From Michoacan, Mexico to California: A Latina Writer Reflects

By Aurora Garcia

We hear it everywhere “we are one.” Do we really believe it? I personally struggle with my own demons of stereotyping, pride, fear and narrow mindedness. I force myself to think of me and everything else that surrounds me as a global matter. But I have to keep reminding myself of the type of person I want to be and the kind of example I want to be for my son. Not easy.

As a kid I would fear hearing anything that had to do with news. Perhaps all the catastrophes, political affairs, personal interests, unfairness, is what has made me be so scared. As I got older I realized that I had to be informed on relevant issues. Reluctantly, I watch and read “some” news.

I hear a lot about immigration and of course being a Latina, I could not turn my back on these issues. The first time I entered the United States, I did it with my green card. Do you think racist or prejudiced people know or care about that? No, they look only at my last name.

Thankfully my wonderful father did the work it took to make sure I did not have the need to enter this country illegally. This means, I did not have to suffer what people trying to survive around the world have suffered for centuries. People around the world have been displaced countless times. Also, in the United States think of the discrimination that in past decades- Irish, Chinese, Blacks, and Native American have been through, not to mention being called the Okies. Well, now it is the Hispanics’ turn – myself included.

The Spaniards came to America. They “discovered” America. My answer to that is no need to discover us. We knew we were here. The conquistadors killed Native people. They took ships loaded with gold back to Spain. They traded mirrors for gold. They destroyed writings, and a culture. If that had not happened, I would most likely live in my hometown and my last name would not be Garcia, but most likely a Purepecha name.

I feel a right to write about all this, because it hits home. As a Mexican, I see and hear all the trouble that immigrants from Central America go through in my own country. This is a shame. I have heard all kinds of criticism because in Mexico there is a large Argentinean, Chinese, Centro-American community. Well, we are the least indicated to say a word or mistreat anybody. And I don’t even want to get started on the terrible way society has treated and continues to treat Natives in my own country. This is a whole other topic.

Yes, the world would be chaotic if we all went back to where we came from. The United States of America would be filled with only Native Americans. The Mayans and Aztecs would have emerged as the great civilizations they were. The rest of the European countries that immigrated to America and that now call it their own would have stayed where they originated. But why are we so territorial?

There is a sense of ownership that people around the world acquire, but whose world is this? At the same time, we contradict ourselves in so many ways. We need to practice what we preach. When will we learn as a civilization that the world belongs to all of us, and that it is also our obligation to make it better.

WE ARE ONE. It would make the world a better place if we helped each other and stopped segregating. When God, or nature or whomever you believe in made the universe and earth, it was created with no borders, no names and no flags. Perhaps we could try to be more instinctive, more tolerant. And learn that the way the world has been managed for centuries is not working. I don’t have all the answers, but we could try together as a planet to avoid the mistakes that we keep repeating that have not taken us anywhere. Then again, I have been called crazy many times. Or like John Lennon said, “you may say I’m a dreamer.”

Copyright © 2011 Aurora Garcia. All rights reserved.

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 12 year-old 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.

She’s Awake

by Dawn Downey

There are days when the elders speak directly to the heart.

A hospice assignment led me to a suburban ranch house. Nothing in its appearance distinguished it from the others that lined the block.

Squinting into the August glare, I climbed the front stairs and rang the bell. When Mr. Murphy answered, the sun danced across his smiling face. It spilled into the entry hall behind him. I would sit with his wife, who was bedridden and lost to Alzheimer’s, while he ran errands.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the rear of the house. “She’s awake today.”

I followed him into the den. Picture windows on three of its walls framed a manicured back yard. The brilliant day poured in. Cushions printed in violet and lime plumped up a white wicker couch and ottoman. Better Homes and Gardens lay on a glass-topped table.

The furniture was pushed aside to accommodate Mrs. Murphy’s hospital bed. It faced a television set tuned to a country music video station. When I leaned over to say hello, she smiled up at me. Her unlined face and pixie haircut belied the degeneration reflected in her toothless grin.

“Are you going to do my hair?”
“She thinks you’re the beautician,” Mr. Murphy said.
I played along. “I’d love to.”
“Expensive?” she asked.
“Nope, I’m free.”

