Carolyn Dunn's News and Views

The Frybread Queen reading at La Jolla Playhouse and the Autry National Center

2009-06-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 20, 1:00 p.m., Mandell Weiss Forum Studio, La Jolla Playhouse
Saturday, June 27, 1:00 p.m., Wells Fargo Theater, Autry National Center

The Frybread Queen by Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)
Directed by Scott Horstein
Dramaturgy by Robert Caisley

Three generations of Indian women come together for the funeral of a beloved son. The collision
of personalities forces them to confront long-simmering tensions that threaten to tear them apart.

This quietly poetic drama has all the haunting qualities of a tragicomedy—Navajo
style! A reception follows the reading and discussion.

frybread queen

(between 3-4pm, join us for a reception featuring authentic frybread)

_____

see Native Voices at the Autry's site:
http://www.autrynationalcenter.org/nativevoices/nv_events.php

The Last Light

2009-03-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

Twilight
The sun falls behind
The succulence of cloud.
Our coming, our leaving
Another day, another night.

Water sprays
From the crest
Of a fluorite wave.
The head tips slightly
Forward,
Leading the torrent
Of motion
One after the other,
Capping to the shore.
Breaking, as grief
Pushes on ahead.

The last light
Shallows in her absence.
Turning, twisting,
Now just an imprint
Where my feet touched earth.
Trading breath,
Leaves flutter
In the waning day,
Seared by the rising
Breath of heaven.

Like so many before,
So many after,
Who will be here
To sing
When I
Am gone?

© 2009 Carolyn Dunn

A new Coyote Speaks review...

2009-03-04T00:24:00.000-08:00

...from Children's Literature magazine.

Children's Literature

This generously sized and exquisitely presented mix of original poetry, retold traditional stories and linking commentary is an answer from within Native America to two centuries of decontextualized appropriation of story. Of the more than 500 tribes of North America, nearly 50 find expression in this meticulously crafted collection that opens windows onto indigenous traditions while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism. The stories are contained within chapters focused on medicine people, word magic, creation, the magic of art and artifacts, hero figures, guardians of wild places, trickster and related animal characters, and stories from tribal memories. A final chapter looks forward, addressing mythmaking in the 21st century. Within each content area, however, the lines between story and commentary are gently blurred, so that form and content both reflect societies with story at their heart. Even the introduction begins with brief text that erases distinctions between what we=2 0think of as real and imaginary, then moves through a Cherokee ballgame story and concludes with this reminder: "When we walk the lands of these stories in our imaginations, it is vital to understand that we are guests and need to tread softly." The retellings are simple, vital, fluid and direct, each in a style fitting to the story. Some like the transformation tales are short and pointed. Others like "The Daughter of Sun" span vast periods of mythic time, so we can feel the sweep of the storyteller's prose. Still others such as "Song of the World" (Pima) employ both prose and song. Here the tale moves from its launching in primordial time, through the journey of the first man, and then in a swift one-twoconclusion, arrives right into the reader's here and now: "He picked up the sun and placed it in the sky, and it is still there, just as he made it." Parchment-effect pages showcase the rendering by Berk of selected petroglyphs. The book is additionally enriched by the incorporation of a range of artwork from photographs of southwestern kachinas and bone artifacts from the Arctic, to stunning contemporary art such as Hazel Merritt's iconic painting of a satellite dish with a Navajo wedding basket design on it. As an example of how text and form are perfectly married, the facing page carries a poem titled "Beautyway" that evokes both the Dine ceremony and the troubled ecology and history of the Four Corners region. Back matter contains a list of tribes and nations mentioned in the book, a select bibliography, a note on sources, extensive illustration credits and an index. In all, Coyote Speaks is a gift offered up with a delicate and caring touch, inviting both young readers and adults to explore its pages again and again. Reviewer: Uma Krishnaswami

Rick Nelson was right, part 2...and Coyote Speaks

2009-01-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

Eighteen years ago, when my non-Indian brother-in-law remarried, he told me that the wedding would be in Sedona, Arizona. “We have a native medicine man performing the ceremony- I’m looking forward to you meeting him,” he told me. “You should get along very well.” I assumed that this “getting along very well” would be because we were both native peoples. When we met, the first thing the “medicine man” said to me was “Where did you get that curly hair?” to which I replied, “the same place you got that Spanish last name.”

We have been completely acculturized in this country to think we understand than Native peoples have a certain phenomelogical look, and if we don’t fit under that rubric, then the questions begin. The federal government and other non-Indian entities have been very good at creating division within our communities and we have allowed them to tell us what is Indian and what is not. We have allowed them to tell us what our identity is, and who we are. They have taken our stories, many times, and made them their own. Some have gotten very good at hiding their nativist agenda- their ability to speak for native peoples while asserting their own nativism in this country. It is a dangerous precedence if we are to allow non-natives to tell us what stories belong to whom, and that we, as native people, who are doing the work of reclaiming our songs, our stories, and our languages.

The eighteen year old adventure of my brother-in-law’s wedding in Sedona would continue well past the ceremony itself. As part of a guided tour of Sedona that the “medicine man” made his living giving to non-natives, he began telling stories of place names in the area. I was accompanied on this tour by my dear friend, a Laguna scholar and critic who questioned the authenticity of the place names the self professed “medicine man” was spouting. “Who gave these places these names?” she asked him, to which he replied smugly, “I did.”

The cultural work of repatriation works in many ways. In my own work, I have examined how stories recorded by early anthropologists were written and recorded to reflect the cultural biases of the recorder. (see my article in Ines Hernandez-Avila’s Reading Native American Women: Critical and Creative Representations; see also my introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, co-written and edited with Carol Comfort). To place an aforementioned oral narrative back into the tribal repertoire is in itself an act of reclaiming that story for that tribe. To place these stories back into the tribal archive and acknowledge the tribe to whom it belongs is to re-gather the story that has been spoken and give credit where credit is due. Is that an exploitation of a culture? If that is so, then one must accuse other native peoples whose work in cultural reclaimation have included Alfonso Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan, among many, many other native writers. Are storytellers such as Gayle Ross, Dovie Thomasen, and Tim Tingle, who have told other peoples’ stories (with utmost care and credit to the original storyteller and the tribe) in performance and in print, exploiting the storytellers and the tribes to whom these stories originate? The danger of taking stories that belong to others, reclassifying them as your own and lending a certain cultural authenticity to these stories is indeed exploiting native peoples and others who come to these stories thinking they will be learning about native peoples. Beverly Slapin’s review of Coyote Speaks does everything she accuses the authors (Ari Berk and myself) of doing: she attempts to synthesize the book and takes short phrases from the book out of context to further her own nativist agenda. She avoids mentioning the book's authors' extensive cultural and scholarly expertise in both the field of American Indian literary studies and in native communities in Indian Country. She further accuses us of making vast generalizations when it comes to native peoples, where we very clearly state in the book, “It is important to remember that there are more than five hundred distinct Native American tribes, with as many languages and cultures.” (p 17). We are careful also to follow the lead of the late scholar and activist Vine Deloria in that any stories still in the oral tradition still reside there. Do we criticize Anna and Jack Kilpatrick for recording traditional Cherokee stories and placing them in a written archive? Do we criticize Alfonso Ortiz for co-authoring a book with Richard Erdoes on native mythology that takes an oral archive and placing in a written one? Do we criticize Rigoberta Menchu for taking the oral narratives she learned as a child and placing it in a children’s book? No, because these texts are preserving an archive that was in danger of being lost at one time. Do we take their written records of these narratives completely out of context to support a so-called “nativist” agenda? The Kilpatricks attempted to record traditional Cherokee narratives exactly the way the original storytellers performed them, to preserve the sense of the oral archive. Does that mean the written version of the story takes away a story’s orality? Does it take away a story’s authenticity because it is now part of a written record for not only the nation from whom it derives but non-natives as well? If we are to follow the logic of Slapin’s argument, then the retelling of any native story infringes upon the rights of native peoples and exploits native peoples in the retelling.

