This class was taught at San Diego Writers, Ink on Sunday, November 19, 2017, from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Native American Women Poets (with a couple of exceptions)

Quotes:

Joy Harjo (Muscogee): There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

Mary Tallmountain (Koyukon): We never leave each other./ When does your mouth/ say goodbye to your heart.  I see you sitting Implanted by roots Coiled deep from your thighs. Roots, flesh red, centuries pale.  Hairsprings wound tight Through fertile earthscapes Where each layer feeds the next Into depths immutable. Though you must rise, must Move large and slow When it is time, O my Gnarled mother-vine, ancient As vanished ages, Your spirit remains Nourished, Nourishing me. 

Louise Erdrich (Chippewa): Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could…Feed me honey from the rock…When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

Georgi Sanchez (Chumash): We are the stars that sing; we sing with our light.

professor Georgiana Sanchez on Chumash history and culture

Music To Write To:
Native American Healer Songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYyM60RlhCA
Meditations: Native American Flute Album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH8nsXpxlxU&t=1218s
Morning Relaxing Music – Positive Feelings and Energy (Adele), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuLKvcn-c7A
Rain and Native American Flutes – Relaxing Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SynzKC4fWp0&t=3764s

Watch the below Poetry Film Clips and read the following poems.  Then choose one of the poetry prompts that follow and write a minimum 10 line poem.

Joy Harjo, For Alva Benson, And For Those Who Have Learned to Speak, (Start at 1:42, Stop at 3:47)

 

Mati Waiya Chumash Elder and Water Protector, Director of Wishtoyo Foundation, Gives A Chumash Blessing (9:53)

 

 

 

While Mary Oliver may not be Native American this poem resonates with indigenous inclusion, tolerance, and all of nature as relatives:

 

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives —
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

From West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems, Mariner Books, 1998.

There Is No Word for Goodbye
by Mary Tallmountain

Sokoya, I said, looking through

the net of wrinkles into

wise black pools

of her eyes.

What do you say in Athabascan

when you leave each other?

What is the word

for goodbye?

A shade of feeling rippled

the wind-tanned skin.

Ah, nothing, she said,

watching the river flash.

She looked at me close.

We just say, Tlaa. That means,

See you.

We never leave each other.

When does your mouth

say goodbye to your heart?

She touched me light

as a bluebell.

You forget when you leave us;

you’re so small then.

We don’t use that word.

We always think you’re coming back, I

but if you don’t,

we’ll see you some place else.

You understand.

There is no word for goodbye.

Sokoya: Aunt (mother’s sister)

Tlaa: See you

From The Light on the Tent Wall, Mary Tallmountain, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

 

Excerpt from the poem, The Light on the Tent Wall
by Mary Tallmountain

There was light. Suffused
onto canvas through mother’s womb.
Her round belly turned the
tent wall pink. There was humming,
soft talk about the baby coming.
Women, mothers, warm by the
Yukon stove, visiting Mary Joe
and her child, I who lay unborn
in her cradle of light.
Years came. I was taken
where there were no tent walls,
where I had to dream my own,
and as time passed, often
I saw the light on the wall.
No longer pink, it was
fire, its tongues licking
MARY TALL MOUNTAIN’S WRITING 139
the tent wall.
Fire of our life, flickering.
Light returned where I was,
moving through far places, years.
Not suffused now. Gone
the voices, singing. Useless,
wind plucked with
chill fingers at the wall.
Often the sound was angry,
hasty, wanted to speak
but could not find the words.
I overtook it, brought back
my dream. Light dyed the canvas
the color of mother’s blood
gliding through her womb,
through labored lungs,
through death, and I
remembered the color of her blood,
light on the tent wall,
painted by my infant dreams.
Sometimes I still hear
angry winds plucking mutely
at the wall. The light is there too,
and thinking of the watching women
I wonder whether they
saw the light on the tent wall.
I saw it plain before my birth
and held it a half century
I will hold it forever.

Poem Louise Erdrich, Turtle Mountain Chippewa,

CHUMASH MAN

 

The Songmother

light waxing & waning with a touch of Luiseno

by Jim Moreno, Smuwich Chumash

I am the stars that twinkle in my girl child’s eyes― popu’sh.

