Race & Ethnicity

Thung joo Kwa yaa na povi sah
Thung joo Kwa yaa na povi sah
Tsay ohi taa geh wo gi wa naa povi sah
pin povi
pin povi do mu u da kun
ka nee na nun dun naa da si tah.
On top of Black Mesa there are flowers
On top of Black Mesa there are flowers
dew on yellow flowers
mountain flowers I see
so far away that it makes me cry.

She always got mad at him
every time he came home in the middle of the morning
with his pant legs wet.
She knew he had fallen in the ditch again.
His legs were not strong enough to be straddling ditches.
He was too old to be walking over temporary dikes.
She wished he didn’ t do that, but sometimes he had to.
She sometimes imagined him falling over backward in one of the irrigation ditches,
his head hitting hard cement,
his body slowly sinking into the water.
Water that was only three feet deep.

I.

i saved my energy as i read,
like managing held-breath underwater
so i could extend my survey
and not miss anything great

I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-’ i/

FIRST CHEROKEE LESSON: MOURNING

Find a flint blade
Use your teeth as a whetstone

Cut your hair
Talk to shadows and crows

Cry your red throat raw

Learn to translate the words you miss most:
dust love poetry

Thunderer God of the turbulent sky may
my turbulent mind shape
for my people
rain clouds
beans
pumpkins
and yams.

East Spirit
Dawn Spirit may
birds awaken in
the forest of teeth
whose river your color must say
frozen mountains’
prayer that you
will loosen them.

I scratch earth around timpsila
on this hill, while below me,
hanging in still air, a hawk
searches the creekbed for my brothers.
Squat leaves, I’ ll braid your roots
into such long ropes, they’ ll cover
the rump of my stallion.
Withered flower, feed us now
buffalo rot in the waist-high grass.

“It isn’ t a game for girls,”
he said, grabbing a fifth
with his right hand,
the wind with his left.

“For six days
I raced Jack Daniels.
He cheated, told jokes.
Some weren’ t even funny.

That’ s how come he won.
It took a long time
to reach this Yellow River.
I’ m not yet thirty,

Two hundred seventy
Ghost Dancers died dreaming
That humanity would drown
In a flood of White sins.

Then the renewed earth
Would reclaim city and town,
Leaving only Ghost Dancers
And those who lived by nature’ s laws.

History books say the threat is gone.
The Ghost Dance died with the ancestors —
Wovoka and his sacred dream
Were destroyed.

Each time it rains,
I go out to the sidewalk,
Where the tree roots
Have broken the concrete
Listening to the water’ s whispering:

Spanish captive, Hoahwah, married twin sisters.
The one wife called Double
turned into a snake
after eating a nest of glossy eggs.
Snake Woman still lives on Mt. Scott,
sleeps facing west.
The sun a white skull itself
bathes her on the cedar breaks.
In rectangular dreams
she calls the young men grandson.

The other sister Tsi-yee, named after a war deed
(her father charged a cavalry office
knocked him off his horse then lanced him to the prairie)
bore three children: Tabe titah, Namnetse, and Sam Hoahwah.