River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging

Edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez

Unpapered is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins. Native heritage is neither simple nor always clearly documented, and citizenship is a legal and political matter of sovereign nations determined by such criteria as blood quantum, tribal rolls, or community involvement. Those who claim a Native cultural identity often have family stories of tenuous ties dating back several generations. Given that tribal enrollment was part of a string of government programs and agreements calculated to quantify and dismiss Native populations, many writers who identify culturally and are recognized as Native Americans do not hold tribal citizenship.

Unpapered charts how current exclusionary tactics began as a response to “pretendians”—non-indigenous people assuming a Native identity for job benefits—and have expanded to an intense patrolling of identity that divides Native communities and has resulted in attacks on peoples’ professional, spiritual, emotional, and physical states. An essential addition to Native discourse, Unpapered shows how social and political ideologies have created barriers for Native people truthfully claiming identities while simultaneously upholding stereotypes.

César Love Poetry

Four Corners

you share with me a picture of your sunset

I would give one back to you

But my balcony faces east

instead, I offer you

A midnight

dawn

And noon

three corners of the sky

with your sunset, they are four

one diamond of the night and day

Orange

In the grocery store aisle

one belly button orange with a scar

others pristine, unblemished

others soon to be sold

Between perfect sisters

one unbidden sphere

branded by two discolored inches

not to be held

not to be tasted

A globe passed over

oceans never plunged

forests never inhaled

landscapes never painted

A world unfathomed

with a navel and a canyon scar

is the canyon east or west?

north or south?

perhaps along her belly

or across a breast

maybe against her cheek.

Moonlight at Noon

The Moon, My Shadow, and I make Three. – Li Po

I would bake on this planet

If not for the Moon I invited

She agreed to let me keep her

Tucked beneath my blouse

Her cool face against my belly

I lounge in her quiet

I swim in her well

I bloom in her sanity

The Moon brought me a friend

One who used to follow me

She mimicked my every movement

At first she flattered me

Then she mocked me

Finally, she ran away

I screamed at her,

Come back here!

I tried to put a leash on her

But she was too smart

I threw a plum at her

Of course, she thew one back

We did this for months

Then the Moon told me her name

The Poet’s Tent

North or South, she travels

Always with her tent.

On chosen ground,

She slides its rods into the earth.

She places cloth on its frame.

A cloth she imagined

Something like a Mexican rebozo

Something like an Amish quilt

A cloth that exchanges colors

That switches latticework

Cloth that vibrates to the heartbeat of deer

Cloth that answers the whispers of trees

The poet smooths the floor

She unrolls her carpet

Psychic knots detach from its tendrils:

abandoned theories

dropped desires

jettisoned memories.

They pulse on her floor.

Soon to transform

Soon to become

feral opals

protean metals

iris crystals.

She prepares the door

Butterflies of every stripe arrive

Cesar Love is a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, he is also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He is the author of Birthright and While Bees Sleep. cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com

For Q

by Kim Shuck

Pull on a different mountain range

One leg at a time

You time travel in poem

He told me

I've seen you do it

We went relic spotting

More than once

Through the line up of the '53 Dodgers

Before his heart was broken

Memories never sit as neatly in a prong setting

As a heart solitaire

Memories never sit as neatly

Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of 9 books, co-authored one, edited another ten and has contributed to a vast array of anthologies, journals, curriculum guides, tours, and protests. www.kimshuck.com

To my bystanders

by Deborah Jang

People stand by during attack of elderly Asian woman – Associated Press

Did you catch a whiff of lilac

on that warm summer eve

while we gathered at the bus stop,

each wandering our mind?

Out the corner of your eye

did you flinch, did you see him

rushing twilight, pushing rudely in?

In a flash of recognition,

did your stomach tell your throat

what was going down?

Did you see my toes curl fetal

while I lay sideways

on the concrete stunned?

Did you freeze in fear and horror?

Did you look the other way?

Did you reach down for your phone

or was it already in your hand?

Were you scared to intervene?

Did your silence cheer him on?

Was it you who kneeled down

and whispered something kind

I didn’t understand?

Did you see my bruised face on TV?

Did they say my name?

Did they even try?