The cultural work of storytelling is to reify a peoples’ history, language, cosmology, in a sense, it is a retelling of that peoples’ origin narratives. To retell these narratives that classifies them as quaint old folktales and genericizes them as simply “a Native American tale” colonizes these tales and becomes a danger to the outside world who doesn’t share the cultural world view of the tribe to whom these tales belong. That is exploiting a people and their stories.

2008-10-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

I Met an old Woman

I met an old woman

who looked beyond

the years of living,

scattered among stones,

grain,

and living between

ashes, reeds,

forgotten things.

She took my hand

in hers.

bebe, bebe,

she whispered, then I

was standing under

a splash of stars

spreading from a center

of the womb

of hidden and swollen

satrs.

In her touch,

she displaced

memory rooted

and routed along

a trail of tears,

from which

spring roses

born of thorns

and deep red bloom.

Survival is this,

she said,

biology speaking a language

unspoken by stars

whose light

has long gone

back to the exploding

dome of the sky.

Entrails

of light, each

seeping into

new and wet

beings and blessing.

We can trace the trajectory

of a spark, of birth

of life, of death.

Here it ends

when it begins.

Bebe, she smiles,

you look so like my own.

A motherless child

sees oceans of stars

in her eyes,

laced within

the shining sorrow

of a long foreshadowed

unfolding prayer.

Albuquerque

10-16-08

Paula Gunn Allen Memorial

2008-09-29T21:28:00.001-07:00

Memorial Tribute to Paula Gunn Allen

Saturday, Oct 25, 2008

5 - 9 PM

City College of San Francisco
50 Phelan Avenue, San Francisco
Diego Rivera Theater

Please join us. Program details forthcoming.

Rick Nelson was right...

2008-09-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

The blog always suffers when it's back to school time. So we've been in for a month and I'm now just updating. Trying to get everything done---get back into the working mom mode, finishing dissertations, articles, short stories, getting review copies out, fly fishing (or in our case raiding Kernville for anything 50's pink) with my Sisters, has kept me busy. But I am up to my ears in ideas and complaints as well as rants. Once again, the only people paying attention to Indians arew Indians, what else is new. Palin's record on Alaska native rights? Atrocious! Of course one does not find that little tidbit in the mainstream media but only amongst Native America. And once again, I am still not surprised. It's ok to complain about Indians if you live near a casino and traffic pisses you off, or to complain about how Indians rip off the state of California, as our governor so eloquently stated when he was about to oust the previous governor. In 1992 I visited the Shakopee casino in Minnesota where I overheard a little elderly blue haired lady complain about how much the Shakopee community was making money hand over fist as she plied her quarters into the slot machine. (she really did have blue hair). So all of this gets me thinking about the theory section of my current project and the colonization of America. I should say the continuing colonization of America....

Theories of nation building and narrative, decolonization, and what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “the decolonizing moment” can shed light onto the particular situation of the American Indian diaspora. Research on indigenous peoples, according to Smith, has been cloaked in the language of colonization; from “discovery” to “claiming” and “naming”. Utilizing indigenous epistemology from her Maori culture as well as Michel Foucault’s theories on power and Jacques Derrida’s theories on language, Smith examines the intersections of western imperialism, knowledge, and research, and how indigenous researchers must access and utilize indigenous epistemologies in researching and writing. Smith also argues that western (European-American) research on indigenous peoples forecloses on indigenous representation and identity, that the language of colonization remains intact within academic, historical, and critical studies on indigenous nations by researchers outside of these indigenous communities. The narrative of research conducted in native communities has furthered the colonial and imperialistic narrative of western hegemony, and in order for decolonization to take place and for new narratives to emerge, researchers – native and non-native- must address the language of colonization within these narratives and examine their own complicity within constructing colonial narratives. Smith insists that indigenous researchers must not only use indigenous narratives as a mode of resistance but as a way to rebuild integrity of native communities utilizing native epistemologies. Indigenous scholars are educated in western epistemology as well as in the narrative of their communities and therefore are bicultural, as both Smith and Roseanna Henare-Salomona argue. The language of colonization is reiterated, rearticulated in western trained indigenous researchers’ narratives; we must acknowledge colonial research systems and implemement indigenous research systems and ways of knowledge into our own methodology. Henare-Salomona, a Maori clinical social worker living and working amongst the Dharru aboriginal nation in western Australia, argues that indigenous peoples must be bicultural and bicompetent in order to survive ongoing colonization. Indigenous people are not only competent in their own cultures, but as a diasporic people must be competent in the epistemology of the west as well as that of our adopted indigenous homelands. Henare-Salomona’s work as a diasporic indigenous Maori woman living amongst a different indigenous community than her own is an example of multiple indigenous epistemologies that can be applied to American Indians living far from nation and home, multiplicitous in their ways of knowing. Henare-Salomona’s work in the application of Maori metaphor to research in Maori communities living abroad is groundbreaking in the sense that she argues for community metaphor as a research method for Maori communities. Henare-Salomona developes multiple approaches to her investigate of Maori identity; like American Indians, Maoris in Aeoteoroa and abroad acknowledge their tribal identities and then their national indigenous designation (Maori). Henare Salomona’s work seeks to “highlight the possibilities for the emergence of a new way of being, one that is more suited to the next generation and their anticipated experiences in this land. The narrative will then be analysed and examined for what toanga or gifts of knowledge may then be offered for future Maori living here in Australia. At the same time, this thesis is an introduction to Maori culture in the hope to give readers a better understanding of Maori people and the cultural protocols and concepts that guide the way in which they live and exist in the world. It also reveals the way they feel about their sense of place in this new land and the connection they still have with Aotearoa.” Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narrative, an exploration of indigenous identity in contemporary American Indian and Maori writing, is a text of great impact upon my project as well. Allen investigates “the construction of indigeneity within the context of a deep and enduring settler colonization…writers and activists who self-identify as American Indian or New Zealand Maori to mark their identities as persistently distinctive from those of dominant European–descended settlers and as irrevocably rooted in the particular lands these writers, activists, and community leaders call home.”What makes indigenous cultures distinctive? How has the demarcation of identity categories been addressed by indigenous peoples as colonized by European powers? Allen argues, N. Scott Momaday’s “genetic memory” trope, that blood/land/memory is "a complex of interrelated tropes and emblematic figures that were developed by American Indian and New Zealand Maori writers and activists to counter and, potentially to subvert . . . dominating discourses" (220) of First World nations. "Blood" represents "an enduring indigenous identity" (220); and "Memory," "a specific indigenous history" (218) or "narratives of connection to specific lands" (220). The blood/land/memory complex trope of native writers becomes even more provocative in an American Indian setting of dispersal in Indian lands of other nations.

So when I say Rick Nelson was right, I'm thinking of his song Garden Party: "...you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself..." We just got a review of Coyote Speaks from the School Library Journal, which can be a blessing or curse in the publishing world in which we operate. Apparently, to some reviewers (and hiring committees) one cannot be an academic and a poet, nor can one be a Native American and a scholar at the same time. My co-author (and evil twin brother) is referred to as "academic" and "scholar" and "Professor Berk" while I am "Native American poet", "tribal member", and "Ms. Dunn". And all I do is think about blood-land-memory complex and survivance and decolonizing frameworks all day. Ari, however, says that sometimes being an "academic" and a "scholar" isn't always the best classification to be assigned. Just like Henry Kissinger is "Dr. Kissinger" and Jean Kirkpatrick isn't "Dr. Kirkpatrick". There is still a class ceiling in this world and it's still smeared by the blood of my ancestors.

Busy busy busy little bees!!!

2008-08-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

It has been a wonderful summer. I spent a week with the Creek Divas at this year's playwrights' retreat with Native Voices at the Autry. It was my third retreat, first as an actor, since I was workshopping two of my plays in the previous retreats. I had the honor of working with my friend Joy Harjo on her new one-woman show Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light as well as on Creek playwright Julie Pearson-Little Thunder's The Girl Who Was Captured By Ghosts. I'm also really excited to announce that my play The Frybread Queen will be presented as a staged reading at the Wells Fargo Theatre at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park on November 3rd.

