River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

Homeland Insecurity

By Dawn Downey

I struggled for balance as the tide sucked the sand from under my feet, wrapping kelp around my ankles. The receding surf blanketed my toes with foam and left them icy, even as the setting sun warmed my shoulders. Gulls screamed at dogs let loose by their owners. I backed away from the water and strolled uphill to join my best friend Angie at a picnic table in the grass.

We were spending the night on East Beach with her siblings and her cousins who had driven up from Mexico. We had a job to do: stake a claim on a spot for the following day’s Fourth of July gathering. Mothers and abuelas from different families would arrive early in the morning to cook chorizo and eggs, but the night belonged to us teenagers. We danced, gossiped, and smoked pot. I flirted with Angie’s cutest cousin. We wandered along the beach to see who else was camping out. Mariachi music drifted from a car stereo. When we finally crawled into our sleeping bags, stars were poking through an inky sky. I pulled the bag tight against the cold California night until only my eyes were exposed. Phosphorescent waves rolled in, as sparks rose from our fire pit along with the scent of burning wood. An occasional snap broke the lull of the ocean’s roar.

That summer in high school, the cadence of Spanish came as easily to my tongue as English did. Lying on the beach with Angie and her cousins, I scrunched into the sand until it conformed to the contours of my body. They were my tribe, the beach our homeland. But it was a borrowed sense of belonging. It receded when our friendship ebbed.

This morning, I planted nine seedlings
in a strawberry pot, seeing,
instead, the lane leading up to the farm.
If you can’t go home again then why
do I go home so often? Why trace
my bloodline down the side
of a red clay pot?
–––From A Red Clay Pot, by Janet Sunderland

When I was a child, home was a bright yellow two-story in Des Moines,. A brick sidewalk led up to our screened-in front porch, which offered scant protection from mosquitoes or june bugs. Dad hung a razor strap on a hook beside the door between the porch and the living room, warning my siblings and I to stay on our best behavior.

I suppose we farmed a bit––helped Mama pick rutabagas and dandelion greens for supper. Hard packed clay soil poked my knees. Sweat traced lines down my forehead, the salt stinging my eyes when I wiped it away. Mama studied the Burpee seed catalog at the kitchen table and planted marigolds, but our yard was more arsenal than farm. It grew snowballs, rocks, and buckeyes, which bullies threw at my head. After ten years in Des Moines––I was fourteen at the time––Dad moved us out to California. The brick sidewalk leading up to the yellow house did not burn an after-image in my heart.

Home was a place I could not fathom, the mythical Land of Oz, instead of the farmstead Dorothy tried to get back to.

I spent five winters in Minneapolis with my first husband. On the February day we first pulled into town, the temperature dipped well below zero, yet joggers and bikers in brightly colored tights crowded the trail around Lake Harriet. An environment that froze your nose hairs from October to May could not be ignored. You had to come to terms with it, or else build your life around hating it. I adapted. I learned to navigate downtown skywalks. I learned the value of front wheel drive and a manual transmission. Mastered plowing my Honda CRX through bumper-deep slush. Prided myself on the ability to take off from a stop sign at the crest of a slippery hill. Those were the survival techniques of a foreigner. Locals, on the other hand, traced their bloodlines in the rituals handed down by the tribe. Certain behaviors defined fitting in. Ice skating. Ice fishing. Ice sculpting! I signed up for a class, but failed to master staying erect on cross-country skis, atop snow crusted over with ice. I could not discern the names of the people leaving messages on my office phone: Lena Larsdatter, Hans Helland, Tormod Oefstedal. And what was a hotdish?

For every house I’ve called home, I did not go home again. Iowa, California, Oregon, Minnesota, Missouri. A roll call of places where I failed to set down roots. A litany of states describing a single state of mind: outsider.

I’ve been in Kansas City thirty years, certainly long enough to develop an attachment, but by the time I’d moved to my suburban split-level, a wary relationship with place had already set in. I planted marigolds in red clay pots around my patio, in a simulation of homestead, but when I leave for a daily walk, neither pots nor patio linger in my mind’s eye. The front steps cease to exist as soon as they're behind me. I don’t look at my street and see the snow packed lanes of Minneapolis. And nothing pulls me back to Santa Barbara’s shoreline. I live near a wooded area crisscrossed by blacktop trails. A deer once startled me on a day I’d braved our miniature forest. She stood at attention a few yards away, her head lifted in my direction. We eyeballed each other and then she stepped daintily into the brush. I envied her sure-footedness, the way she seemed to know where she was headed and where she’d come from. The environment looked opaque to me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha: Stories about Tripping over My Principles on the Road to Transformation.” An essayist, Downey finds inspiration in everyday situations. Topics under her scrutiny range from her pursuit of the perfect purse to her search for the meaning of life. Toss in jealousy, prejudice, guilt, and inadequacy for good measure. Thanks to a spiritual path that winds through the teachings of the Buddha and around to non-duality, she now enjoys a kinder, gentler relationship with her eccentricities.

