River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

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.

WomanSong

By Linda Boyden

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.

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

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

César Love Poetry

Photographs not Taken

Not the selfie before the pyramid

Not the banquet where we ate and gorged

The falcons in formation above your chimney

The crime you witnessed but your testimony ignored

That lakeside stroll when sunset rays revealed her truest beauty

Maybe you held your camera but were too in awe

It never became a photo, now it’s a minor regret.

Somewhere in the head’s rear lobe

Snapshot memories keep in Kodachrome

Some are stored in black-and-white, some in sepia tone

There they fade like everything else.

Finally you are cremated

Your mind’s gallery turns ash

Then they become something to touch

Each picture a shingle on the scales

Of the wings of your moth.

Daytime Moon

sighted at 3 o’clock at this hour,

a salt cracker

by midnight, vanilla ice cream

Request to the Whale

You beast of myth, you beast of time

Your journeys though oceans are vaster than the moon flights

The barnacles of your hide are as bumpy as the decades, as coarse as history

I am unworthy to ride on your back. Explain to me one simple thing I might understand.

Share with me one chapter from your voyages. Teach to me one vowel of your language.

Cesar Love is a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, he is also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He is the author of Birthright and While Bees Sleep. cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com

THIRTY-ONE AMERICANS

by Dawn Downey

An ambulance shriek closes in. From which direction? Where? Where? I slam on the brakes midway through a left turn, and the ambulance screams past, dangerously close to my front bumper. After traffic nudges back to life, I’m frozen for a second, trying to remember how to drive.

I’ve just come from the art museum. I’d gone solo, so the visual images could sink into my cells, unobstructed by conversation. 30 Americans—an exhibit of American life, as interpreted by thirty contemporary black artists. It was a bad idea. Not the exhibit. My going to see the exhibit.

An engine revs; an SUV speeds by. Now I remember how to drive: Look both ways. Turn the steering wheel. Press the gas pedal. I cruise through the leafy neighborhood that surrounds the museum’s manicured gardens. Several blocks ahead, the ambulance is shrinking, its siren receding. #

I felt out of place among the white onlookers touring 30 Americans, even though I was an onlooker, too, gawking at my own life. Four hundred years of color-infused emotions—mine, the artists’, our ancestors’—compressed into claustrophobic passageways and alcoves. I chuckled at a montage of our hair in its myriad configurations. Yup, I used to sport that stick-straight coif, thanks to a lye relaxer that—swear to god—I could still smell. And I fairly levitated with joy at a human-shaped sculpture made of flower blossoms. You couldn’t identify gender, race, or age. Yes, let me see cabbage roses when I look at my enemies. Let the fragrance of gardenias hang in the air between us. Apparently, I have a greater capacity for despondence than optimism. Despite the intermittent uplift, four hundred years beat me down. #

I pull up for a red light at a crossroad where high-end white Kansas City smacks up against low-end black Kansas City. Fast food. Bus stop. Cell phone mart. An urban apparel store sits across the street from a health clinic. Anchoring the corner is Walgreens, the place I stock up on eye shadow in shades designed for women of color. #

The exhibition flowed into a corner housing an installation called “Duck, Duck, Noose.” A circle of nine wooden stools. On each stool sat a KKK hood, empty eyeholes facing the center, where a rope dangled from the ceiling, the end pooled in tidy coils on the floor. I gasped. Run. Get the hell out of here. Stop looking. But “Duck, Duck, Noose” forced me to stare, like an assailant holding my head underwater. I stumbled past in a stupor. #

The car in front of me sits a beat too long after the light turns green. Cell phone distraction? The driver creeps into the intersection. Stops again. What is he—?

In the fast food parking lot, the ambulance.

Two white policemen.

A black person flat on the ground. Face-up.

Bright flowered fabric across thighs. Skirt. A woman.

Still as a rock.

I clench the steering wheel. Hyperventilate. My vision blurs, and I realize I’m sobbing. Need to pull over, to park, to say oh my god, oh my god, but I can’t remember how to stop driving. Automatic pilot glides the car past the scene, but my heart stumbles past it in a stupor.

On the highway, as grief makes a slick mess of my face, a slide show plays the images my brain has photographed. She’s on her back, arms and legs spread. Her head is inches from the policemen’s polished shoes. Her legs span the sidewalk. The patrolmen stand beside their car, hands resting on their heavy-laden belts. They appear to watch traffic go by. If she were alive, they’d be kneeling at her side, wouldn’t they? They’d be making her comfortable, wouldn’t they? The EMTs would be rushing to her aid, wouldn’t they? There is an absence of urgency.