My new poetry book, Echo Location, will be published by the end of the year and we are in editing stages. Griselda Suarez is editing and some of you may know her work from Through the Eye of the Deer. Griselda is on faculty in Chicano-Latino Studies at Cal State Long Beach and is working on several of her own manuscripts, including the excellent The Mysteries of the Maginficent Rosario Santos. Gris and I have known each other since working together at Upward Bound at Cal Ploy Pomona where she was a lead tutor and resident advisor for summer programs. She later went on to become the assistant director for Educational Talent Search for AASE in San Francisco where she earned her MFA in creative writing and returned to Southern California to teach at Idylwild Summer Arts and CSULB. We both have had similar career tracks, being academics as well as dedicated to educational opportunity and TRIO programs.

We will also be developing the literary journal Angelena in the coming year, both online and in print. Angelena is a journal devoted to creative and critical works by women writers of color in Los Angeles, "from the freeway to the river." Our inaugural edition will feature Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, the Chumash/Tohono O'odham poet; African-American playwright Calysta Watson; Tongva scholar and artist Cindi Alvitre, the Kickapoo-Creek diva herself, Arigon Starr (who many people don't know is an incredible artists as well as musican/ playwright/ singer/songwriter, etc. etc...) among other L.A. based poets. The sense of a poetry community in Los Angeles is very limited and Gris and I are working toward filling the void and using the journal as a way to build community and use art as activism here in this city. We are looking forward to getting Angelena out by Spring 2009, so look for coming updates on this issue. Paula Gunn Allen had agreed to write the editorial for the inaugural issue but due to her illness was unable to do so. We honor her memory by continuing with the first issue.

Sadly, the final edition of the Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts will be forthcoming in the fall. Terri Windling and Midori Snyder have worked so hard over the years to keep this online journal up and running and will close the journal in order to concentrate on their own work but will keep the mythic arts alive in other venues. I will have a new piece in the final journal, "Spider Woman". Terri and Midori published several of my Deer Woman articles and most of my poetry published in the last few years has been through Endicott.

And, in closing, I am very pleased to announce that my first children's book, coauthored with my evil twin brother Dr. Ari Berk, will be published at the end of the month by Abrams. Coyote Speaks contains original poetry and stories by me as well as re-tellings of traditional stories by both of us from across Indian Country. Some of Ari's wonderful artwork is in the book as well as his dedication to preserving storytelling traditions of Native America. Also included is a final chapter on storytelling in Los Angeles, since both Ari and I are from this city alot of people love to hate. Ari also has some exciting projects forthcoming and I hope to be able to announce them soon (hint, hint).

I'm also pleased to announce that we are working on a new website for both myself and Mother Bear Media. Karen Strom, who has by sheer determination and will brought so many native writers to the web, has been my webmistress for the past eight years and I thank her so much for her patience with me and my lack of mad computer skills to get my site up. Robert Silent Thunder will take over from her and will struggle to comprehend the madness as we work on getting new sites developed and published this fall.

More sooner than later, hopefully!

Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts final issue now online:
http://www.endicott-studio.com/jMA08Farewell/index.html

Coyote Speaks is now available through the usual suspects...published August 20th.

2008-06-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

Spider Woman

Here

in your house

amongst the

pretty lace

china cup,
silk scarves

and books lining the shelves,

I take comfort

in you having

slept here,

thought new worlds

here,

breathed fire here,

made your enemies

drink their own blood,

watched the sun rise,

the sound of water

slowly spreading

its fingers in loving

prayer.

Your beautiful

linens, wallpapered

borders hand-drawn,

woven in color and content,

all in one.

I’m not long for

this world,

you said in

a dream

of another time,

space, life, lace,

feathered light and air,

yet there you sat, telling

me it was time.

Then you were gone.

Five hundred miles later,

through old haze,

children crying,

gnarled trunks

and congested airways,

I lay here, looking for you.

A last song of days

looms sweetly

amongst the tangled web

you so carefully spun from

your body,

fingers dancing, spinning,

until time stood still.

I lay here, dreaming your voice,

watching light and air

fall from spinarets and

thousand faceted eyes

of sky blown clouds.

Last night,

frogs sang, calling rain home.

The sky opened up,

dreaming the dark rimmed

edge of night along

a rain basted sky,

clouds seamless,

the only thing missing

was you.

New Journeys

2008-06-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

For those who have sent messages of condolences on the passing of my mentor, teacher, and dear friend Paula Gunn Allen, mvto. Paula was a great influence not only to me but to many others. She was a pioneer in the field of American Indian literary studies and in connecting the dots between American Indian matrilineal, matrifocal gynocratic societies and western feminism. As a poet and novelist, she was a strong influence. I was honored to sing at her funeral and thank her children, Lauralee Brown and Sulieman Russell Allen, for asking me to participate and allowing me to be with them during that time.

A memorial service for Paula is being planned for the third week 0f July in the Bay Area. For more information, please see www.paulagunnallen.net. There is a guest book to sign and more info about Paula and her work.

Paula's Corn Dance

ne hi pah
ho pe le tok
hey ya

cha ha ti keya
cha ha ti keya

I plant this seed for you,
so it will grow,
so it will grow.

National Creole Heritage Conference

2008-01-23T13:04:00.000-08:00

My cousin, Janet Colson, is the Director of the Creole Studies Center at Northwestern Louisiana State University and is doing excellent work on the preservation of Creole identity --- language, religion, culture--- and they are sponsoring this conference in Chicago, which is part of the Creole Diaspora. Speakers include Dr. Andrew Jolivette of San Francisco State University who does work on intersections of race and identity in Creole (French, Spanish, African, American Indian) culture.

I posed this information on my myspace site and got great response from folks who were just confused or wondering about the difference between Cajun and Creole culture. I shall do my best to explain these sometimes subtle, sometimes not subtle, differences.

The term Creole comes from the Spanish "griol" which means native born. There were two types of Creoles in Louisiana during this time, the white Creoles, those native born of French or Spanish origin. There were also Creoles of color, "Les gens de coleur libre", who were born in Louisiana of mixed white French (or sometimes Spanish), African, and American Indian - often Choctaw or other Muskogean speaking tribes--- who were and are indigenous to the area. Now those with European only ancestry were considered white of European ancestry - French or Spanish- very different than the white Cajuns who inhabited and still inhabit Louisiana.

Cajuns are the descendants of early French immigrants to Nova Scotia, who were kicked out of Nova Scotia by the English speaking majority. These folks traveled down the Mississippi River into northwestern Louisiana and settled in the bayou country there. Cajun French and French ancestry are different. Many folks will tell you that there really was no intermarrying on child bearing between Cajuns and Creoles. In fact, there are many misconceptions of this very early racial mixing unique to Louisiana. My mother's maternal grandmother was a Cajun born in Opelousas who married a Creole man (French/African/Choctaw/Biloxi) from Marksville. Let me be clear: my great-grandfather wasn't Cajun; in fact his father was from France. My great-grandmother's family had been in Louisiana as far back the early 1700's after migrating from Nova Scotia. She was a Cajun; he Creole.

So these groups share common cultural histories, but generally we are told that Cajuns and Creoles of color did not mix well. There are many, many oral traditions that tell us differently, that these groups did indeed mix very well.

White Creoles took the name Creole to denote who was born in the so-called "New World" and who was not. They also took the name and it came to connote only white or European-American born folks. Thee Creole Heritage Center at Northwestern State Louisiana University (www.nsula.edu), under the direction of my cousine, Janet Ravare Colson, seeks to assert the historical and cultural presence of Creoles of color in Louisiana and the Creole diaspora, including California, Texas, and Illinois, among where the largest concetration of Creoles outisde of Louisiana generally reside.