Downey’s essays have been published by The Christian Science Monitor; Shambhala Sun; Skirt! Magazine; Kansas City Voices: A Periodical of Writing and Art; and The Best Times. Her work is anthologized in Alzheimer’s Anthology of Unconditional Love: The 110,000 Missourians with Alzheimer’s; My Dad is My Hero: Tributes to the Men Who Gave Us Life, Love, and Driving Lessons; and the Cuivre River Anthology. Her writing has earned awards from the Missouri Writers Guild, Oklahoma Writers Federation, Northern Colorado Writers, and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She lives in Kansas City with her husband, Ben Worth (aka publisher, roadie, and driver). He spoils her rotten. She reciprocates. Read her weekly blog at www.dawndowney.com

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

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.

Grandma Iron Thunder tells me

that Giveaways are to Indians

what Christmas is to white people.

~Tiffany Midge "Outlaws, Renegades and Saints"

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.

Abrazando la Diversidad en la Escritura

Embracing Diversity in Writing
By Aurora Garcia

Being a Latina whose first language is Spanish, I prefer to read and write in Spanish. There are a couple different reasons for this. First, I love my language. Spanish is a rich, vast, delicious, poetic and fun language. I will in English, especially when something was initially written in English. However, I believe that we often lose some of the meaning the author had intended when writing is translated. Some things just cannot be translated. Yet, when it comes to diversity, not everything needs translating, because some feelings and situations are universal.

My favorite author is Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite book. Garcia Marquez, in my opinion, personifies a perfect writer. First, the richness of our vocabulary is overwhelming. I can’t get over how he interlaces words that can be so simple and quotidian, yet he and only he could create such magic with those common words. I love the way he can make you look at a life in a snapshot and make you know that character with all virtues and defects. I’m in love with his sarcasm, sense of humor and realism. He is realistic in the way he paints a character and then he adds the magical realism that allows you dream and wonder how he came up with those ideas.

I believe that we should all be exposed to diversity in reading. The world is a small place and we need to focus more on the similarities than in our differences. I have read stories about people in China or India and it always goes back to how we can relate or understand their situation.

Regardless of the culture, we share the same feelings and situations. It probably comes natural for me to feel that way, but it may not be the case for everybody. I witnessed a lot of racism and closed minds. I have seen Caucasians with a sense of entitlement and don’t care to even consider trying to understand other cultures. Or they will travel to other countries and expect the people to adapt to their American ways, instead of enjoying the differences and the richness that each culture has to offer.

I’ve also seen a lot of rejection in the Latino culture in terms of language. Some may say that their country speaks the best Spanish. People have a need to compare and feel superior to others. For me, loving Spanish, I see differences in language as an excuse to make it more vast and interesting. When I hear a different Latin-American accent or wording, I find it great and enjoy listening to the different ways of speaking. If everyone were more open and more welcoming to diversity in reading, it would open more possibilities for tolerance amongst everybody.

Thank you to author Terra Trevor, who invited me to join the growing number of readers, authors, publishers and writers who are passionate about diversity and have launched an online campaign calling for more diversity in publishing, and inviting writers to answer the following questions:

Q. Why do you write what you do? And, how does your work differ from others of its genre?

My writing is informal, and sometimes I feel awkward being called a writer. I write off and on, and sometimes there are long stretches when I read instead of write. I enjoy writing, but it is a process I cannot force. Also, when I read works by great writers, I question my writing. I write personal essays, intimate writing, but I also write about society. I believe as a Latina I can write about the mistakes we make as Latinos. It’s like in a family, you feel like you can tell your family what they’re doing wrong, but you cannot stand hearing anybody else telling them the same thing.

One of the first mistakes we make as Latinos is segregation. It would make a huge difference is if every Latin American could see other Latin Americans as part of the same culture. Just like in the language, it would make a tremendous difference if we embraced the different cultures and enjoyed the differences instead of being so defensive. Yes it is great to have a sense of pride in one’s country, but I don’t think it’s contradictory to at the same time have a feeling of inclusion towards others. Embracing the multiplicities of the Spanish language will make us stronger, and offer respect from other countries when they see segregation is not an option.

Q: How does your writing process work?

I write whatever appeals to me, and I believe my passion for writing (and reading) was inherited from my father who wrote songs and poetry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Aurora Garcia is a nonfiction writer and essayist who was born in La Piedad, Michoacan, Mexico. She moved to California in 1989, when she was 14 years old. This is about the time when she began writing, but throughout her teen and young adult years she kept her writing to herself for fear of being exposed. Although fluent in English and Spanish she instinctively writes in Spanish, as it is her native language.