She’s alone. May she find peace. Her family’s going to get a bad phone call. May they find peace.

I grip the steering wheel hard, to squeeze life back into its proper shape. So I can buy makeup again at Walgreens. Maybe she’s part of an art installation. I want her to be an art installation.

She’s lying in savasana—corpse pose. She’s anonymous. I name her Grace. Who lies at the intersection of life and art.

Thirty-one Americans.

Dawn Downey writes essays about her journey through everyday life. The question she strives to answer: How does a sensitive elder woman of color thrive in an insensitive, white-centered, male dominated, youth-oriented culture? The author of six books, she also writes “Dawn Downey’s Teachable Moments,” a Substack newsletter. Blindsided: Essays from the Only Black Woman in the Room earned Book of the Year Finalist honors from the Independent Author Network. Downey lives with her husband in Kansas City, Missouri. Learn more at DawnDowneyBlog.com

We Who Walk the Seven Ways by Terra Trevor

Excerpt: We Who Walk the Seven Ways

University of Nebraska Press

Native And Indigenous Studies | Memoir

Growing Old in a Beautiful Way

This morning I watched a red-tailed hawk circle up from the bottom of the canyon and glide past, wings spread wide to catch the wind. Then a second hawk glided past, and then a third arrived in the air and was joined by a fourth and all of a sudden Auntie showed up, just as strong in my mind as she had been in life. I remembered the way she answered my questions by telling me to put it in my holy center and not to think about it too much, to just let the answer come in its own time. I returned to the times when Auntie would surprise me by talking about what was good medicine and bad, and how to figure out what to do, and not do, if power was given.

Her shoulders had bent as she grew older, but Auntie always stood straight as a young girl when she told me her stories. Her words sounded like wind shaking the leaves on a tree.

Auntie’s stories began in the evening, as the sun was going down. The turquoise beads she wore on Sundays made her white hair shine. Her skin was like dark smooth clay and when she laughed, she held her hand in front of her mouth hiding her bare gums. Before bed, she gathered me and all of the girl cousins and reminded us to remember our dreams and to feel our feet growing up from the ground so we would be able to find our paths within the great circle in relation to how Indigenous people viewed the world... Continue reading

We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Terra Trevor is an essayist, memoirist and the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press). She is a contributor to fifteen books and her essays appear widely in journals and 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), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate (A Raven Chronicles Anthology), News From Native California, Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal. Visit her at Terra Trevor: Writing, Reading and Living.

Poetry by E. Fox

Ink & Lead

I’m too afraid to be that of the bold permanence.

Afraid to be the spilled ink seeped into the bones of a page.

Etched not only into the surface but run deep into one’s core.

With the daring stance of unwavering line after line.

Forever waiting to be scrutinized and yet still stay unchanged.

Never truly able to be erased.

Meekly covered in an attempt to be conformed.

All I ever will be is the faded lead.

The blended marks left on the page.

Standing alone in despair.

Left for others disposal.

Bringing the weight of everything sinking down.

Drowning to the bottomless pit of one’s mind.

Blackened with the ink pressed over my skin.

Seeing what is left in my wake.

Only after I’ve been erased.

Flesh Filled Face

You know that feeling when you see another beautiful person

And you can’t help but touch your own delicate skin in response

I can’t help but notice that mine is not so delicate

Not so beautiful

It feels as a softer mask waiting to be peeled from the bone

The flesh sits atop my skull in mock disguise

Seeing another beautiful person only makes me realize that I am not that

I am only a faceless entity waiting to truly figure out who I am

A Role, Not a Model

My dad never loved me, I know it

He liked me when I was just a small child

Until I got older and then

Then he didn’t even like me

I realize now it wasn’t hate when I was growing up

It was only dislike

It became hate as I aged more and more

But once I was “old enough,”

He started to like me once again

Or at least what he could make me to be

He liked that I didn’t like “her”

But he never realized I hated him too

It was almost in the same way he did me

But I was so much younger

I just wanted to be happy and loved

He never accepted my choices

They weren’t his, so neither was I

Even now it is the same

It always has been

And always will be

First published in Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Thought

Fox is an Indigenous aspiring poet from the Arikara and Lakota-Sioux Nations who was born and raised in North Dakota. They have been a lover of books & reading from a very young age, always searching for more to fulfill themself with as time has gone forward. Their published works can be seen featured in Yellow Medicine Review's 2023 Fall Edition. Fox's motivation in writing stems from their want to reach all communities and show the ability along with the importance of Native American & LGBTQ+ youths' writing about the experiences of growing up & coming of age. Fox is currently a recent high school graduate with the hopes of transitioning to a career in creative writing through workshops and apprenticeships. With every gained experience, they are working on a collection of poetry with aspirations to soon publish a book of their own that will help take off their career in writing.

