Once Upon A River

By Tiffany Midge

We were the kids trading marbles and penny candy at the Friday night Grange Hall meetings. We were the deaf shopkeeper at McDougals who said the comics would set ya back two bits, and the digests two bits and a George Washington. We were the Pillager kids from your dad’s class who had you over for supper, who horrified your mom when Mrs. Pillager wiped the rain off her hounds with a dishcloth, then covered the fried chicken with the same cloth.

We were the voices of the evening church bells chiming every sunset and the Rutherford sisters who graciously invited you into their doily-drenched parlor for hot water and honey and taught you how to play Hearts.

We were the hippie mom of the kid you played with, who stored the umbilical cords of her children in the back of the freezer, and the waitress at the Silver Spoon who dished you free bowls of vanilla ice cream on slow nights. We were the man who convinced you he was going to commandeer a raft all the way to Hawaii and who you swear you saw on the TV news, safe and triumphant after he’d mysteriously left town.

We were the junkyard dog next door whose owner was jaundiced and sported a hook for a hand, and the Davenquist boy who you traded your Girl Scout Mints for a litter of baby mice that all died because the house was too cold at night, so your dad replaced them with tropical fish.

We were the general store where you ran to fetch the mail every afternoon from Box 70 and spent your ten cent weekly allowance on a candy bar, and the girl named Rudy whose newborn sister had pierced ears and whose dad smoked from a hookah pipe, and Brian Osterday who was your perfect first love and who had a brother named Royal, the name of your orange cat.

We were the Snoqualmie Bull’s Saturday baseball games your dad coached and the fat catcher named Moose who later died from a broken leg. We were Brownie meetings in the basement of the library across the street.

We were the occasional shrieking of the firehouse alarm alerting your dad, in the volunteer squad to run up the block and help save distressed babies or car engine fires, and we were creek crawdads and guppies and the steady stream of bull fish hooked from the banks of the Snoqualmie River.

We were the long days that existed solely for the pleasures of swimming in the lagoons of that river, and the sandbar where some fishermen gave you your first can of beer and where you traced pictures in the sand and buried costume jewelry and brooches stolen from your mother’s dresser.

We were the sticker bushes alongside the banks where you harvested quarts of blackberries and traded to Mrs. Higgenbottom who made you a blue pie.

We were Mary Chesum whose parents were Yakima Indians and we were the Friday night when she was abducted from the house she was babysitting at, taken to the river where she was alternately chased, then stabbed, and chased again, repeatedly—her blood and clothing spilling across the lengths of the rocky bank—by a high school senior who she’d been refusing to date.

We were Mary Chesum’s younger sister Lisa, your friend, your classmate. You were the only two Indian girls in school, the only ones with that long black hair that wrapped around your shoulders like shawls. The only two girls who knew they were different, who knew they’d be singled out; girls who paired up for safety and refuge, for shelter; ones who knew how to flee to the banks of the river, instinctually, by memory.

We were there, that day on the playground when your shoelace had broken and Lisa without hesitation unbraided her lace and gave it to you.
We watched as she bent over and threaded the lace into the grommets of your shoe, then went for the remainder of the day with her one shoe loose and undressed.

Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.
Once Upon A River appeared in “Native Literatures: Generations," 2010.

Tiffany Midge’s book “Outlaws, Renegades and Saints, Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” won the Diane Decorah Poetry Award. She’s most recently been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review and the online journal No Tell Motel. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux and MFA grad from University of Idaho she lives in Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College. 
https://tiffanymidge.wixsite.com/website

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).

Scenes From a Naturalist’s Sketchbook

By Tiffany Midge

My father tells me the stars don’t exist,

having burned out year’s ago. These are what remains,
tricks of the eye.  We are standing beneath
a congress of firs lit by stars—
flickering candles in night’s windows.
After my mother dies he tells me
everything still exists, it’s all still alive.
I think of the intrepid current of a Cascades’
creek that nearly drowned me—
the rapids I was saved from banked by stones
each with a name my father knew: Terrigenous,
breccias, shale.  In the Gulf of Mexico
kerchiefed women, aunties of Jorges and Jose,
peddled giant sea turtle shells to tourists—
my father shrugging them off: Gracious, gracious, no, no.
I think of remote camps, my father leaving
for hours on expedition, returning with a hat
full of berries he swore he’d outrun a bear for.
Nanooch Tropical Gardens, Thailand: My father
chain-smoking Chinese cigarettes beneath
an umbrella of palms, the esplanade full of howler
monkeys and sun bears, an exhibit of giant butterflies.
Everything still exists, it’s all still alive.
We net smelt at a Pacific coast beach,
our fingers stained purple from gutting fish,
our faces stinging with salt spray, canvas Keds
drying on a line; tacky residue of campfire
fish on our hands, the meat part smoke, part sweet.

Whatcom Creek

It’s been four years since I’ve seen my father

and here we are taking in the mayhem
like a couple of tourists who’ll later
buy bright, glossy postcards of the salmon
belly-up and gutted along the pier.
He’s still handsome, my father, still smokes
the filter-less cigarettes, year by year
their tar flowering like badly-timed jokes
in his dark lungs.  I used to pray for him
before prayer was futile as these fish
pitching their fruiting bodies into dim
bleary tombs.  This same time next year I’ll wish
for more time.  I’ll wish for redemption,
but only ghosts will rise, I imagine. 

First published at Drunken Boat No. 15 
Readmore  http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/tiffany-midge 
Copyright © Tiffany Midge. All rights reserved.

Tiffany Midge’s book “Outlaws, Renegades and Saints, Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” won the Diane Decorah Poetry Award.  She’s most recently been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review and the online journal No Tell Motel.  An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux and MFA grad from University of Idaho, she lives in Moscow, Idaho (Nez Perce country) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College.