the world will find something in this collection that will speak to them with respect to issues of race, identity, culture, community, and representation. 

 

Thank you to our readers. We are honored and grateful to each one of you.

Lord Have Mercy for These Days

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.

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 was a member of the inaugural class of the Institute of American Indigenous Arts low-rez MFA in Creative Writing Program and studied under the guidance of Chip Livingston and Elissa Washuta. 

A Winter Solstice Love Story

For forty-three years I lived on the Central California Coast in an area that makes up the traditional Chumash homeland. In those beautiful days our solstice celebrations were rooted in the traditional ways of the Chumash. 

 

Four years ago, I moved away, away from the land and people who raised and shaped me. Now I’m living near my grandchildren on the Northern California Coast. Everything is still new for me, unfamiliar. I’m walking gently while this Indigenous California landscape in Ohlone territory teaches me who I am. 

For the record, I’m not Chumash. I’m mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German descent, with ties to Korean. And I hold the culture, traditions, and history of the Chumash people in my heart. This is their heritage, their life blood, and their landscape of time. And for all Native people Solstice is a time to honor the connection to our ancestors, to the rhythm of nature and our continuing deepening ties. 

In my bones I remember, and I can still hear and feel the slap of the wansaks’—a musical instrument made from the branch of an elderberry—beat out a steady rhythm and a mix of laughing voices of my friends gathered contrast with the drift of fog and the heavy surf pounding. Lanterns are lit against the darkening evening and a fire is built, where storytelling takes place. Salmon is on the grill, potatoes are roasting, and the picnic table is loaded with more food. We are honoring solstice, an astronomical phenomenon marking the shortest day and the longest night of the year. For people throughout the ages—from the ancient Egyptians and Celts to the Hopi—midwinter has been a time of ritual, reflection, and renewal. 

Solstices happen twice a year, around June 21 and again around December 21. The date is not fixed, it varies; the December Solstice can take place on December 20, 21, 22, 23. While we usually think of the whole day as the Solstice, it actually takes place at a specific moment when the Sun is precisely overhead the Tropic of Capricorn. Solstice helps us cultivate a deeper connection to nature and to all of the things that matter most to us. It’s a time for feeding the spirit and nurturing the soul. Prayers and rituals set forth a plan of life for the coming year, ceremonially turning back the sun toward its summer path. 

Throughout history, honoring the solstice has been a way to renew our connection with each other and with acts of goodwill, special rituals, and heightened awareness. Solstice is also reserved for feeding the spirit and nurturing the soul. It’s a period for quiet reflection, turning inward, slowing down and appreciating the day, the hour, and each moment. 

While we don’t know how long people have been celebrating the solstice, we do know that ancient cultures built stone structures designed to align with the sun at specific times, and in ancient times the winter solstice was immensely important because the people were economically dependent on monitoring the progress of the seasons. There was an emphasis on the fall harvest and storing food for winter. 

Remembrance weighs heavy on my mind. Tonight as we near Winter Solstice, with a December moon above me, and the only light I can see, I’m falling back in time. My memories are washing over me like a series of massive waves hitting hard, without warning. As soon as I catch my breath another beautiful memory pulls me back home. My mind floats back over the years. Memories surface—and feelings that remain untouched in my heart, in that place of perpetual remembering. All those Winter Solstice nights of long ago, when we were young, and our elders walked this good earth with us, when we gathered for a good meal together, with storytelling, laughter, conversation, dance, and songs from the ancestors. Fire offerings of chia seeds, acorn flour, and berries were made, followed by prayer and ceremony. 

Now, I’m in my seventies, nearly the same age as the elder Native women who guided me, informed, instructed and shaped me into the woman I am today. I’m honoring my Indigenous community with gratitude for their love and the gift of their time they gave me, helping me give to others. 

With the night sky, dark and beautiful above, I walk toward the sea and stand silent in respect to the ancient peoples who left the witness of their lives, visions, and the strength of their faith for me to ponder. The scent of sage hangs in the air. I fill my lungs with it, knowing it will permeate my body and cling to my soul as a reminder of what I can feel and remember when we were together long ago.

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press). Her essays are widely published in anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), and Mixed Roots: Writers on Multiracial Identity and Both/And Belonging, forthcoming from Beacon Press, Fall 2026. Her stories steeped in themes of home, place and belonging, her identity as a mixed-blood Indigenous woman, and her connection to the landscape.

WomanSong

There’s never an easy time to be a woman; 

Harder yet to be a woman of Color. 

You know, one of the standard four-skin 

variety pack–Black, White, Red, Yellow?

 

But what about us MixedBloods? 

What are we? The Grays? Pinks? Ecrus, 

Coppers, Burt Siennas?

 

Color confuses. 

Makes some see outrage; 

Others, pity or an-in-your-face-kind-of-scorn. 

Senseless. Color can’t speak the truth. 

The truth lives under the color. 

 

As each succeeding generation mutes

and blends the tones, 

The blending carries us closer 

To the true state of our souls, 

The final destination of being Colorless. 

 

The power of woman brings us into the world, 

Leads us to the safety, comfort, and pain of our world. 

If we are lucky, in the end, the power of woman will sing us through our deaths, 

Carry us home, 

Where there are no tints and shades, 

Where there is only sanctuary, and the solace of the open arms of the Grandmothers. 

Women, when there is nothing else to give your child, 

Give her a song, a strong woman song. 

Sing us, Mothers, sing us home. 

Copyright © Linda Boyden. All rights reserved. 

 

Linda Boyden writes children’s books and poetry. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers. She is the author of The Blue Roses (Lee and Low Books), Powwow's Coming (University of New Mexico Press), and Giveaways: An ABC Book of Loanwords from the Americas (University of New Mexico Press). 

Kim Shuck Poetry

Call this time of year 

Windswept and sight 

Down the phone lines to 

Infinity- they say- 

Which 

Considering our road and direction 

Might be 

Bartlesville a place 

Misheard into another language I know it 

Both the place and the 

Language in a patchwork of 

Supper and 

Relatives 

Filling station and 

Random nouns a 

Blanket that smells of 

Grandma Mae a 

Story about 

Grand Lake the 

Word for a specific turtle the 

Feel of sandals in 

Creek mud

Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

 

Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of 9 books, co-authored one, edited another ten and has contributed to a vast array of anthologies, journals, curriculum guides, tours, and protests. www.kimshuck.com