Pick a Garnet to Sleep In

by Kim Shuck

We are hunting the graveyards and

Practicing fly-casting off of the roof at 4am

It must be summer

I paint the symbols on my feet

Study the evolution of bats and

21st century poetry of the 600 block of Chenery

Oh child

I braid you into my hair most days

And I’m the only one who can read you there

But then

We are descended from the symbolic dead and

I’m becoming the old woman out of those stories

If not as quickly as I’d hoped

Kim Shuck loves fiddling with words and puzzles and stones. Shuck served as the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco and is still recovering. Her latest book is Pick a Garnet to Sleep In.

Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp

by Alice Rose Crow ~ Maar’aq

Alice Rose Crow ~ Maar’aq is among the kass’ayagat of the Kusquqvaq diaspora. She is an independent maker based in Anchorage, Alaska. For the Covid-19-year of 2021, the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center invited Alice to curate a series of creative interpretations to augment ongoing efforts to examine archived collections. A mutual and consolatory goal is to bring attention and reflection to little known and overlooked elements living within the Anchorage Yugtarvik.3 An inclination is to keep stepping toward broadened and deepened groundedness, mutual acknowledgment, contemplation, engagement, understanding, deep dialogue, and sharing among First Alaskans, relatives, migrants, expats, and allanret4 across generations, languages, and amid evolving cultures, technologies, and world views.

Her mixed form 2021 collection commissioned by the Anchorage Museum,Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp, is available via the yugtarvik’s website.

Yugtarvik: A Tʌndrə’d Glimp is also available for direct digital download:

https://view.flipdocs.com/?ID=10017700_675590

Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging

University of Nebraska Press

Edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez

Table of Contents and Contributors

Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Those who claim a Native cultural identity often have family stories of tenuous ties dating back several generations. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship.

Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”—non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits—and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.

César Love Poetry

Four Corners

you share with me a picture of your sunset

I would give one back to you

But my balcony faces east

instead, I offer you

A midnight

dawn

And noon

three corners of the sky

with your sunset, they are four

one diamond of the night and day

Orange

In the grocery store aisle

one belly button orange with a scar

others pristine, unblemished

others soon to be sold

Between perfect sisters

one unbidden sphere

branded by two discolored inches

not to be held

not to be tasted

A globe passed over

oceans never plunged

forests never inhaled

landscapes never painted

A world unfathomed

with a navel and a canyon scar

is the canyon east or west?

north or south?

perhaps along her belly

or across a breast

maybe against her cheek.

Moonlight at Noon

The Moon, My Shadow, and I make Three. – Li Po

I would bake on this planet

If not for the Moon I invited

She agreed to let me keep her

Tucked beneath my blouse

Her cool face against my belly

I lounge in her quiet

I swim in her well

I bloom in her sanity

The Moon brought me a friend

One who used to follow me

She mimicked my every movement

At first she flattered me

Then she mocked me

Finally, she ran away

I screamed at her,

Come back here!

I tried to put a leash on her

But she was too smart

I threw a plum at her

Of course, she thew one back

We did this for months

Then the Moon told me her name

The Poet’s Tent

North or South, she travels

Always with her tent.

On chosen ground,

She slides its rods into the earth.

She places cloth on its frame.

A cloth she imagined

Something like a Mexican rebozo

Something like an Amish quilt

A cloth that exchanges colors

That switches latticework

Cloth that vibrates to the heartbeat of deer

Cloth that answers the whispers of trees

The poet smooths the floor

She unrolls her carpet

Psychic knots detach from its tendrils:

abandoned theories

dropped desires

jettisoned memories.

They pulse on her floor.

Soon to transform

Soon to become

feral opals

protean metals

iris crystals.