Mr. Murphy pushed the controls that raised the head of the bed. The motor whirred until his wife sat upright. He reached for a cup on the nightstand. “Want some water, Honey?” Leaning down to her, he touched a plastic straw to her thin, cracked lips.

After replacing the cup, he returned the bed to horizontal, gave me instructions and headed off to the grocery store.

I straightened the blankets, searching her face for signs of distress. But there was no strain in her expression. No worry lines creased her forehead.

The television blared a beer commercial. I switched it off, pulled up a stool and sat down next to the bed. Mrs. Murphy seemed to study the ceiling. We chatted our way through an Alzheimer’s banter, a duet sung with two different sets of lyrics.

“I’m happy I get to visit you today,” I said.
She lay still as a corpse. “Where’s my coat? I’m going home.”
I patted her leg, which was barely discernible among the pillows and blankets. “Where are you in there?”

We both chuckled, sharing the cosmic joke.

The sun streamed through the windows, warming me as I sat beside her. When hunger rumbled through my stomach, I reached into my bag. “Do you mind if I eat my apple?”

“We used to have a big back yard,” she said.
I nodded. “We did, too, with roses and oranges and avocados. And apples so sour, only Mother and I liked them.”

“Did you make pie?”
I crunched the Granny Smith. Its tartness bit my tongue. “Gosh no. She wasn’t great in the kitchen.”

Mrs. Murphy drifted off to sleep.

I curled up on the couch to meditate. A river of silence wound through intermittent thoughts. When the dark behind my eyelids grew brilliant, I checked to see if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud. The sky, however, was clear as glass. I closed my eyes and once more, the darkness brightened. A second peek revealed that the light in the room remained unchanged. I returned to meditation. The radiance reappeared as though the shades had been raised, but calm stayed my curiosity and lulled me into a nap.

I woke with a sense of remembering, without knowing what had been forgotten.

My companion had also awakened, but her eyes were vacant.
“Did you have a good nap?” I asked.
She replied without missing a beat. “We both did.”

Her erratic clarity enchanted me. I yearned to follow wherever she led, but the front door opened and Mr. Murphy brought in the groceries.

I met him in the kitchen, heard about the prices on soup and baby food, and then returned to her bed.

She startled me with a gaze as deep as Einstein’s. Her eyes reflected mine, and mine hers, back and back through the ages.
“Thanks for keeping me company,” I whispered.
She said … nothing. Off to play in other realms. Her absence was no less gratifying than her presence. I stroked her translucent cheek, said goodbye to her husband and stepped into the afternoon sun. A surge of energy quickened my pace --- the satisfaction that descends when I turn the last page of a perfectly crafted novel.

Copyright © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.

First published 2007 in Alzheimer’s Anthology of Unconditional Love, by the Mid-Missouri Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association

Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation.”
Dawn’s writing has also been published in The Christian Science Monitor, ShambhalaSun.com, Kansas City Voices Magazine, Ink Byte and The Best Times newspaper. Her work has earned honors at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, Oklahoma Writers Federation and the Missouri Writers Guild. www.dawndowney.com

Rosalia in her 90s

By Kim Shuck

Off in those days of furniture forts

Curled under upended armchairs or

Broom handles stuck in the lawn

Draped with blankets with you it was always this

Architecture

As your fears take over we try to

Talk it out

Tease some sense from a new game

Cereal, mug, toast

Food become building material you

Push it more than eat the

Pills you take or bury in the mashed potato when

No one is looking the arguments

About baths

About dreams that have become for you so

Vivid about your cold cold hands about the dinner you

Cooked it years ago but can smell that soup and

Yearn

Yearn for it, I’m

Learning to overcook to use

Handfuls of black pepper a

Spell to summon that familiar raven’s eye that

Smile that says you knew I was teasing you.