To us, Louisiana is more than just a state; it is the "Old Country" the place from where we were born, and where we came from. Our indigenous roots tie us to that land, our African roots tie us to the history and culture of slavery and freedom; our French (or Spanish) roots connect us to the history, colonization and culture of settlement of Louisiana by the French and Spanish. So many generations from European colonization have passed for many Creoles that the "old country" is just that and we feel no cultural connection to these places. For us, Louisiana will always be "home", the place from where we emerged.

See Dr. Andrew Jolivette's work on Creole and American Indian familial connections in his books, Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity, and his essay in the book he edited, Cultural Representation in Native America; Sybil Kein's Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color, among many excellent texts examining the culture and traditions of Creole peoples. For Cajun biographies, with some Creole resources, look at Barry Jean Ancelet's Cajun and Creole Folktales: The French Oral Traditions of South Louisiana, and Cajun Country, co-edited by Professor Ancelet with Glen Pitre and Lynwood Montell.

__________________________________________________

National Creole Conference on Language & Culture

Call for Proposals for the Chicago Creole Heritage Conference & Convention scheduled for July 31 – August 2, 2008 are now available online. Preliminary information about this conference has been posted at :

http://www.nsula.edu/creole/chicago/index.htm

This site will be updated as additional information is finalized.

The first national conference to explore "Documenting Creole Language and Culture" has been set for July 31-August 2, 2008 in the Chicago area. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars and members of the general public from throughout the U.S. and beyond to share their research findings and family histories. This project is a collaborative endeavor between Northwestern Louisiana State University and and local Mid West representatives.

Call for Papers/Presentations

Call for Proposals
(Revised 11/15/07)

"Documenting Creole Language and Culture"
Conference Dates: July 31-August 2, 2008
Location: Pheasant Run Resort, St. Charles, Illinois (just outside of Chicago)

Although language is an essential part of everyday life, few of us think about how vital human speech is to the transmission of thoughts and ideas. Studies have shown the strong link between language and culture; language determines how its native speakers view the world. Language allows us to share ideas, teach children about their heritage, and gives us a way to disseminate our cultural ideals. Since language remains such a fundamental part of culture, the theme for the 2008 Creole Heritage Conference is "Documenting Creole Language and Culture."

The Creole Heritage Conference strives to bring together Creole cultural constituents and researchers to share knowledge within a relaxed setting. This unique event draws participants from across the country who have a desire to preserve and promote Creole culture. The Creole Heritage Conference seeks presentation proposals from academics, professional and community researchers who have undertaken studies in any area that relates language to a cultural component. This conference will combine a substantial scholarly component with community-oriented activities (family history exhibits, genealogy workshops, and city tours.)

In preparation for the scholarly component of the conference, we are issuing this call for papers on any topic relating to Creole people, culture, and language. While the primary focus of the conference is on the Creole people and culture of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, we also welcome contributions that examine the broader context of Creole societies to which Louisiana belongs. In addition to individual papers, we encourage submission of proposals for panels consisting of three or four papers organized around a coherent theme and that include a panel chair. The organizers reserve the right to make changes in the overall configuration of panels.

Some topics of interest may include but are not restricted to: ·
Food names and the Creole culture
Place names in the natural environment
Music as a way of language transmission
Passing language on to the next generation of Creole children
Oral history documentation of Creole elders
Origins of Creole languages and dialects
Language in literature
Terminology of traditional occupations
Language and Community
Origins of specialized terms for material culture
Geographic analysis of Creole languages
Endangered language research methods
Linguistic studies of Creole French

Please note that all presentations will be limited to 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions and answers. Presenters are required to pay the conference registration fee and are welcome to become Creole Heritage Center Members.

Deadline for submission of abstracts:
January 15, 2008 Notification of Acceptance: February 15, 2008

Preferred Form of Submission: Send your abstract (150 words or less) as an email attachment in Word format to colsonj@nsula.edu. Within the body of the email message (but not on the attachment page containing the abstract), please provide the title of your submission as well as your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and full contact information, including mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address.

Alternative form of submission: Send a hard copy of your abstract (150 words or less) to Janet Colson, Louisiana Creole Heritage Center, Northwestern State University, NSU Box 5675, Natchitoches, LA 71497. On a separate sheet of paper from your abstract, please provide the title of your submission as well as your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and full contact information, including mailing address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address.

365.10.08

2008-01-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

winter count

Deepened octaves of winter,
three different words for
snow
and we can't seem
to fathom even one.
Bringing us to our
knees, the road ends
here, in a mist of sky,
water, and air
greeting earth in
a kiss of white and
the end of time.
Drifts rise
smoke of prayers
ascending upon a
breath of a distant
light, long ago laden
with the end of beauty.
How can we move
'if we are frozen
in a fear of change, of death,
of endings and beginnings
that are one in the same?
Can this frozen starlight,
glittering starry-eyed
in the darkness and silence
of night,
remain just what
breathing was meant to be---
beginning, ending, ending,
beginning---
and the mercy of an eternal
night
brings the breathing
to prayers looking
skyward
to heaven as we wish
the road would lead
us home.

notes left on the door on the house on 46th street, PART ONE

2008-01-06T21:08:00.000-08:00

notes left on the door on the house on 46^th street, PART ONE

Henry- when are you coming home?

Department of Water and Power 48 hour notice: please do not mail your bill. Your service at 926 W. 46^th Street may be turned off if payment of 196.74 is not made to our office by Friday, May 25^th.

Jessie: do you have any more lemons? Pie goes well with shame, sweetheart.

Henry- please come home. We all miss you. All is forgiven. P.

48 hour notice….

It’s 2:00 am, Henry. Do you know where your daughters are?

Department of Water and Power…

Dear Daddy: when are you coming home?

This house is condemned.

One night, my father dreamt of his father, snoring loudly in the basement in their house on 46^th Street. “Pop,” my father said to his father, “why are you here?”

“I just walked all the way from Sawtelle,” my grandfather said, “and I can’t find anyone home.”

The Veteran’s Cemetery, on Sawtelle Avenue in West Los Angeles, is the cemetery where my grandfather is buried. Both of my grandfathers are buried there; both are World War I veterans.

Years later, when my father’s spirit lies snoring in empty spaces of the house that was once his, I’m reminded of this dream, except I’m the one lost and searching for someone to be home. But no one is here. The empty shell that my mother once lived in no longer gives the comfort I would like to lay my head in, wishing for rain. She’s checked out instead, following my father back across the dirt and concrete and jimson and alata and palm trees lining the streets all the way from here to house on 46^th Street.

There’s a photo of my aunt, heavily pregnant, trying to avoid her image being caught for prosperity, desperately trying to dodge behind the pillar on the porch on the house on 46^th Street. She’s young, beautiful, laughing…so much the 1950’s housewife caught in that moment. Years later she would waste away as cancer ate at her brain. Still beautiful, still vibrant to the end, unable to speak or make words that were her gift. She looked exactly the same as she did that day on the porch on the house on 46^th Street.

I lost my front teeth at the age of three to the house on 46^th Street. My sister, 6 years my senior, was swinging on the porch railing and I had to join her. “Be careful,” my mother admonished.

“I will!” I cried, as I fell face first to the concrete. My mother was nowhere to be found as my grandmother wiped blood, tears, and bone from my face. I remember swallowing my tooth. “Look at all the pretty blood,” Grandmother cooed, trying to calm me.

My mother is still nowhere to be seen. Grief has gotten the best of her. Her retreat has been silent, painful. Like most leavings usually are.

What is the imprint of our presence upon those we leave behind? The house where my aunt hid her extended belly – that became my cousin Kim- and the place where I swallowed my own bones was claimed by fire years ago. Yet I drive by this place and feel its pull from in my blood and I cannot resist it. Sacred places do not exist in cathedrals of glass or stone and wax but in the space of time and the souls who inhabit, whose footprints are still etched on dirt and concrete and urban blood.

When my grandmother was in her later years, she sold the house on 46^th Street, and my grandfather’s ghost tried to return there in their son’s dreams. “Pop,” my father said to his father, “where are you going?”