She prepares the door

Butterflies of every stripe arrive

Cesar Love is a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, he is also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He is the author of Birthright and While Bees Sleep. cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com

For Q

by Kim Shuck

Pull on a different mountain range

One leg at a time

You time travel in poem

He told me

I've seen you do it

We went relic spotting

More than once

Through the line up of the '53 Dodgers

Before his heart was broken

Memories never sit as neatly in a prong setting

As a heart solitaire

Memories never sit as neatly

To my bystanders

by Deborah Jang

People stand by during attack of elderly Asian woman – Associated Press

Did you catch a whiff of lilac

on that warm summer eve

while we gathered at the bus stop,

each wandering our mind?

Out the corner of your eye

did you flinch, did you see him

rushing twilight, pushing rudely in?

In a flash of recognition,

did your stomach tell your throat

what was going down?

Did you see my toes curl fetal

while I lay sideways

on the concrete stunned?

Did you freeze in fear and horror?

Did you look the other way?

Did you reach down for your phone

or was it already in your hand?

Were you scared to intervene?

Did your silence cheer him on?

Was it you who kneeled down

and whispered something kind

I didn’t understand?

Did you see my bruised face on TV?

Did they say my name?

Did they even try?

Deborah Jang’s creative practices include assemblage sculpture and poetry, based out of Denver, Colorado and Oceanside, California. Her debut poetry collection is titled Float True (Shanti Arts, 2020). Her new chapbook is Last Will and Best Guesses (Finishing Line Press, 2022). deborahjang.com

LAST WILL AND BEST GUESSES by Deborah Jang

"Deborah Jang knows the terrain of the human heart. In Last Will and Best Guesses she offers an unflinching meditation on mortality and mystery. Jang taps into our shared experiences from the pandemic to racial reckonings, the environmental crises, the plights of refugees. She writes candidly about the workings of her mind, which are the unspeakable workings of ours too. She muses on connections and consciousness that alter and deepen through recent and ongoing trauma and settles into grace. This is a rich, relatable book to pull out again and again." –Terra Trevor is a contributor to 15 books including, Take A Stand: Art Against Hate.

"Deborah Jang writes through a raging global pandemic, when a “planet [is] spinning off its axis,” gathering strength to face its uncertainties and attendant anti-Asian violence and sentiment. This is a reserve, for herself, and future generations, and I am nourished by her work." –Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multi-media artist whose book, Ghost Of, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

“Mind bent, nose blown, fingers crossed./Head bowed, going home.” Deborah Jang writes to the rhythm of life while examining death and all its intricacies. This chapbook is an exhale and a deep breath." –Vogue M. Robinson is the author of Vogue 3:16 (2014) and served as Poet Laureate (2017-2019) for Clark County, Nevada.

Last Will and Best Guesses by Deborah Jang, Finishing Line Press

Community

by Kim Shuck

Grandma lived with this peppernut

Sapling and tree

They drank the same water

I know that the creek is here

Under ground

Under thought

Near the lilac

Someone’s relic of a different life

Someone’s idea

Carried from somewhere else

On a quiet day

When there has been rain

Rest your cheek on the trunk and hear/feel

Water

Running in cracked pipes

Grandma

The tree

The elderberry

The salamander

The sense of humor

The fog

Each water particle

Rhymes with the life here

Whispers kinship

To the cracked and layered

Rocks on this

Hill

Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of eight books and one that is on the way. She has edited or co-edited ten volumes of poetry. She contributed essays to the recently released de Young 125, a collection of writing about and photographs of pieces in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her most recent collection of poems is Exile Heart from That Painted Horse Press. www.kimshuck.com

Assassination Nation

On the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968

by Robert Bensen

Whoever we might have been,

whatever grief or fury we might have shared

were lost when the mighty arm

that God and the weight room gave him

brought down, I believe

a set of knuckles to open my skull

to the complicity of my complexion

and turn us, like the twilight, black and white.

A half-hour later: dizziness, nausea,

a swarm of psychedelic lights.

The brain trauma specialist

asked if I always sweat like this.

—Yes, I said, yes, yes,

I always sweat like this.

Police stacked the table with album after album of mug shots,

thumbnails of beautiful black males, growing older, somewhere, maybe.

Maybe my main mugger-man in there, or the brothers who shot up the neighborhood

night after night I lay sweating bullets on the floor, that summer the night

one of their grandmothers took a slug through her picture window into her heart.

None of those faces belonged above the arm

I can still see silhouetted against the cool dusk of April 4, 1968,

before it descended like the wrath of Jehovah

who smote the hard, hard hearts of the children

all the harder because they were his children.

—Officer, I said, I never saw the man’s face.

Cop thinks —This guy’s a waste.