Copyright © Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kim Shuck is a writer, visual artist, curator, frustrated mom and recovering sarcastic. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University. Her first solo book of poetry, Smuggling Cherokee, was published by Greenfield Review press in 2005 and won the Diane Decorah Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. Recent work has been included in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and I Was Indian. In June 2010 Kim had a month long co-residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Visit her on the web at www.kimshuck.com

DEER-MICE SINGING UP PARNASSUS

By Carter Revard

(for Bill and Lois Winchester)

Sally Carrighar, in a meadow one night, heard what seemed a bird trilling, then saw it was a deer-mouse. My friend Bill Winchester tells me that when deer-mice came into his house from the tallgrass prairie of Oklahoma, he live-trapped and released them in a nearby hedgerow, but they waltzed back in, singing an epithalamium. Add an O and a Muse becomes a Mouse, with poetic license to party on Mount Parnassus and drink from the Muses’ Spring of Helicon. Blake's Sunflower, weary of time, looked for that sweet golden clime where the Traveler's journey is done—but the little Deer-Mice got there before tourists with FOX2P genes did (NY Times 29 May 2009, p.A5: human “language gene” put into mice deepens their baby-cries, so Mezzo Mice may soon be singing).

In this “new” world they sing,
as we come down from the stars,1
like Milton’s Leonora singing
(aut Deus, aut vacui certé mens tertia cøeli),2
they climb up the stems
of sunflowers still not weary
of time, and they trill,
perching and swinging,
in meadow and glade, as if
a rainbow
trout might rise
to May-flies from their
music, as if John Muir and
Hetch Hetchy3
might come back
alive and listening,
anadromous as salmon or sabretooth
tigers, up time itself into the glistening
moonlit sonatas of
Sierra song.

1 In our Osage naming ceremonies it is said that we have come to this world from the stars. The words in one of our dawn-songs say of the Sun: “He returns, he is coming again into the visible world.”
2 Line 5 of John Milton’s Latin poem written in 1637-8 for the Neapolitan singer Leonora Baroni, whom he heard during a visit to Rome. In English, lines 4-8 of that poem, as translated from Latin by Lawrence Revard, say: “…your voice itself sounds God’s presence./ Surely God, or an emptied heaven’s third intelligence,/…glides through your throat,/…and teaches mortal hearts/ to grow accustomed to immortal sound.” See JOHN MILTON, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella Revard (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 199.
3 John Muir tried to save a Sierra vale, Hetch Hetchy, but the dam was built and now the people of San Francisco (St. Francis?) drink, shower, and flush with water drawn from that sanctuary—the moving waters at their priestlike task, perhaps.

Copyright © Carter Revard. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carter Revard, Osage on his father's side, was born in the Osage Agency town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma and grew up on the Osage Reservation there. He attended a one-room school in the Buck Creek rural community, won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, and was given his Osage name in 1952, the year he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After taking his B.A. there, he earned a Ph.D. at Yale and taught medieval literature, linguistics, and American Indian literature at Amherst College, Washington University St. Louis, and elsewhere. He retired in 1997 but continues to write and publish poems and scholarly essays. His books of poetry include Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), and How The Songs Come Down (2005). A collection of essays published in 1998, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, was followed by Winning The Dust Bowl (memoirs and poems) in 2001. Some recent poems, including "Deer Mice Singing Up Parnassus," was first published in AHANI: Poems of the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, The University of Arizona Press.

Shaking the Snow

By Kimberly L. Becker

(for Susan)

In the night yard,
the old magnolia is
heavy
with all-day
fall
so I go and begin
lowering the branches,
pulling and releasing
just enough
for the snow to shake off
and keep the limbs from breaking
under unabated weight.

I walk around the tree
and when I’m finished
I stand inside the circle.
Just me and the tree
with the rim of cast-off
snow as boundary.
Beyond, the yard lies
pristine except for exuberant dog tracks.

What if someone took our
burden from us lightly?
Shook us just enough
that we let fall
whatever weighed
our spirit
down?

You did that once, for me.

I was frozen
and with your bracing words
you shook the sorrow
from my limbs
so that I stood centered once again
with the boundaries of my life around
and new.