“I walked all the way from Sawtelle,” my grandfather said, “and couldn’t get into the house.” So he found his way into the basement and went to sleep, where my father followed the sounds of his father’s snores and found him. We follow scents and sounds all the time. That is who we are as animal people in this desert. Following scents and sounds on concrete and ash isn’t what the ancestors had in mind, but it is what’s left of them. Sand, glass, stone, earth. Bricks and mortar and blood and tears. What stories does the land of sparkling sidewalks, genocide, eternal sunshine and smoke and fire tell? Look to the wild tobacco sprouting in cracks of pavement along the ribbons of freeways. Look to the hawks sitting on telephone lines after the rain, gaze fixed not on the SUVs and signs of extravagance but smaller things we tend to ignore. The smaller things are sustenance. In a wold of opposites people have lost sight of the smaller things. But hawks, traditional messengers. see the hidden. They filter out noise and SUVs and density and look to the world of smaller spaces for their sustenance.

365 poems 1.03.08

2008-01-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Thursday, January 03, 2008

365.1.3.8

a blessing of
birth and life,
living in eyes of
depths and darkness,
she smiles a smile
of 1000 year old starlight,
bright in the darkest
moments of a sunlit
and dawning sky.
all things end,
but in her,
a heart is renewed,
shattered stones
reworked and
pieces back together
with love,
old tongues,
and words pushed forth
like new life
waiting to begin.
a new beginning,
greeted with sorrow
and regret,
has come to sing
a song of joy,
like the promise
and vision
of new dreams and
ceremony,
calling the next world
into the one
in which
we live.

Carolyn Dunn 2008

365 poems

2008-01-05T21:22:00.001-08:00

365.1.1.08

A New Year...a New blog!! Yippee!! New resolutions include taking better care of myself, finishing a dang dissertation, getting student papers back at an earlier pace (yippee!), and writing a poem a day. At this point, I should have twenty books finished by Jan 2009!!

Drifting on a blue sail
of shell, rock, sleet
and all that comes between,
facing the daunting tide
for again the first time.
Passing the stones
between the teeth of
passing stones,
we rise, we rise,
falling away the depth
of sadness and grace.
Can I rescind what
magic has left on breath
of bitterness and grief?
Only then can we accept
the rough song
escaping from lips torn
by teeth and regret,
breathing life
into once dying songs.

(c) 2008

Natives & Comics: Scalped

2007-05-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

My introduction to the world of comic books began at age 9 when my mom, who was an educator, took us on some educational adventure to the missions or to Oak Glen to get apples or some other Southern California one day road trip and we stopped to go potty (sorry, I do have small children) and get something to drink at a mom & pop store and there was a limited, first edition of the first five Wonder Woman books from the 1940's in mint condition. Mind you, this was in the 1970's, way before Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Charles Vess and their contemporaries revolutionized the industry in the late 80's, so the books weren't that expensive and my mom, who I found out later loved Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman from the 40's, bought the books for me. I read that thing cover to cover. I still remember William Moulton's artwork and writing and the melodrama of Wonder Woman’s romance with Steve Trevor and the Amazonian purple healing ray that brought Steve back to life so he could accompany Wonder Woman back to Man's World and be by her side in a dramatic clinch and save the free world from the tyranny of Nazism. I knew the origin story of Bullets and Bracelets and how Diana won the competition to be Wonder Woman and how her mother, Queen Hypolyta, didn't want her to go. I loved the idea that women were warriors, having been raised by women warriors myself, and this was nothing new. But Wonder Woman was created in the 1940's when we really needed as much feminine s-heroics that we could get.

So thirty something years later, when I was asked to talk about Jason Aaron's new book Scalped from Vertigo for an article for the student publication of the Native American Journalist's Association, I thought, here is my chance to be an Indian and a comic nerd at the same time...since there's only two...maybe three...of us out there (Arigon Starr, this is for you) I thought I could do this. So I ran down to 3rd Planet and picked up the first five issues of this new, well received Vertigo series and got to reading.

First of all, let me say this: Jason Aaron is a great writer. The pitch for these books has been "the Sopranos meet the rez," and I would say that's pretty accurate, except my take would be if Deadwood, The Sopranos, and Thunderheart all got together and had a love child, it would be Scalped. The writing is sparse and poetic, the art is gritty, and unfortunately, it's the return of the western all over again.

But at least it's not 1870 in the Great Sioux Nation as they are "the last vestiges of a great civilization fading with the frontier". But it's the great Sioux Nation on the “Prairie Rose” reservation that's supposed to be Pine Ridge or Rosebud, a place where "the great Sioux Nation came to die." (Scalped,). Many Lakota people, especially the literary critic and writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn would argue that Pine Ridge is where the Lakota people came to live. That is, to survive and continue in a way that the federal government would never have imagined. It is a place of survivance rather than death, destruction and corruption. Scalped is the complete end of the spectrum of Indian stereotypes… if the 1970’s activists grew up and became mortal enemies. The chief, Red Crow, is a corrupt crime/casino boss who runs the tribe; his old comrade, Gina Bad Horse, still a badass community activist. Into this walks Gina’s son, Dashiell Bad Horse, who has been gone for years and there is no love lost between him, the chief, and his mother. Good and evil is delineated very early on, and the characters are complicated, but in the sense of one note complications. Red Crow is corrupt. Gina is angry, Dash even angrier. Red Crow’s daughter, Carol, is the angriest of all, so when she and Dash rekindle their “romance”, we know something bad is going to happen. All of the Indians in the book are pissed off, corrupt, violent, and addicted to some substance in some form. It is what most non-Indians imagine Indians to be (if they haven’t imagined Indians killed off with the buffalo yet), especially if they live near rural areas such as Pine Ridge, Rosebud, etc.

As an Indian woman who knows a lot of Indian women, I won’t even get into the outright misogyny of the book. I won’t treat you to a treatise on native feminism, because I don’t think there’s any such thing, but the Hollywood Indians are alive and well in Scalped and although I applaud the effort to place Indians in the contemporary moment, it’s a contemporary moment that takes its cues from the imagined Indian rather than Indian survivance.

# # #

Next time… Scottish men…and the Indian women who love them…

words, in secret, guide my feet

2007-04-02T23:20:00.000-07:00

In the young daylight

dreams of a better life

seemed so possible, so eventful,

within reach.

We shed our skins,

the stories of a disposed

people,

remained motionless

under the dawning

forecast of the rest

of our lives.

In our distress,

we remembered

how the taste of joy

once interred in our hearts slowly faded

as the daylight

moved on.

II.

In my bones

I carry the story

of blessing,

of death,

of breasts cut from bodies

of the dispossessed limbs,

severed from the solid

trunk of speech, of

matter, of blood

and birth;

skin shorn in flakes

from the dispossessed.

It was the beginning

of the descent of stars

into my bones.

III.

Someone said once

in a famous movie,

it’s as if a thousand screaming

voices were suddenly silenced.

Silence resists

the exit of bones,

seeps through the flesh

until the sound of the lash

comes on a dappled gray ash,

settling within blood.

There is no resistance

in this ancestral form of grieving.

It takes on many forms,

many refugees in the silence

of harbored secrets,

held close to where

no one can see them.

Blood and bone

is no safe place

for the missing, the murdered,

recorded generation

upon generation

until the silence,

reed thin, emaciated,

takes on the sallow glow

of diseased and broken

flesh.

IV.

When even walking becomes

a danger, foot in front of foot,

thinking “I must walk upright,

upright…

Worn bits of carpet,

faded wood, and marks

upon the wall of a home

that never wanted us,

wanted us.

Words are our only weapons,

as grief grows,

swallowing the knot

of feathers, bones,

and the undigested bits,

turning our steps

into shards of glass.

Bone fragments.

And we are glass, ever

shattering,

at any moment.

The young daylight

found me, blood drying

in the early morning as

I gazed out over the burning

taste of the last drop

of fire upon my tongue.

I carry the voices

upon my tongue,

a world in which

there can be no mercy, no joy,

no thought of ever catching

the last train home.