But I had seen the heraldry of race, an arm raised,

and locked in the fist, a club, a mace—

trapped in this row after row, page after page

of sullen faces. Many frames, one rage.

I wonder: could he pick out of a college yearbook,

or a line-up of my entire despiséd race,

me, whose head got in the way of his fist?

Did this startled face serve in place of him

who cocked the hammer and aimed the rifle

and pulled the trigger that fired the bullet

that flew through Memphis

that lovely April afternoon, the bullet

that has been flying for half a century,

bullet flying still—

would this one do, who did nothing to stop it,

nothing whatever to stop it,

this one who’ll never undo the nothing he did

with the nothing he wouldn’t do, if he could.

First published in Piltdown Review.

Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta NY). He also taught at Parkland College and SUNY Oneonta, and conducted community workshops, including the Red Herring Workshop (Urbana IL) and the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell NY). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. robertbensen.com

Race, Ethnicity and My Face

by Terra Trevor

As a woman of Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German descent, I came of age understanding that I'm not totally Native nor am I totally white. I'm a border woman dwelling between the boundaries.

I have light skin, light enough that some people think I’m a white person. My dad, a Native man, and my mother, a white woman, had me when they were teenagers in 1953. We lived in Compton, a mixed-race community in Los Angeles. The family next door was Bolivian and they loved me like a daughter. My best friend was Japanese and Mexican. Still, when I was 10 years-old, my dad sat me down to have “the talk” with me about race. He told me about how to navigate the streets, about how to stay safe. He also wanted to make sure I understood that in order to be accepted by certain white people it mattered who your friends were.

By that point, however, I already knew.

I had discovered that when I went to play at the houses of my white friends after school I needed to be aware of how I was holding myself at all times. I learned to stay alert and watch for clues: sometimes there might be an older brother who pulled his eyes in an upward slant and said something mean about Chinese people; or a father that casually spouted racial slurs at people of color. When this happened, I knew I had to make an excuse to go home and I’d never go back. Sometimes I’d make up stories when asked about my darker skinned, mixed-race family in order to protect them. But if the mothers of my white friends didn’t feel satisfied with my answers, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay at their houses for long.

Things would be different when I went over to the houses of my friends of color. Their mothers would always take me in without hesitation. And if there was a grandmother at home who spoke English with an accent, or didn’t speak English at all I could usually be certain they wouldn’t ask me if my daddy had a job. In their homes, I felt safe.

As a child I had things all figured out. But when I reached my late teens and early twenties it became more complicated.

Hanging out with my friends of color meant witnessing them get treated poorly and face multiple instances of discrimination by white people. Being out with my white friends, however, meant that we could expect to be given preferential treatment no matter where we went. When I began dating and went out with Native boys or other boys of color in my community, I was considered “white trash” by white America. I could even expect to have a white man point to my date and ask me what I thought I was doing being with the likes of someone like him. But when I dated the first guy that was white, I was allowed to be white by association and had access to the privileges of white America because of that. In stores or restaurants, we were always served or seated first, before people of color. When we acted up or got into mischief in public, it was laughed off as opposed to being taken seriously with the assumption that we were up to no good like it had been for other teens of color.

My early adulthood was charged with decisions to make: Should I mention my Native identity? Should I let white people I don’t know well and may not ever want to become close friends with, assume I’m white? Keep my racial identity private from employers and others who would discriminate against me if they knew I’m a mixed-blood Native American woman? With dark skinned family members and dark skin friends? With strong ties to Native America and rooted within a community of color?

Then, at age twenty-three, I suddenly found myself employed full-time in a company that was predominantly white. So white, that my intuition told me if my boss had known I was anything other than white, I would have probably not been hired. My white co-workers seemed to only accept people of color who adhered to white social norms and didn’t challenge their biases. They could not accept how vastly different the culture values, thought processes, and social norms of ethnic people were from white America.

I wear the face of a woman with light skin privilege. While keenly aware of the advantage it has given me over my friends and family who are not able to pass, I always make the decision to disclose my Native identity. I never try to pass. Passing would mean turning my back on my Native family, friends and community. Following my experiences working in a predominantly-white company at 23, I began to make sure that at each interview I had for a new job, I’d take a “racial temperature check” to ensure that people of color who looked like my friends and family were always welcomed. And I’d proudly list all the positions I’ve held within American Indian and Asian-American organizations on my resume.