Copyright © Kimberly L. Becker. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kimberly L. Becker is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Words Facing East (WordTech Editions, 2011) is her first book of poetry. Individual poems appear widely in journals and anthologies. The Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD) funded her study of Cherokee language, history, and culture in Cherokee, NC. She was also awarded a residency at Hambidge Center in North Georgia. Current projects include adapting Cherokee myths into plays for the Cherokee Youth in Radio Project at the Cherokee Youth Center, also in Cherokee, NC.
Visit her on the web at www.kimberlylbecker.com

Doppelgängers: A Nativity Ode

By Carter Revard

(if only Columbus had…)

By way of introduction: It has lately been discovered that, just as the first stanza of this piece narrates, at a certain time of year hellacious gales of wind blow from east to west through certain parts of the Sahara (the “Bodélé Depression”), from which they scoop great quantities of very fine minerals, sweeping them up into dark roiling clouds that are then driven high across the Atlantic, over Brazil and up along the Amazon and its tributaries, where the fine dust eventually settles down into the lush rainforests. (For scientific accounts of this, see Deflation in the dustiest place on Earth: The Bodélé Depression, Chad, in Geomorphology, Volume 105, Issues 1-2, 1 April 2009, Pages 50-58; and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, December 8, 2009, vol. 106 no. 49, 20564-20571.) It is thought that this Sahara dust constitutes exactly the fertilizing soils and minerals required to renew those rain forests, which otherwise would deplete the soils so extensively that eventually the forests would die. In this way, desert and jungle are “Doppelgängers,” orchid (“air-plant,” epiphyte) an apotheosis of hurricane (Hart Crane’s wonderful poem “The Air Plant” reversed), nectar an avatar of dust. If we had the ability of angels to see past and present and future simultaneously, we might see jungles that used to cover what is now the Sahara, and perhaps a desert that will cover what are now the rain forests of Brazil; but for now, I have painted only two brothers, African desert and Brazilian rainforest, in present time. Not dust to dust, but dust into nectar, is the story of Terra Nuova.

For my poem, I have put that story together with another of an infant’s finding his voice, first in weeping and then in laughing, which are also Doppelgängers, and have narrated this in terms of the Osage Creation Story’s account of our people’s having come down into this world from the stars. So the Infanta Nuova, made of stardust (though not named Ziggy), asleep in a dark house, awakes in pre-dawn darkness and cries, is cleansed, sung to, sings along with the strong-heart song, and is fed, then sees through the window the Morning Star and the Dawn, and hears a bird sing, at which (s)he laughs, and sings along with it the new/old song of joy, one of our Osage songs.

In my first year on Earth, my twin sister and I were taken care of for some time
by our Ponca aunt Jewell MacDonald in the village at White Eagle, Oklahoma. A lullaby she used to sing us, made by her blind great aunt, is the Strong Heart Song she sings in the poem, made to hearten the warriors in despair, driven from their homelands in the Dakotas down to White Eagle in Oklahoma. The old voice is Aunt Jewell’s mother, who waked again at dawn by the child’s voice rises and (like a Ponca Firebird) fixes sun-golden pancakes with honey and fresh butter for breakfast—something gold that sticks to the ribs, a contrafactum to the Frost lyric “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” (Contrafacta are lyrics sung to the same tune—in medieval times, maybe a pastourelle about a young girl’s wooing alongside a lament spoken by Mary at the Cross; or, in the case of the “Cuckoo Song”—“Sumer is icumen in”—an Easter hymn. In my poem, I have reversed Frost’s exquisite brief lyric, in which his line “So dawn goes down to day” implies a falling-off in beauty; my contrafactual version is that the ongoing life in the house, now filled with daylight, is a feasting and not a falling off.) And I have stuffed into the final line both Lycidas (in italics) and the Lord’s Prayer.

1.
It’s not exactly a Pentecostal wind or
Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, it’s
more a haboob or maybe simoom, truly
a burning desert blast at this time of the year—
down on the southern Sahara swoops a hellish
roiling hurricane-force wind that scoops
a hundred-mile-long rift-full of dusty crystals up
and up and drives them in dark flashing clouds westward
high and higher and out over the coastline of Africa, the grey
haze now streaming across the Atlantic over Brazil
and on up over the Amazon,
high above lush rain-forests until the fine
dust comes delicately down into an orchid’s apotheosis
of hurricane where a hummingbird
glittering sends its long tongue into
deep nectar, avatar
of Sahara sand.

