Art Works

by Robert Bensen

            Sara Bates, “Honoring Circle” (sculpture)

            1

            Before a shop built downtown sealed over a spring and a little creek,

excavation turned up the bones of a man, his pipe and some shards of clay

            that came from this embankment above the Susquehanna—

clay that made the brick that made the shop that hides the creek

            that flows through pipe that’s made with clay that made the pipe they dug

beside the man they found not long ago, long after he had turned to clay.

            2

If spirit lives in everything and everything in spirit

            then the young woman with a virus raging in the head

who has fallen asleep beside Sarah's “Honoring Circle” while the rest write

            may have dreamed herself one day as pleasant as this

beside a pretty little creek above a bluff and drank from its talkative source

            in the warmth of a complicated sun, an agitated sun

flaring with seeds and pods and leaves and shells and petals,

            a composed sun from whose center the crossed roads carry

what they always carry down their seven shining paths

            until the red sun of evening stripes her face

and she flutters awake to find herself alone

            with this work, this disk of gifts on the floor, walk about

and wonder what on earth she saw in it, and what she sees. 

 An excerpt from Before by Robert Bensen

© Robert Bensen. All rights. Reserved.

Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, including Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems, and Before. His work has earned an NEA poetry fellowship, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Harvard Summer Poetry Prize, and Illinois Arts Council and NY State Council on the Arts awards. His scholarship in the Caribbean and Native America has produced essays, studies, and editions, won fellowships from the NEH and Newberry Library, and led to teaching in St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. He is the editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College (1978-2017).  He teaches at SUNY-Oneonta, and conducts a poetry workshop at Bright Hill Literary Center, Treadwell.

www.robertbensen.com

How Turtle Got Her Shell

by Jenny L. Davis 

Did you know 
Turtle 
didn’t always have 
a shell? 
She grew it 
to keep 
from being crushed 
fortifying 
her own body 
ribs 
vertebrae 
clavicle 
into carapace and plastron 
learning a whole 
new way to 
breath to 
walk to 
live 
to protect 
her from 
predators. 
She knew 
safety 
requires strength 
survival 
means fortifying 
softness 

© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved. 

Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous writer and professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology. Her creative work has been featured in literary journals including the Santa Ana River Review; Transmotion; Anomaly; Broadsided; and as well as anthologies such as As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. 

Author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (The University of Arizona Press). uapress.arizona.edu/book/talking-indian

Dancing to Remember

by Terra Trevor 

I am gathered with friends and family under a bead blue sky. Powwow weekend. Santa Ynez Chumash Inter-Tribal. My shawl is folded over my arm. I listen to the wind, spilling through the tree leaves. Time merges with timelessness. Memories circle and carry me to a day forty years ago, when I stood on this good land, near the oak tree for the first time, with my young children gathered about. 

The same tree I am standing under today. I lean my back against this oak. This tree, giver of life. She has raised a community with song, dance and prayer. We return to this land, to this tree, in October every year. Laughter, flirting and romance in lives young and old take place all around her. She stands sentry. Her autumn softened leaves, swept up from a cool mountain breeze, fall gently on American Indian fathers holding sleeping babies. Mothers trading stories, their shiny cut beads reflecting light while braiding their children’s hair, with feathers in the colors of the earth, trailing. 

There were difficult times too for this oak tree, when she witnessed wild fires raging, drought years with dust rising against the clear sky. The times when her branches sheltered human arguments and angry outbursts, but mostly she is surrounded by love and caring. 

I stand high upon a flat rock, my eyes roaming, taking in the day, the years. Filling my lungs with sweet fragrances of the damp Mother Earth. Feeling my body grow light, like the feathers of the red tail hawk touching the soft clouds. 

For the record I am not California Indian. I am mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and for forty years I have lived near a creek in an area that makes up the traditional Chumash homeland. I’m walking gently, a guest on this good land and I hold the culture, traditions and history of the Chumash people in my heart. For my Chumash friends this is their landscape of time. 

I remember the words of my aunties, my grandmother, about how each person is a link to history and that when it comes to powwows all Native people gathered around the arena are participating as we form a circle around the drums, singers and dancers. And how every Native person gathered is connected, making a statement that American Indian people are still here. This is our celebration of life past, present and future. 

First published in the Spring 2019, vol. 2, issue 3 of News From Native California, a quarterly magazine devoted to California's Indian peoples. This essay also appears in We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir by Terra Trevor.

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

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, and her connection to the landscape. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal. Learn more at terratrevor.com