Later on in my life, I married a man who was white and we had a daughter together, before adopting two Korean children. Two of our kids had apparent ethnic features and their black hair and darker skin often caused people to mistakenly assume they were Native American. I knew that blending into white society would never be an option for them. So it was always a toss on whether they would be able to ride on the wings of my white privilege, or be subject to the racism that ruled America when they were out on their own. In turn, I did my best to connect them with their Korean roots by becoming deeply involved with the Korean community in our town. For thirty years, my heart and soul was shaped by my connection to this community for which I am grateful to be a part of.

Now, in my 70s, my gray hair and wrinkled face reveal the many years I have lived. Yet what has not changed is what most cannot see: I am still a border woman. Borders are set up to define or to separate, but I am neither part white, nor part Native. My blood is a mix between two worlds, Native and white merging together to form a third: a woman dwelling between the boundaries.

A border woman—that is me.

First published in Santa Clara Review, vol 108 / issue 01

Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press). She is a contributor to fifteen books in Native studies, Native literature, nonfiction and memoir. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals 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), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate: A Raven Chronicles Anthology, and in numerous other books. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal.

Take a Stand: Art Against Hate

A Raven Chronicles Anthology

“The poems and stories in this anthology offer necessary anecdotes against hate. They are inscription, instruction, witness, warning, remedy, solution, even solace. This anthology is relief.”

—Diane Glancy

Winner of an Amerian Book Award and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry

“We can regard Take a Stand: Art Against Hate as a print-form peace march, an ongoing campaign for justice for all of the struggles embodied in these writings and depicted in the artwork included here.”

—Carolyne Wright

co-editor of Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace

Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, edited by Seattle-based writers Anna Balint, Phoebe Bosche, and Thomas Hubbard, contains poems, stories and images from 117 writers, 53 artists, with 69 illustrations, divided into five fluid and intersecting sections: Legacies, We Are Here, Why?, Evidence, and Resistance. We begin with Legacies because the current increased climate of hate in this country didn’t begin with the 2016 election, and to find its roots we must look to U.S. history.

Home Rocks

by Kim Shuck

This morning I hear the singing

One mountain to another

Across valley and piped creek

Rock

Tumbling in culvert

Translating water into

Serpentine thoughts

When they moved the star map

I could hear her singing

Can hear her singing now

Can hear her learning

Granite story

Heat and cooling

We are all stories in series

The water we are

The water that has carried us

Has carried stone

Has cracked a surface has

Sung through the culverts

Another kind of mapping of

Writing

A travel story a

Song of staying and of

Shifting

A song called across this valley from this mountain to another

A scatter

A collection

I found a scrap of you

Wrenched from your hill

Mounted on a museum wall

We sang quiet songs to one other

All afternoon

Dissident rocks that we are

Just today I could hear our home hills

The waters that polished us

Humming an answer

Kim Shuck, a native of San Francisco whose work explores her multiethnic roots, is San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate.

A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Shuck lives in the Castro district. Her poetry collections include Clouds Running In, Rabbit Stories, Smuggling Cherokee and Deer Trails. Shuck also teaches at the California College of Art, in the diversity department, and has taught at San Francisco State University. She has volunteered in San Francisco Unified School District classrooms for two decades. www.kimshuck.com

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press)

By Robert Bensen

The recent discoveries of over 1,000 Indigenous children’s graves near boarding and residential schools are the latest developments in the story of assimilative, arguably genocidal education in the U.S. and Canada. In poetry, fiction, and memoir, the boarding school experience is represented in Children of the Dragonfly, the first anthology of Indian literature devoted to Indian child education and welfare. The anthology also includes literature on adoption and foster care, when some 35 percent of Indian children were raised in non-Indian settings during the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the U.S. crisis that led to passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Dragonfly is an ancient spirit in the Zuni story that saves two abandoned children and restores them to their people. That spirit is infused in the literature collected in Children of the Dragonfly.

Boarding schools were created to assimilate Indian children to the white world, which required the loss of cultural traditions. The literature tells us, however, that children kept their stories and practices as much as they could. U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” (1994) retells the ancient creation story in the story of Johnny and Lila. Together they endured the rigors and privations of boarding school, but afterward went their separate ways. Johnny joined the army. Lila worked at Dairy Queen and cleaned houses until she entered the story that had been her refuge at school. She married one of the stars and lived in the Sky World, where she was sure “she could find love in a place that did not know the disturbance of death.”

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

The University of Arizona Press

River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal: A Community of Voices