2.
--In this dark house I hear the
shimmering of my Doppelgänger’s wings,
but I am crying, the voices say—
some time ago I came down like dust
from the stars into this house where the old voice says
he is crying, give him
some milk, it says,
and the young voice says
I have to change him first,
then hands come down and take me up,
remove the swaddling clothes and dip
me in chilly water, wash me clean,
and I am crying and the young voice sings,
I still myself and listen, I hear the words,
“What are you afraid of?” they say,
“No one can go around death.”
In this dark house there are no
stars but there is song, the hands
have warmed a bottle, there is milk,
but first I sing along, the young voice stops then
and I sing alone,
“What are we afraid of, no one
can go around death.”
My brother hears me and he turns
from the nectar and flies out
into the moonlight, and the stars
are over him. “This child
is singing,” the young voice says, and then
the old voice says,
“Give him the bottle, let him sleep.”
The milk is sweet and warm. Now
through silent window
the morning star comes nearer,
then fades away, the east turns russet and my brother
the orchard oriole, wearing the soft
colors of early dawn, begins to sing,
so I laugh and sing,
we sing together
without words his song of joy,
“The stars go home and now
the sun appears,”
then the old voice says,
“I guess I better get up
and fix some breakfast now”—
so dawn goes down to day,
its light-gold pancakes lifting off a tray
like little suns, butter and honey spreading,
black coffee’s bitter perfume rising while
Grandmother gives us (yet once more) our daily lives.

When I was a boy in the Buck Creek Valley on the Reservation, one spring and summer a pair of orchard orioles nested in the elms beside our home, and I learned to whistle their challenge-notes and the long cascading series of mellifluous notes of their song. Alexander F. Skutch (Orioles, Blackbirds, and their Kin, University of Arizona Press, 1996), studied them in their winter migration homes in Central America and says the orchard orioles were “most songful of all the birds I have heard….At dawn, young and old sang together in a many-voiced chorus of whistled notes delightful to hear” (p. 190).

As a final comment: I think it likely that creatures sang and danced before they spoke, and that communities were first made of song and dance: metronymic mouth, hands, feet, bodies. Birds do it, bees do it, octopodes and people do it. And I suspect singing began from weeping and from laughing, turned into choral tragedy and comedy, kept time with rhythms and rhymes of tropical sunlight and starlight, temperate blossom and snowfall. Without song, no nesting. Home, as the Frost poem says, is where, when you go there, they have to take you in, and it turns out our relatives are everywhere. So the tropical paradise in New Guinea with snow around it, in the crater of a long-extinct volcano called Mount Bosavi, a place where new forms of life have evolved in isolation (including a Bird of Paradise, arising from that extinct volcano like a Phoenix), rhymes well with the Osage Agency town where I was born, Pawhuska, which means “White Hair.” Now that song has put on feathers and become speech, we dance, sing, and speak with each other in Pawhuska, at the June solstice, to keep the Osage Nation alive. Our dances begin and end with spoken prayers. We hear Adam and Eve as Milton gives them to us, every dawn, if we are lucky enough to have birds as neighbors: for them at sunrise, I believe, the Paradise within is happier far.

Copyright © Carter Revard. All rights reserved.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carter Revard, Osage on his father's side, was born in the Osage Agency town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma and grew up on the Osage Reservation there. He attended a one-room school in the Buck Creek rural community, won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, and was given his Osage name in 1952, the year he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After taking his B.A. there, he earned a Ph.D. at Yale and taught medieval literature, linguistics, and American Indian literature at Amherst College, Washington University St. Louis, and elsewhere. He retired in 1997 but continues to write and publish poems and scholarly essays. His books of poetry include Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), and How The Songs Come Down (2005). A collection of essays published in 1998, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, was followed by Winning The Dust Bowl (memoirs and poems) in 2001. Some recent poems, including "Deer Mice Singing Up Parnassus," will appear in AHANI: Poems of the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, forthcoming from The University of Arizona Press.

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices On Child Custody and Education - The Book as Village

By Robert Bensen

The anthology of Native American writing that I edited, Children of the Dragonfly, was begun not long after my wife and I learned that our adoptive infant daughter was of Native as well as European ancestry. We had many questions about what to do. We wondered what that might mean for her and for us as parents.