Aurora lives with her husband and son. She loves life, nature, art, music, and diversity, admiring the contrasts and richness of her homeland culture, as well as the beautiful language that Spanish is. Aurora believes her passion for writing was inherited from her father who wrote songs and poetry.

One More Reason Why We Need Diverse Lit

By Linda Rodriguez

The other day I had a conversation with a very wealthy and well-educated white man. This conversation still bothers me. Probably because it’s a discussion whose main points I’ve had to deal with many times before with other people. Note: this guy was not some ignorant, insensitive racist spouting ethnic slurs.

Still, he didn’t understand what I was talking about because ultimately he was not yet able to stand outside his privilege of white skin, male gender, and inherited wealth. I say, “not yet,” because I refuse to give up hope for him and others I’ve encountered like him, who have genuinely good intentions but can’t get past the blinders of privilege. Earlier conversations with such people have focused around the difficult lives of women living in poverty, the automatic racism encountered over and over by people of color that can leave them justifiably hypersensitive, and similar topics. This conversation centered on books. More

#WeNeedDiverseBooks #diverselit

Punta del Este Pantoum

By Chip Livingston

Accept my need and let me call you brother,

Slate blue oyster, wet sand crustacean,

In your hurrying to burrow, wait. Hover.

Parse opening’s disaster to creation’s

Slate, to another blue-eyed monstrous sand crustacean,

Water-bearer. Hear the ocean behind me,

Pursued, asking to be opened, asking Creation

To heed the tides that uncover you nightly.

Water-bearer, wear the water beside me,

Hide your burying shadow from the shorebirds,

But heed the tides that uncover you nightly.

Gems in sandcastles, stick-written words,

Hidden from the shadows of shorebirds,

Washed over by water. Water’s revelatory

Gems, sand, castles, sticks, words –

Assured of erasure, voluntary erosion.

Watched over with warrior resolution,

Crab armor, claws, and nautilus heart,

Assured of a savior, reconstruct your evolution,

Clamor to hear, water scarab, what the tampered heart hears.

A scarab’s armor is light enough to fly.

In your hurry to burrow, wait. Hover.

Hear the clamor of the crustacean’s heart.

Heed this call of creation. Call me brother.

First published in SING:Poetry of the Indigenous Americas
The University of Arizona Press, 2011

How is it

we stopped for directions to Cabo Polonio

and I smelled Fry bread? It couldn’t be,

I said, telling you quickly my hungry Indian

history. You replied Estas son tortas fritas,

una comida del campo desde hace mucho tiempo,

then Oh my God, those are my grandfathers!

And there they were, from Aguas Dulces,

visiting an old friend who ran the roadside stand,

a woman already wrapping the sweet dough

and packing it in a plastic bag with napkins

for us to eat on the sand dunes, trying to figure out

with your grandmother how long it had been

since the last time she’d seen you, only then

as tall as the hand she held at the pocket

of her thin denim skirt, and how was it again

that you and she were related. I watched this

in English, waiting to taste the difference

I wouldn’t find in what your ancestors

and my ancestors fed us. How is it

we shared this flour and fat they fried

as golden as buttered toast, on a dune buggy

ride to a village without roads or electricity,

ate this ancient bread on ancient rocks

watching seals you call los lobos

de mar, envisioning a new Picasso?

We ate these tortas as the sun dove,

as the moon rose a day before it would be full,

telling each other the names of our appetites

in two languages winnowed down to basics:

Do you like me? Do you like the bread? How is it?

First published in SING: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas
The University of Arizona Press, 2011

Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of two collections of poetry, CROW-BLUE, CROW-BLACK and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS, and a collection of short stories, NAMING CEREMONY, Lethe Press, 2014. Chip has received fiction awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Writers and Storytellers, and the AABB Foundation. Chip grew up on the Florida-Alabama border and now lives in Colorado, where he teaches writing online, and is a faculty mentor in the low-rez MFA program at Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico.

A Rattle of Individual Voices and Tires

By Kim Shuck

Incantations over formica at

Carefully chosen hours we define the old

Route 66 the

World serpent shattered now like the spine of the

Carpathians, the vertebrae of the Andes we are

Black top and burned coffee, we are pie 24 hours a day we

Chart sunrises and arrange stones we run

Fingertips over petroglyphs, over countertop scratches, our prayer

Songs call cactus flowers out of the lizard jeweled night the breath of the

Lungless, that other beat of a heart that doesn’t keep the

Blood warm and the faint outline of an old-time eye that

Stares from an unclenched fist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Shuck is a writer, editor and visual artist of Tsalagi and Polish ancestry. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry Smuggling Cherokee won the 2005 Diane Decorah award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas and was published by Greenfield Review Press in 2006. Her first book of prose, Rabbit Stories, came out in February of 2013.

Her second solo book of poetry, Clouds Running In, forthcoming in 2014, includes drawings by the brilliant Cumbrian artist, Marcer Campbell.

Visit Kim at www.kimshuck.com