I can’t hold on,

I can’t let go,

I can’t put one foot in

front of another,

can’t find the space of reason

to put a sentence together.

What good am I,

flying blind in this world

where words are what matters,

when the connection

between bone, blood, brain

is severed by the very

rising

of the sun in a place

where I’m not even

supposed to be?

Shedding your skin,

I step out of your shadow,

one eye to the stars,

the other,

missing you.

300

2007-04-02T22:18:00.000-07:00

I told my students I went to see "300" and they asked me what I thought of it. Now you must know, I am a shameless fangrrl from way back and have loved Frank Miller's writing since The Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Returns. I do have sort of a Wonder Woman fetish. I also have seen "Reign of Fire" and "Phantom of the Opera" each about, oh, thirty five times. So there is a pattern emerging: comic girl, Greek mythology, great writing, and Gerry Butler. This was a no-brainer.

300 men in codpieces, cloaks and abs to die for? Check. A tough female character that I could relate to? Check. Swords, sorcery, mayhem, a just cause and Rodrigo Santoro in eyeliner and gold lipgloss? Oh yeah.

At one point, trying to decide if Gerry Butler's eyes are blue or gray, I looked over at my husband who, like any teenage fanboy, had the biggest grin on his face whilst heads were rolling and blood was spurting on the page/screen and I thought to myself, I love this man. (I love you too, Gerry, but I'm married. Sorry...) Where else can I go and spend two hours looking at abs of steel and chests forged from the gods themselves, look at my long haired, pierced and tattooed Choctaw man and think it's true. I have found my soulmate.

Did I love "300"? Yeah, all of the bad guys looked like me. All of the Spartans were white Brits. The romantic in me goes home to the real world in which I'm sleeping with America's enemy. The Glaswegians didn't have it too great from the English either. A Spartan with that fine Scottish brogue seems fitting after all, after all, didn't we all have to sleep with the enemy to get where we are now?

heritage...or identity

2007-02-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

First of all, I have to mention my friend Dr. Ari Berk in my blog. Ari is a wonderful artist, wrtier, and professor of Myth and Folklore in the department of English at Central Michigan University. His wife, Dr. Kris McDermott, is a terrific scholar and writer and I look forward to seeing them at the Native American Literature Symposium at the Soaring Eagle next month. Ari and I are coauthoring a YA book Coyote Speaks, which should be out next year from Abrams.

I visited Ari and Kris and their son Robin in October when I performed at the Michigan STory Festival in and around Mt. Pleasant. They were, as always, wonderful hosts and I found that I loved it there. I also got to visit with the incredible Choctaw storyteller Tim Tingle, and we had a great time telling stories (the kind that don't always end up being performed on stage!). I was interviewed by the local PBS station for their local show Inside Central. As a journalist, I was struck as I watched the show (and also thought to myself, jeez I have gained a lot of weight!!) at how when you're a Native American storyteller viewed by the outside world, then you're "proud of your heritage", which strikes me as quite the opposite of those of us who have the luxury of having a heritage as opposed to an identity.

Oh, isn't it cute that we native writers and performers have such a wonderful heritage that we can be proud of? Would the same thing be said of an African storyteller or a Japanese American storyteller talking about genocide and holocaust? What is the chasm that is developed between "heritage" and "identity"? Once again, it strikes me within the language. When I perform I sing specific songs from specific tribes, mostly Choctaw or Creek songs and I am very clear in acknowledging that each of these songs is from a deifferent, if culturally related, tribe. I am very clear on recognizing for audiences that there are over 500 different nations and languages and that the term "Native American" is a created label for created identity. Yet I get labled as a "Native American storyteller...proud of her Native American heritage." Never midn the fact that I live in a Choctaw-Creek-Cherokee-Seminole family and that our very existence is testament to our survival in this diaspora called California. Identity is who we are and there is no choice given in that matter. While the romantics are happy to wax nostalgic about us and our pride, our stoicism, our closeness to the earth and oneness with nature, we still have to live in a world that is a constant reminder of our colonization. It's time to take the stories to the next level.

Heritage is a luxury. Identity is survival.

A Tale of One City

2006-12-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

So yesterday, I’m drying my hair to go to church and all of the sudden this comes to me…not poetic, not up front, just life in Los Angeles as I know it…

So it’s the day after the “big game” in L.A. For those of you who don’t know (and maybe the eleven or so Angelenos who don’t pay attention), USC’s football team journeyed across town to Pasadena to play UCLA at the Rose Bowl. (this isn’t the actual Rose Bowl game, mind you, but the actual; physical space where the game is played, also called the Rose Bowl.) Neither team has an adequate campus stadium; USC’s home stadium is the Coliseum one block from campus; UCLA leaves Westwood for the east along the sycamore and oak lined streets of Pasadena for their “home” stadium. This is true of all of Los Angeles it seems; even home can be far away up a freeway, or just one block south.

I grew up in a family of staunch and loyal Bruins. My mother and aunt graduated in 1949 and 1952 respectively; my uncle and aunt both graduated in the 1950’s as well. All became teachers in Los Angeles Unified School District (I always said that everyone in my family is either a teacher or a cop or a Bruin or not), I myself received my MA in American Indian Studies at UCLA in 1992. For my graduation, my mom presented me with a letterman’s jacket. I was continuing in the family tradition. I never was the football fan that every single person in my extended family is; I grew up around it but preferred baseball, bleeding Dodger Blue. Yet I knew all about the rules and plays of football; I guess osmosis really does work.

When I was accepted into the PhD program in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC in 2003, I will admit there was some trepidation on my part. How could I, a Bruin by genetic code, even set foot on Trojan grounds without feeling the sudden urge to go down fighting? Every time I passed Tommy Trojan, I had to fight the instinct to run up to him and swathe him in light blue and gold streamers gliding in the wind, trailing behind him defiantly in the warm Santa Ana breeze. During a particularly cold weather spell two years ago, I rushed out of the house and forgot my coat. It was cold enough for me to head over to the bookstore and buy a sweatshirt in Cardinal and gold. (Mind you, red is so much more my color than light blue!) It was 45 degrees, which for a native born Angeleno is below freezing; I could not bring myself to buy anything at least remotely Trojan and wear it--- God forbid--- in public. That day, I literally would have rather frozen than walk around being seen wear the Trojan colors. I hope you see how deep in my blood this blue and gold runs.

At my mother’s funeral this past spring, the battle was still being fought. My cousin Mark, in his lovely and moving eulogy, talked about my mother’s lifelong, die hard devotion to her Bruins, noting the fact that she was proud of her daughter, even if the PhD will come from “the lesser of the two fine Los Angeles institutions.” (Somewhere, up in heaven, my mother was getting her last laugh.) To which I responded, in my eulogy, “What my cousin neglects to say is that I received my Master’s degree from UCLA and am simply just an infiltrator.”

San Pedro, in the port of Los Angeles, is an anomaly: small town surrounded by L.A. People can get into San Pedro one of three ways: through the Harbor Freeway (110) which is at the opposite end of the Pasadena Freeway, broken up by downtown and--- you guessed it--- USC. My whole life in Los Angeles has been marked by two freeways: the Harbor Freeway and the 405, which intersect far from the stomping grounds of Sunset and Westwood Blvd and Figueroa and Exposition. Between Pasadena and San Pedro. In 1972, my family left Pasadena for San Pedro. We entered into the war zone.

San Pedro is a Trojan town. This is the bottom line. We are, like my cousin Chris at the game last Saturday, the only blue shirts in a sea of cardinal and gold. For all of our lives my cousins and I were the only UCLA supporters amongst everyone around us. Even my descent into the pit of hell as I began studies on the campus between Fig and Exposition did not sway me to the other side.

Until this year.