Fast-forward ten years, and Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices On Child Custody and Education, appeared from the University of Arizona Press in 2001. The book collects writing by Native American people raised in adoptive and foster-care and other non-Indian settings such as boarding schools, as well as related fiction and poetry—the first such collection. 

 Many people responded to calls I sent out to various Native e-groups, including WordCraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for original contributions. It would establish a new area of concern in American Indian literature devoted to childhood and family. I thought it could embrace traditional upbringing (as figured in instructive, older stories), as well as boarding schools and adoptive and foster-care homes, and a broad range of issues in trans-cultural adoption and child-rearing.

I wanted the book to help support, however modestly, organizations devoted to the well-being of Indian children and families. Royalties continue to aid the American Indian Community House (NYC), Native American Rights Fund, American Indian College Fund, AAIA, Running Strong for American Indian Youth, NICWA, and others. In the first years, royalties were sufficient to share among the authors as well.

I found the book could do all that and more: I found in it the proverbial village it takes to raise a child. This village is full of people who, at least most of them, have never met except between the covers of the book. Until they saw my call for people raised in adoptive or foster care settings to contribute their story, many of the writers told me they thought they were the only one. They thought they were alone.

And it took a child to bring this village together. The book has given back to the authors who wrote for it, who are also Dragonfly’s children. Some were published there for the first time. Writing for the book advanced everyone’s journey toward understanding who they are and where they came from. Among them are artists who have pursued their life-issues in new ways in Native galleries and museums. Others work in adoption and social services, or in community organizations related to child welfare and education. Some found a new direction and energy for learning the cultural ways that had been denied them. Some are writers for whom Dragonfly has opened new areas for their work, and who are leaders in Native writing circles, publishing, and mentoring.

In an old Zuni story, Dragonfly is the form an ancient spirit takes to provide for two abandoned children. As Carter Revard writes in the “Foreword,” Dragonfly lately made his body of the book, and within it and from it and surrounding it are a host of people who have, loosely speaking, adopted our daughter back in loving ways—so she has aunts and uncles and cousins from many nations, including Cherokee, Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Tuscarora, Shinnecock, Innu, Navajo, Osage, and Lakota and others. Those in the book sometimes led us to others as well. Some have passed into the spirit-world but return for her in ceremony and dream. Everyone has taught her something of her Native heritage.

Our daughter was at an Aboriginal dance workshop in Toronto last summer. Certainly she was the fairest of them all, though her hair has turned from blonde to brown as she’s grown up. A woman came to teach some social dances to the group, and had gathered the dancers in a circle to talk to them. She said that these dances were not sacred, so they could be shared, but that they were seldom, if ever, taught to non-Natives. She was looking at our daughter when she said this, and that she had asked the elders for permission, since there were non-Natives involved.

When she finished, my daughter replied that, while she may look non-Native to some on the outside, inside her heart was red. Though she was adopted, she had always learned all she could about her ancestry. She had been given a clan and a name. “And besides,” she said, “do you know the story of Goldilocks?”
“The old one?” the woman replied.
“No, the old Cherokee one,” she said, and told how, in Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey’s retelling, Goldilocks flees the house of the three bears and is soon tired and hungry. As she wanders lost in the woods, she smells some good cooking. She follows her nose to a clearing with some dark-skinned children and adults, and some log cabins and fires with pots cooking on them. Goldilocks doesn’t understand their language, but they understand her hunger, and so feed and shelter her.

Many days later a U.S. Indian agent comes around to enroll families. He sees a blonde girl playing with the dark-skinned children and asks the woman watching them if all those children are hers. “Yes,” she says, because she cared for the girl. The man marks them all down as “F,” full-blood Cherokees. As the story goes, the girl grew and married a Cherokee man. Among their children was one little blonde girl. And so it came to be that there is a Goldilocks in every Cherokee family.

That’s the story our daughter remembered from Children of the Dragonfly to tell at that moment, when her identity and rightful place were being challenged. That was one more gift of the village of the book. It has given her ground to stand on, among those who care for her. And who knows, maybe that’s why the worlds she makes hoop dancing never fall apart.