I am the moon, grandmothering soft light gently

in your tender, silent night, ‘oyo’kval tuu ‘kumit.

I am the blue sky― tuu ‘pash―thunder calling clouds;

come shade my deep sweltering hue.

I am the wind― hu’ngla― blowing leaves in the trees

and on the ground…slow down… hear my gentle sound.

I am the thunder clouds―tuu ‘vii’cha―

come to answer the call of blue sky.

I am the door― popuu’ ‘uk―to the cool, moonless night,

cool to your touch, cooling the heat of your day.

I am dark moon―mo’yla―

fearlessly motionless in motion,

pushing grandmother ocean waves,

rhythm songs, cousins to wind leaves.

I am fire―ku’t―

warming winter fire,

heating your eyes closed

solitude face,

heating last moments

of your soul ice melt cry―ngaa’!―

I am old man white water―wanii’cha―

boiling river rapids racing willow raft

downstream pushing ocean wind smells,

pulsing gull cries, waves breaking sea,

I am the stars―$u’ ‘lam―

twinkling in my girl child’s eyes,

she throwing her head back,

free falling milky way spirit trail

light path utter joy now!

She is the star twinking in my eyes,

noswaa’may no$u’laki.

Fall 2000

Now that you’ve watched and read the above poems take a break. Wash your face, go outside for a walk,

get some tea, etc.  Then return to this class, pick one of the below poetry prompts, and write a minimum 10 line poem.

Write more than 10 lines if you like.  Change words you don’t like or write your own poem from your personal theme.

Write —The ground spoke when I was born…

I breathe and walk softer now…

To open the door I reach for the latch…

There is no word for….

They always seem to find me…

Give me a song…

I think of ancient…

I write in my own light…

I am…

They gather around her/him…

 

Writing On Turtle Island―The Poetry of Native America
Poem-Making With Jim Moreno
Sunday, November 19, 2017, 1:00 P.M. To 4:00 P.M.
San Diego Writers, Ink,  2730 Historic Decatur Rd., #202, San Diego, CA 92106

 Native American Men Poets

Quotes: Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene ): You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it…I don’t know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.
Jimmy Santiago Baca (Apache):I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way.

N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa):We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined… There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one’s life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. 

Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma): Moments recalled like friends. It was that way or another. We’re fairly certain either way. Stories. They are with us. Time doesn’t forsake. It doesn’t soothe or decrease. Never…It is amazing how much knowledge we have of hope. Whisper bravely into the dark, heart — whisper bravely

Music To Write To
Kanyon Sings a Chumash Grandmother’s Song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X4stXZJNQo&list=RD3X4stXZJNQo&t=10
Cody Blackbird Native Flute @ 2015 Malibu Chumash PW, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J6HwNP3nK0
Chumash Flute,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_39uh8p14

Wishtoyo Chumash Village of Malibu – Patrick Dockry Health Beauty Life

 

Lines for Roethke Twenty Years after His Death

by Duane Niatum (Salish)

I

You asked us to hear the softest vocable of wind,

whether slow or swift, rising or falling to earth,

its fragments will drop in to place in the end.

You said, believe, endure, the ironies of birth!

If we succeeded in sleeping like thorns on a rose,

the nerves awake to the pulse, folklore of the sun,

the interior drifts may loosen, the nights freeze,

the passions whirl, not ramble until undone.

And noone colors the years black, but crow,

retouches the ruins, fakes the moon, pocks the beach.

Laugh right back, you sang, let it take hold,

it’ll grow bored, forget whoever is in reach.

Let your hand trace the riddle on the wave

rejoice in the tale that leaves the ear a cave.

II

To give each death its light reflects the maze.

The promise bacteria also favor green.

You secretly burned your tracks to fan the blaze,

and warned the world’ll tell what to dream.

This is why you spoke in tongues to the vine,

wren, snail, bear, sloth, and swamp air.

You almost found an island without decline,

where roots kept your soul exposed to every layer.

You suggested we see the spirit’s gift in the eye,

but the eye in the gut, the slug in the mossy field.

Taught us ghosts can love as well as mortify,

yet the heart’s the actor; we must bow and yield.

When your body’s a wheat impulse, nothing’s stale;

even thunder’s crack is music to the whale.