Zack Heberer is my cousin Chris Linscomb’s brother-in-law. Zack was a star lineman for San Pedro High School, earning all city and all Marine league honors. He made 2005 Super Prep All-American, Super Prep All-Farwest, Prep Star All-Western, Tacoma News-Tribune Western 100, Cal-Hi Sports All-State first team, All-L.A. City first team, Los Angeles Times All-Star, South Bay Daily Breeze All-South Bay first team, Long Beach Press-Telegram Dream Team first team and All-Marine League MVP as a senior offensive and defensive lineman at San Pedro (Calif.) High...He had 56 tackles and 9 sacks in 2005...As a junior in 2004, he made All-L.A. City, South Bay Daily Breeze All-South Bay second team and All-Marine League first team. He was heavily recruited by colleges across the country—especially Oregon and--- you guessed it--- USC. I have known Zack since he was a scrawny little second grader. I went to high school (and college) with his uncle Chris; his uncle Carl married one of my best friends from elementary school, Julie. So when my cousin started dating Zack’s oldest sister, Heidi, it was a Pedro match made in heaven. Remember I said Zack was a scrawny little second grader? Well now, I am 5’10 and I have to reach up on my tiptoes to hug him and he has to lean down to hug me. Zack is now 6’5” and about 280 pounds. He is not little. He is not big. He is a hulk of a kid, recruited to play on the offensive line for USC.

I teach in the religion department at USC as part of my program. This semester I taught two sections of Religion 140, Religion and Ethics in America. As I was calling roll in last August, I was getting to know my students’ names and as I began calling names, I noticed one young man, sitting in the back, quiet and keeping to himself. I noticed him because he reminded me so much of my cousin Chris in looks--- part Asian, part black, part American Indian---the “ethnic utility man” as we call Chris and his brothers David and Mark. A nice perfect blend of southern Americana and charm. I continued calling names. “Emmanuel?” He answered, smiling slightly. I made note and moved on.

The next week, Emmanuel missed class and stayed after class when he returned. “Miss Dunn,” he said politely, “I missed class last week because I traveled with the team to Arizona and I would like to get the assignment I missed.”

The team?

“You play football, Emmanuel?”

“Yes, Miss Dunn.” (he is so polite and called me Miss Dunn up until a week ago- it’s a combination of Texas charm and being raised right at home by his mom to be respectful.)

“Do you know Zack?”

“Heberer?”

“Yes.”

And so the recognition began. Family ties were once again secured, and at the next family gathering, Zack asked me, “So Moody’s in your class, huh?”

Emmanuel Moody, like his friend and team mate Zack Heberer, is very a very humble young man. He made 2005 Parade All-American, Prep Star Dream Team, ESPN 150, Super Prep All-American, Prep Star All-American, Super Prep All-Southwest, Prep Star All-Midlands and All-District first team as a senior running back at Coppell High...He ran for 1,170 yards and 14 TDs in 2005...As a junior in 2004, he was All-District 6-5A first team as he rushed for 1,319 yards with 12 TDs. His choice to attend USC was announced on ESPN last spring. I asked him recently how many colleges were trying to recruit him last year. “All of them,” he shrugged. Emmanuel came to college with a 3.2 GPA. I think because he was far away from home (Dallas area) and looked so much like my family, I kind of adopted him. Under a sea of hulking Oregon/Cal/Stanford (etc)n players I would scream “Get off of my boy!!” I would bring Emmanuel copies of the Sunday paper to send to his mom at home in Texas. (“I don’t read the local papers, Miss Dunn,” he said to me at the beginning of the year. “This is the L.A. Times, Emmanuel, not some little hometown 3000 readership publication!” I said, exasperated.)

In my class, where many of my colleagues have said, “You’re such a mom…” to my students, Emmanuel became like one of own children. Because of Emmanuel and Zack, I started paying attention to stats and started watching football games on Saturday. I paid attention to who was playing whom. I even knew what BCS stood for. And, like being a Bruin was coded genetically into me, I guess all those years of being forced to watch Monday Night Football and accompanying my mom and aunt to UCLA season ticket holders games really did do something…I understood exactly what those stats and what all those plays meant and what was at stake for USC last Saturday.

I also understand what a win over USC means to UCLA. Normally, if this was any other year in the past eight seasons, I would be rejoicing in the streets with all five UCLA fans in San Pedro (most of them are related to me). I would laugh at all the stuffed bears on a noose draggers around campus last week, smile smugly, and proudly display my UCLA Alumni license plate frame. I would call of my friends who are USC grads and really rub it in. But the year that this one kind of mattered to me, because of my pride in my students and family, it just doesn’t seem as sweet. Like my cousin told me, as he’s sitting in this hushed sea of cardinal and gold, “As a brother-in-law, I just couldn’t gloat, you know?”

But hey, the Rose Bowl (the game, not the stadium) isn’t too bad of a place to be either. Coach Carroll is very gracious, as is Coach Dorrell. Both teams have learned from this game and it is UCLA’s time to shine around the word “upset”. I will cheer loudly in Pasadena come January 1^st. And for my two kids on the team, I may wear the cardinal and gold Burberry scarf in my closet. Maybe.

new works

2006-10-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

havent posted in some time--- heres some new works...
_______________

The road ends in circles

in eastern Utah.

Painted canyons

Like decorated eyes

and things

of death.

Beginnings

and endings that

somehow run together,

things that look

the same.

Grief is the land,

ever changing,

ever moving,

looking on its surface

the same,

but below,

where breath and blood

begins. The changes

are subtle.

Death comes to the edges,

moving slowly inward,

dark edges

drowning in black,

like her soul,

under the scorching sun

or clear, cool water.

An absence of breath

and blood

turns to dusk

cutting off space

of living,

And turns

the place where

grief reigns.

Brown, colorless grief,

like the roads

that end in circles

in eastern

Utah.

forgiveness, the three r's, and the spaces between

2006-08-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

Ahhhh… life

Forgiveness is not an easy pill to swallow--- and sometimes it gets stuck in your throat and refuses to work itself way down to the pit of your stomach where it needs to reside in order to flow into your bloodstream, where peace should reside instead of anger. The wounds can be still raw that need to heal as well, especially when the poison comes from within your own circle of life, love, and family. We are so addicted to dysfunction and drama that sometimes in order to make ourselves feel better about our own hurts and the hurts cause others that we become addicted to that cycle of blame and soon forgiveness gets stuck once again in the throat, making that a hard lump to swallow, causing tears and more anguish. When we cause that pain to others, sometimes we become so caught in that ugly cycle that the lies we tell ourselves to absolve us of any responsibility suddenly become truth and we don’t even know what the truth is anymore. We begin to believe our own lies and then we are completely absolved of our guilt and shame without even realizing how much more hurt and anger we place upon the people we love and purport to love. We then begin to believe in our own victimhood, and then the lies from our own mouths become truth in our own minds and soon we’re talking and writing and telling others of that perceived hurt and a vicious cycle begins again.

The ones we let into our circle, let into our lives and our families are especially adept at hurting us the most. But if we are to heal our communities and ourselves and our families, how do we stop the untruths that once spoken take on a life of their own? How can we call back the hurtful words, the anger, the disappointment, the fear, inauthenticity with which we label others that comes back to haunt us in the end? I was taught that words, once spoken, can never ever be taken back and that they take on this life of their own. Negative words and hurtful things said grow uglier and uglier and soon all of that negativity begins to eat away at the beauty of the world and the beauty of life that we try so hard to enjoy and shape into a world in which we want to raise our children. We need to watch what we say or write, because as poets and musicians and writers and artists and dreamers these negative thoughts will take hold onto that forgiveness pill and make it even harder to go down, sometimes coming back up and causing more illness and disease in our communities. If we forgive past hurts and lies unconditionally, then maybe real communication can heal the fissures that threaten to break up families, relationships, communities.

The native world is so small when we really think about it; all of those hurtful things said in anger and indignation came come back and cause even more hurt and anger until finally this evil spirals out of control and becomes a living, breathing entity. Life is hard. No one told us it would be easy, but I would hope that love would permeate anger and hatred and lies and life the veil so we can look at our own actions and take responsibility for our own failings so we could stop blaming others for our own fears and negative actions and stand up as a child of God. Owning our own faults will help move that pill down; we need to stop blaming others for our own inability to accept responsibility and maybe the love and respect that brought us all together in the first place can grow stronger and overcome the negativity that we have put out with our words and our actions.