Copyright © Robert Bensen 2010. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Bensen is an invited member of WordCraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, whose poems and essays appear widely in U.S., U.K., West Indian and Native American journals such as Akwe:kon and Native Realities. His poems have been collected in five chapbooks (Orenoque, Scriptures of Venus, and others), and he has been awarded an NEA poetry fellowship and the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award. Since 1978 he has been Director of Writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. He teaches writing as well as courses in American Indian law and literature, and is the editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education, The University of Arizona Press.

Tomol Trek: California Indians Regathering a Tradition

by Terra Trevor

Our classes are held outdoors under a bead-blue California sky. We work on a patch of green grass, an occasional hawk sweeping over with light shining through her rust red tail. Back in 1997, when there was money available to be used for education, the Santa Barbara County American Indian Education Project began the series “Tomol Trek.”

After much hard work, the project put together an academy with federal (Title V) funding. Each year the academy had a different focus. In 1997 the year’s final outcome was aimed at producing a modern-day recreation of a traditional Chumash tomol. The children and teenagers attending ranged from elementary through high school. Many are Chumash, but the kids represented a variety of tribes, all with a common bond: every one of these kid’s lives in an area that made up the traditional Chumash homeland. We all hold the culture, traditions, and history of the Chumash people in our hands and in our hearts.

The tomol, a type of plank canoe, is unique to the Chumash. Tomols were used for trips between the islands and Chumash settlements. Originally they were about thirty feet long, and could hold four thousand pounds. Usually they carried six people but could hold up to twelve.

Our modern-day tomol was built by the children under the guidance of Peter Howorth, in his backyard tomol building workshop. There is a perfect balance between master and apprentice as the children sand pieces of the vessel throughout construction. A dozen hands move slowly across the handle, moving towards the paddle end of an oar. Small hands, young hands, skin so smooth and maroon, peach-colored hands, muted brown, every child with a tribal memory circling her or his heart.

A kind of palpable energy surrounds the tomol project. People seem to want to be a part of what’s going on. American Indian students from Cal Poly and UCLA arrive to volunteer support. Before I know it, I’m one of those helping out. The more I sand, the closer I am to the tomol. Sometimes I stop in the middle of the day and am silent in respect to the ancient peoples who left the witness of their lives, their visions, the strength of their faith for us to ponder.

My son is one of those kids helping out. He knows about the pleasure found in working hard, and seeing the good results of that work. As he sands the pieces of wood I watch him find his relationship with the plank canoe he is helping to create.

Our real goal is not only the finished tomol; it is also the season long process of working together. Still, everyone eagerly waits the day the vessel will be launched. When the maiden voyage takes place, within the harbor, there is only a small gathering of people. Before the “official” crewmembers begin their training we get to know the tomol. Her name is Alolkoy—dolphin in Chumash. She is twenty-five feet long, and made of redwood. Conditions in the harbor are ideal. The sun is warm; a soft, steady sea breeze blows at our backs. We fill sandbags for ballast, and then one at a time, we each have a turn sitting inside the tomol.

Photo by Terra Trevor

My son, feeling his connection with the Tomol he helped build

Alolkoy is much lighter than I ever imagined. Slowly I become one with her. I only have to “think” of shifting my weight left, and she responds almost before I even move. By the end of the day I understand we should not take photographs while we are with her, not yet anyway. First I watch someone drop a camera into the ocean, and then the back of my camera opens, exposing my film.

Remembrance weighs heavy on my mind, as it does for most Native people seeking to affirm cultural identity in a high-tech world. There is a comfort in being with those who understand. Our kids do not have to trade in their Indian values for education; the project carried ancient memory and cultural knowledge into their lives today.

First Published in the winter 1997 issue of News from Native California. © Terra Trevor. 

Postscript
A number of the children who participated in the Tomol backyard building workshop have grown up to become crewmembers making the crossings from the mainland to Limuw - Santa Cruz Island. 

You might also like to read the follow up story Tomol Evening by Terra Trevor reprinted from Volume 29, No. 2 (Winter 2015/16) of News from Native California.

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), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), 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, and her connection to the landscape. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal. Visit her at terratrevor.blogspot.com