III

The mind follows currents deeper than any fish,

gropes with otter and duck for food in the river,

it knows water tumbling over rocks restores the flesh,

awaits the moon in the poplars, its first cover―

to meet extremes face to face, seed to seed,

be anonymous as a fly’s grave at dark.

Fill solitude with creatures other than your need;

let the wolf take your shade, teach you to bark.

How to breathe with form? Proceed like the worm;

help desire cross the bridge of the brain;

it relieves paralysis, the wrong turn.

Kiss the petals before and after rain.

Climb out of yourself; edge in close to fate;

smell mortality like the lily on the lake.

IV

You scolded, we can’t spin the wheel that spins night,

can’t shed the scars from birth like old skin.

Better drift in your bones than with the kite;

better croak with bluejay, picking at the limb.

An imagination swims for the Muse on her shell,

while her tribe tickles our inner ear.

Don’t mistake; her cymbals taught the devil;

as she dances , he shreds like pulp all year

so we dream, barter seasons with the dead,

if we accept when they embrace, they cling.

All’s headless as love, you sighed, all shapes you wed,

your senses burnt-orange, bold stranger to nothing

but yourself, your lips as white as Michigan snow.

Show us again how to reap the fire and glow.

 

The Dice Changer

By Duane Niatum

Raven steals your name for an autumn joke:

buries you along with it under

the thickest hemlock known to chipmunks.

Too bad you were awake for the event.

He accuses you of asking all

the wrong questions over and over.

You attempt revolt to prove his medicine

wheel is cracked and filling up its own pit.

He hollers your face is unmasked and madness

has found a home. All stink and rotten fur,

he says to you, claims you had a choice

and forgot what it was. Now he says

your pain must run for the river,

the river for the wind.

He chuckles and the dark chatters, turning

you around until your shadow is the earth’s.

 

 

A poem by Sherman Alexie: The Powwow at the End of the World

Ask Me
By William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

 

The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky,
The rhythm of the sea, speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning,
the dewdrop on the flower, speaks to me.
The strength of the fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun,
and the life that never goes away, they speak to me
And my heart soars.

Chief Dan George

Ancestor by Jimmy Santiago Baca

It was a time when they were afraid of him. 

My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse 

with broken knees no one would shoot. 

Then again, he was like the orange tree, 

and young women plucked from him sweet fruit. 

To meet him, you must be in the right place, 

even his sons and daughter, we wondered 

where was papa now and what was he doing. 

He held the mystique of travelers 

that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees. 

Then, when you follow, you find nothing, 

not a stir, not a twig displaced from its bough. 

And then he would appear one night. 

Half covered in shadows and half in light, 

his voice quiet, absorbing our unspoken thoughts. 

When his hands lay on the table at breakfast, 

they were hands that had not fixed our crumbling home, 

hands that had not taken us into them 

and the fingers did not gently rub along our lips. 

They were hands of a gypsy that filled our home   

with love and safety, for a moment; 

with all the shambles of boards and empty stomachs, 

they filled us because of the love in them. 

Beyond the ordinary love, beyond the coordinated life,   

beyond the sponging of broken hearts, 

came the untimely word, the fallen smile, the quiet tear, 

that made us grow up quick and romantic. 

Papa gave us something: when we paused from work, 

my sister fourteen years old working the cotton fields, 

my brother and I running like deer, 

we would pause, because we had a papa no one could catch, 

who spoke when he spoke and bragged and drank, 

he bragged about us: he did not say we were smart, 

nor did he say we were strong and were going to be rich someday.   

He said we were good. He held us up to the world for it to see, 

three children that were good, who understood love in a quiet way, 

who owned nothing but calloused hands and true freedom, 

and that is how he made us: he offered us to the wind, 

to the mountains, to the skies of autumn and spring. 

He said, “Here are my children! Care for them!” 

And he left again, going somewhere like a child 

with a warrior’s heart, nothing could stop him. 

My grandmother would look at him for a long time, 

and then she would say nothing. 

She chose to remain silent, praying each night, 

guiding down like a root in the heart of earth, 

clutching sunlight and rains to her ancient breast. 

And I am the blossom of many nights. 

A threefold blossom: my sister is as she is, 

my brother is as he is, and I am as I am. 