Deborah Jang’s creative practices include assemblage sculpture and poetry, based out of Denver, Colorado and Oceanside, California. Her debut poetry collection is titled Float True (Shanti Arts, 2020). Her new chapbook is Last Will and Best Guesses (Finishing Line Press, 2022). deborahjang.com

LAST WILL AND BEST GUESSES by Deborah Jang

"Deborah Jang knows the terrain of the human heart. In Last Will and Best Guesses she offers an unflinching meditation on mortality and mystery. Jang taps into our shared experiences from the pandemic to racial reckonings, the environmental crises, the plights of refugees. She writes candidly about the workings of her mind, which are the unspeakable workings of ours too. She muses on connections and consciousness that alter and deepen through recent and ongoing trauma and settles into grace. This is a rich, relatable book to pull out again and again." –Terra Trevor is a contributor to 15 books including, Take A Stand: Art Against Hate.

"Deborah Jang writes through a raging global pandemic, when a “planet [is] spinning off its axis,” gathering strength to face its uncertainties and attendant anti-Asian violence and sentiment. This is a reserve, for herself, and future generations, and I am nourished by her work." –Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multi-media artist whose book, Ghost Of, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

“Mind bent, nose blown, fingers crossed./Head bowed, going home.” Deborah Jang writes to the rhythm of life while examining death and all its intricacies. This chapbook is an exhale and a deep breath." –Vogue M. Robinson is the author of Vogue 3:16 (2014) and served as Poet Laureate (2017-2019) for Clark County, Nevada.

Last Will and Best Guesses by Deborah Jang, Finishing Line Press

Community

by Kim Shuck

Grandma lived with this peppernut

Sapling and tree

They drank the same water

I know that the creek is here

Under ground

Under thought

Near the lilac

Someone’s relic of a different life

Someone’s idea

Carried from somewhere else

On a quiet day

When there has been rain

Rest your cheek on the trunk and hear/feel

Water

Running in cracked pipes

Grandma

The tree

The elderberry

The salamander

The sense of humor

The fog

Each water particle

Rhymes with the life here

Whispers kinship

To the cracked and layered

Rocks on this

Hill

Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of eight books and one that is on the way. She has edited or co-edited ten volumes of poetry. She contributed essays to the recently released de Young 125, a collection of writing about and photographs of pieces in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her most recent collection of poems is Exile Heart from That Painted Horse Press. www.kimshuck.com

Assassination Nation

On the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968

by Robert Bensen

Whoever we might have been,

whatever grief or fury we might have shared

were lost when the mighty arm

that God and the weight room gave him

brought down, I believe

a set of knuckles to open my skull

to the complicity of my complexion

and turn us, like the twilight, black and white.

A half-hour later: dizziness, nausea,

a swarm of psychedelic lights.

The brain trauma specialist

asked if I always sweat like this.

—Yes, I said, yes, yes,

I always sweat like this.

Police stacked the table with album after album of mug shots,

thumbnails of beautiful black males, growing older, somewhere, maybe.

Maybe my main mugger-man in there, or the brothers who shot up the neighborhood

night after night I lay sweating bullets on the floor, that summer the night

one of their grandmothers took a slug through her picture window into her heart.

None of those faces belonged above the arm

I can still see silhouetted against the cool dusk of April 4, 1968,

before it descended like the wrath of Jehovah

who smote the hard, hard hearts of the children

all the harder because they were his children.

—Officer, I said, I never saw the man’s face.

Cop thinks —This guy’s a waste.

But I had seen the heraldry of race, an arm raised,

and locked in the fist, a club, a mace—

trapped in this row after row, page after page

of sullen faces. Many frames, one rage.

I wonder: could he pick out of a college yearbook,

or a line-up of my entire despiséd race,

me, whose head got in the way of his fist?

Did this startled face serve in place of him

who cocked the hammer and aimed the rifle

and pulled the trigger that fired the bullet

that flew through Memphis

that lovely April afternoon, the bullet

that has been flying for half a century,

bullet flying still—

would this one do, who did nothing to stop it,

nothing whatever to stop it,

this one who’ll never undo the nothing he did

with the nothing he wouldn’t do, if he could.

First published in Piltdown Review.

Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta NY). He also taught at Parkland College and SUNY Oneonta, and conducted community workshops, including the Red Herring Workshop (Urbana IL) and the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell NY). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. robertbensen.com

Race, Ethnicity and My Face

by Terra Trevor

As a woman of Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German descent, I came of age understanding that I'm not totally Native nor am I totally white. I'm a border woman dwelling between the boundaries.