Let love and truth be heard, instead of hatred and lies. Let those two come together and out of loving communication and respect, let’s start healing our communities of past negativity and disrespect. Reverence, responsibility, and respect should be our focus; all three stand together as one love. Together they are united; separately, they can get us into trouble.

We have corntassel !!!

2006-07-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

One of my passions that I have gotten away from these last few years is my garden. The front yard looks like an English cottage garden, the back needed some help, but I guess since my mother's passing i really feel like this is my house now. It was the house I grew up in, the place where my roots are, but for the last six years since we moved from our house into my mom's, it never felt like mine. I guess that moving from my own place and having been on my own and then a wife and mom in my own home was a harder transition than I thought it would be going back home to my mom's house. The reason we had moved in with her was because of her dementia, and soon afterward we had to hire 24 hour caregivers because her health deteriorated so much that with my work and being a parent was tough. The caregivers became part of our family and when my mom passed away, we lost not only the shell of who she was but we lost the caregivers who had become so close to us. This forced us to become just us five again, and although it's been a tough transition, we have made a go of it.

I have never really written of my mom's life in the last few years and how it felt to be a motherless daughter when the shell of her was still walking around in a haze of a netherworld that she seemed to hover within and without. I had grieved for her long ago. She was a tough nut, my mom, throughout my childhood adn adulthood and we never really were close until after my dad passed in 1990. Then it was just us and our extended family, and when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's like dementia in 1997 it was just plain unfair. But all of the super-coping skills she instilled withim me helped me through the most difficult times in 1997 and later when I started grad school with a new baby, a toddler, a kindergartner, a parent with Alzheimers and a spouse with diffculties of his own.

All of this is to say that when we moved into my mom's house, my gardening fell away. There is something genetic about agriculture; it's in the blood and I have to do it. We live on a sloped terrace which is ideal for corn, beans, squash, melons, okra, peppers, tomatoes, and other growing vines--- but the lack of actual flat yard space we had proved difficult, so I put the family garden off. This year, my husband built me three large raised beds in the backyard in preparation for our terraced garden for next year.

We planted the usual corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, melons, and tobacco. My friend Theresa sent seeds from their sundance garden, and the kids and I had a grand time planting. When the seedlings sprouted shortly after, I was so excited. I can see why some folks consider those plants children--- to actually care and nurture and plant and make sure they grow to fruition--- now that's ceremonial performativity in action.

Last week we had corntassel. Today I saw for the first time cornsilk. We're going outside to sing now. We'll see what shows up tomorrow

works in progress...

2006-07-19T22:21:00.000-07:00

I'll be posting some new works in progress, as well as some new things here pretty soon. In the meantime, here is a story from Pomo Country, up between Clearlake and Clearlake Oaks in Norcal... this may be a play sometime soon--- has epic all over it...

* * *

The Battle of Bloody Island

“1/4 mile west was Bloody Island, now a hill surrounded by reclaimed land. On this island in 1850, U.S. soldiers nearly annihilated all of its inhabitants for the murder of 2 white men. Doubt exists of these Indians’ guilt. In 1851, a treaty between whites and Indians entered into State Registered Landmark no 427.”
Bloody Island State Historical Marker
Clear Lake Rancheria, Pomo Country
California

Bloody Island: Scene of a battle between U.S. soldiers under the command of Captain Lyons and Indians under Chief Augustine, April 14, 1850. Dedicated as a historical monument by the Native Sons of the Golden West May 20th, 1942.”
Bloody Island State Historical Marker
Bloody Island
Clear Lake Rancheria
Clear Lake, California

I. Red Wing Blackbird

Ghost voices
Move across the lake.
Stars don’t shine
Smoke rising prayers
Mist joining them
To a God
Who no longer hears.
I can hear the fires
Smell death upon
The water
But no one will listen
Save the wind.
Will the world listen
To the lines upon
My face-
My brow,
The soft undersides
Of my arm
I paint red with the color
Of blood
Of sacrifice,
Paint from the dirt
Underfoot.
My mother is dead
My children too.
Lost I have no voice
The man with no past,
No future.
They will not listen
To the one
Who cannot speak
But I smell death.
It pours out of my
Breath
My being and raising up
My arms
The wind flows,
Icy and trembling
From the wing shine
Of cold
Clear air.
There are no stars
This night.
Only death upon water
Red wings
Painted by earth
And blood.

II. Silas Porter

Once forgotten
A dream of blue and gold
Panning shine
For a lock of cloth,
A bath,
Time of a pretty
Yella haired gal
Named Emmylou.
How time goes
Wjen there;s
Nothing left
But infernal
Smoke on water
Hell and his demond
Live under this lake.
The only way
To stop them
Is to dorwn underneath
A pan for shine
Look up into the sky
From a clear bottle
Haze covers my head
Rising from the lake
And it’s easy to forget a yella-haired gal
Named Emmylou
Who would speak my name for shine
The color of her hair
Betrayal
Gold for gold
Silas Porter
You ain’t no good
Only shiny things
Soothe my soul.
I held her down
See that shine
Emmylou
The light in your eyes
Can’t stop me from singing
As I hold you down
Gold drifting
In my hands
Shine color
Of blood.

III.

Her body
Drifted to the surface
And then’it began.
There are no human
Beings anymore
Not even spirits
That speak to the dead.
Cathcing the stars
One by one
I save them
For a tomorrow
That my children
Will never see.
Whose life
Can I save
Now?
Finish the bottle
And move beyond
The battle.
A two step
Will not do
What good is the word
Of a gentleman
In this bloody land?
The word of a savage
Is no good
As gold.

IV. The Lion of Judah

Make amends.
Those were the orders
As I marched under
The faded trees
And passing
Moments the bodies
Spoke to me.
As the effort to breathe
Emboldened my steps.
What good is gold
If there’s no one
To kill for it?
Making a name for myself
Out west
Indian fighter
Buffalo style
But there’s no buffalo
Here
No trains,
No standards to set
And there are still
Indians
To kill.

V. Emmylou Veredia, Under the Lake

I dream I’m down on
The bottom
And no matter what
I do,
I can’t swim up.
Only the finer stars fade,
Turning to water
In my lungs.

From Old Los Angeles...

2006-06-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

I'm spending a week with the Native Voices at the Autry theatre compnay, developing new plays with four other really really good people: Diane Glancy, Drew Hayden Taylor, James Lujan, and Rhianna Yazzie. All of our work is very different and this process is amazing. Thanks to the actors, dramaturgs, the Autry, and Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz for this amazing opportunity!

__________________
Wandering at night under stars and a moon of time in distant skies and stars of life. At night she whispers a prayer and the world falls silent. Light dots the landscape reflecting stars off the black ocean sky and her voice pares away at the noise like the knife at her belt. Her eyes stars and blessing, once the quiet stills, she moves across hills across sage
Chapparal and wild alata, singing a song that keeps sleep at the place behind our eyes. The quiet keeps us down but for her the silence is music, a song of heart and memory
like stars that shine her way light across a desert plain. Lifting her ears, they move forward, back close to her head. She sniffs the ground and on wings of sand and glass
takes flight toward the cry of someone’s child upon the wind. Bring them home, distant stars lit on your path and wisdom of the ancestors her paws stretch like wings to carry them home. Each finds a home close to her heart.

The color of the sky before sunrise and moonset summons the silence home. The sounds
of city breath and brokenness that brings us back from our dreams. From her mouth come our voices waking, rising, they drift over hills and wild alata, tobacco, sagebrush, chapparal and remnants of real and imaginary places. Taking the loss within her wings
she flies home, rooting the lost ones to her breasts. Flying unladen now, they move across the shining sky the in-betweens and the lost ones have found their home As the sun rises, giving voice back to the ones who have none.