Through sacred ceremony of living, daily living, 

arose three distinct hopes, three loves, 

out of the long felt nights and days of yesterday.

From Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems, Jimmy Santiago Baca,  New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1990.

 

 

 

 

Write: I sleep like thorns on a rose…

Rejoice in the story that…

Eagle, Hawk, Crow,

One day you said to me…

The light that settles in my bones…

I unmask your face…

In a dark time…

I am Far Walker…

Take the lively path…

While others sleep…

I am told I must forgive…

My dance is like a….

 

Writing On Turtle Island―The Poetry of Native America
Poem-Making With Jim Moreno
This class was taught on Sunday, November 19, 2017, 1:00 P.M. To 4:00 P.M. @ San Diego Writers, Ink,  2730 Historic Decatur Rd., #202, San Diego, CA 92106

Bibliography

1. Harper’s Anthology of 20^th Century Native American Poetry, Edited by Duan Niatum, Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1988.

2. A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding & Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego, 1994.

3. Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Collected Poems, Duane Niatum, Holy Cow! Press, 1991.

4. Earth Vowels, Duane Niatum, Mongrel Empire Press, Norman Oklahoma, 2017.

5. If You Want To Write: A Book About Art, Independence, & Spirit, Brenda Ueland, Graywolf Press, 2002.

6. In The Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, Steve Kowit, Tilbury House, Gardiner, Maine, 1995.

7. Introduction, Richard Hugo, The American Poetry Review, November/December, 1975.

8. Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love & Revelation, Edited by Roger Housden, Harmony Books, New York, 2003.

9. Soothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral American Indian Literature, Brian Swann, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983, p. 3.

10. The Native American & Contemporary Art: A Dilemma, Fritz Scholder, Book Forum, Volume V, # 3, 1981, p. 423.

11. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard, Harper Perennial, USA, 1989.

12. Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg, Shambhala Publications, 2006.

Quotes:

Richard Hugo: We’ve inherited ruined worlds that, before they were ruined, gave (us) a sense of self-esteem, social unity, spiritual certainty, and being “at home” on the earth…The cultural tradition does not just exist in the memory. It exists in act, thought, speech, the ritualistic discovery of kinship.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux): Writing for me is an act of defiance born by the need to survive.

Simon J. Ortiz(Acoma Pueblo): Writing is an act that defies oppression.

Fritz Scholder (Luiseno): Painting, like most of the visual arts, is an individual activity that is completely personal, and can only be developed through one’s own unique frame of reference. If one is to make a statement in whatever medium, one must find out who one is and fully accept it.

Mary Oliver: Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life.

Writing On Turtle Island―The Poetry of Native America Poem-Making With Jim Moreno
Sunday, November 19, 2017, 1:00 P.M. To 4:00 P.M.@ San Diego Writers, Ink,  2730 Historic Decatur Rd., #202, San Diego, CA 92106

Quotes for Healing the Past:

Canada apologized On 11 June 2008, to its Indigenous peoples for its past actions that eroded “the political, economic and social systems of Aboriginal people and nations”. The government acted on a report which had been tabled two years earlier.

From the 19th century until the 1970s—dates very similar to Australia’s own history—more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were required to attend state-funded schools in an attempt to assimilate them into Canadian society [40] and the purpose of “killing the indian in the child” [33]. They were forbidden from speaking their native languages or participating in cultural practices.

There were an estimated 130 Residential Schools across Canada. An estimated 90,000 survivors fight to have their stories recorded.

The last Residential School closed in 1996.

In May 2006 the Canadian government reached a CDN$1.9-billion settlement to compensate survivors. Source: https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/sorry-apology-to-stolen-generations#ixzz4wdymcPQi

Films:

We Were Children (directed by Tim Wolochatiuk, 2011, 83 min) chronicles the profound impact of the Canadian government’s residential school system through the eyes of two children who were forced to face hardships beyond their years. As young children, Lyna and Glen were taken from their homes and placed in church-run boarding schools, where they suffered years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, the effects of which persist in their adult lives.

The Making of Rabbit Proof Fence – Full length Featurette  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWblj80ZTYk

Links:
Canadian Federal Government Apology to First Nations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCpn1erz1y8

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apology speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKWfiFp24rA

Stolen Children | Residential School survivors speak out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdR9HcmiXLA