I have light skin, light enough that some people think I’m a white person. My dad, a Native man, and my mother, a white woman, had me when they were teenagers in 1953. We lived in Compton, a mixed-race community in Los Angeles. The family next door was Bolivian and they loved me like a daughter. My best friend was Japanese and Mexican. Still, when I was 10 years-old, my dad sat me down to have “the talk” with me about race. He told me about how to navigate the streets, about how to stay safe. He also wanted to make sure I understood that in order to be accepted by certain white people it mattered who your friends were.

By that point, however, I already knew.

I had discovered that when I went to play at the houses of my white friends after school I needed to be aware of how I was holding myself at all times. I learned to stay alert and watch for clues: sometimes there might be an older brother who pulled his eyes in an upward slant and said something mean about Chinese people; or a father that casually spouted racial slurs at people of color. When this happened, I knew I had to make an excuse to go home and I’d never go back. Sometimes I’d make up stories when asked about my darker skinned, mixed-race family in order to protect them. But if the mothers of my white friends didn’t feel satisfied with my answers, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay at their houses for long.

Things would be different when I went over to the houses of my friends of color. Their mothers would always take me in without hesitation. And if there was a grandmother at home who spoke English with an accent, or didn’t speak English at all I could usually be certain they wouldn’t ask me if my daddy had a job. In their homes, I felt safe.

As a child I had things all figured out. But when I reached my late teens and early twenties it became more complicated.

Hanging out with my friends of color meant witnessing them get treated poorly and face multiple instances of discrimination by white people. Being out with my white friends, however, meant that we could expect to be given preferential treatment no matter where we went. When I began dating and went out with Native boys or other boys of color in my community, I was considered “white trash” by white America. I could even expect to have a white man point to my date and ask me what I thought I was doing being with the likes of someone like him. But when I dated the first guy that was white, I was allowed to be white by association and had access to the privileges of white America because of that. In stores or restaurants, we were always served or seated first, before people of color. When we acted up or got into mischief in public, it was laughed off as opposed to being taken seriously with the assumption that we were up to no good like it had been for other teens of color.

My early adulthood was charged with decisions to make: Should I mention my Native identity? Should I let white people I don’t know well and may not ever want to become close friends with, assume I’m white? Keep my racial identity private from employers and others who would discriminate against me if they knew I’m a mixed-blood Native American woman? With dark skinned family members and dark skin friends? With strong ties to Native America and rooted within a community of color?

Then, at age twenty-three, I suddenly found myself employed full-time in a company that was predominantly white. So white, that my intuition told me if my boss had known I was anything other than white, I would have probably not been hired. My white co-workers seemed to only accept people of color who adhered to white social norms and didn’t challenge their biases. They could not accept how vastly different the culture values, thought processes, and social norms of ethnic people were from white America.

I wear the face of a woman with light skin privilege. While keenly aware of the advantage it has given me over my friends and family who are not able to pass, I always make the decision to disclose my Native identity. I never try to pass. Passing would mean turning my back on my Native family, friends and community. Following my experiences working in a predominantly-white company at 23, I began to make sure that at each interview I had for a new job, I’d take a “racial temperature check” to ensure that people of color who looked like my friends and family were always welcomed. And I’d proudly list all the positions I’ve held within American Indian and Asian-American organizations on my resume.

Later on in my life, I married a man who was white and we had a daughter together, before adopting two Korean children. Two of our kids had apparent ethnic features and their black hair and darker skin often caused people to mistakenly assume they were Native American. I knew that blending into white society would never be an option for them. So it was always a toss on whether they would be able to ride on the wings of my white privilege, or be subject to the racism that ruled America when they were out on their own. In turn, I did my best to connect them with their Korean roots by becoming deeply involved with the Korean community in our town. For thirty years, my heart and soul was shaped by my connection to this community for which I am grateful to be a part of.

Now, in my 70s, my gray hair and wrinkled face reveal the many years I have lived. Yet what has not changed is what most cannot see: I am still a border woman. Borders are set up to define or to separate, but I am neither part white, nor part Native. My blood is a mix between two worlds, Native and white merging together to form a third: a woman dwelling between the boundaries.

A border woman—that is me.

First published in Santa Clara Review, vol 108 / issue 01

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. She is the founding editor of River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal. terratrevor.com

River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal: A Community of Voices