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

Copyright Kim Shuck. All rights reserved.

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.”

Read more

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

The University of Arizona Press