OCTOBER MINI-TOUR!

Before the crack of dawn tomorrow, I'll take off on a mini-tour, doing readings, talks and even a writing workshop, on Muwekma Ohlone, Wiyot, Chumash and Haudenosaunee land, circling back to Monacan land. Hope to see some familiar faces, but also looking forward to new ones. Quick list:

Thursday, October 12, U San Francisco. 5:30-7:00 p.m.. Legacies of Incarceration & Resistance: Colonization, Immigration, and California History. University Center 4th floor lounge. Commemorate Indigenous People's Day by joining Deborah Miranda and Barbara Voss in conversation regarding the historical role of the military and presidios in the colonization of California and the impact of the mission system on the lives of indigenous women. Open to the public.

Saturday, October 14, Audubon Center at Debs Park, Los Angeles. Indigenous Women Rising Honoring Event. Elder Barbara Drake (Tongva), Elder Kat High (Hupa), Deborah Miranda (Ohlone~Costanoan Esselen Nation), Lydia Ponce (Mayo/Quechua), Kumu Mikilani Young (Hawaiian) and Unci, Elder Rachelle Figueroa (Arapaho/Tarascan)[in memorial]. MC is Carry Kim, with Hummingbird Drum, followed by a poetry reading from Deborah Miranda. Potluck meal.More info.

October 18-19: Classroom visit & reading/talk at Humbolt State U in Eureka, CA. Environmental Studies welcomes author Deborah Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, to HSU on Oct. 18th (class visits) and will give a talk on the 19th titled “My Body is the Archive: Personal and Tribal California Indian Identities,” 5 to 6:30 p.m. in the Native American Forum (BSS 162). More info.

October 21-22: San Jose Poetry Festival. History Park San José, 1650 Senter Road. San José, CA 95112. Reading: 2-2:50, 10/21. Workshop: 2-5:00 p.m., Firehouse. Workshop title: “Composting Your Demons: Poetry in the midst of the Zombie Apocalypse.” More info.

October 24-25: Cornell University Creative Writing Program. Outside the Border(s): Art and the Political Imagination brings together Chicano poet Eduardo C. Corral and Native American poet and writer Deborah A. Miranda, as well as graduate and undergraduate students in order to trouble the boundaries between art and activism in contemporary America. Place and time to be announced.

Nora

I met Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Ḵeixwnéi, for the first time back in the late 90s, when we both read on a panel of West Coast poets for MLA in San Francisco. I was still a grad student, and MLA was still one of the few conferences I could go to where Indian scholars could be found, so it was a little like heaven for me. Reading with other Indians, going out to dinner with them afterwards, was a rapture. The tension-filled, status-oriented onslaught of almost 20,000 academics in one place – not so much. I gravitated to Nora; her warm, welcoming persona was like a calm shelter.

One afternoon, neither one of us had any particular place we had to be; Nora told me she'd been saving her "fish money" and wanted to go look for a beautiful dress for herself - to wear to readings and important ceremonies. Would I like to go dress-hunting with her?

Nora meant business when it came to shopping: she headed straight to Saks. I'd never set foot in Saks, much less actually seen the store. I'd heard of it, but it seemed more like Brigadoon than a real place. Walking into the massive ornate building was kind of like finding out an imaginary land actually exists. I trailed after Nora in a state of shock as she searched through racks of dresses that cost hundreds of dollars, if not thousands. It was San Francisco; we were Indians, not dressed especially well, or carrying any of the markers of social status – no diamonds, no gold, no name brand purses or coats. We were treated badly by the staff, which Nora took as a matter of course; she didn't let it stop her, although after one particularly rude encounter, she left the floor saying, "She's not getting a commission off of ME!"

Nora had a particular dream dress in mind: it needed to be floor-length, have at least ¾ length sleeves, a not-too-deep neckline, and be in keeping with the respectful nature of events she planned to attend. Eventually Nora settled on a gorgeous, flowing black gown that had a price tag of $800. Trying to keep my jaw off the floor, I agreed that it was pretty spectacular. "But it has this crease in the back..." Nora worried. "I hope I can get it out. I know some tricks." She made sure the saleswoman saw the crease, and told her she'd bring the dress back if she couldn't steam it out. Then she took out her "Indian purse" (a ziplock baggie) and peeled off $100 bills, laying them on the counter like she was dealing a poker hand.

Back at the hotel, Nora used all her wisdom, but the crease remained ("someone bought this dress, wore it all night, and then returned it!" she sighed), and we had to return it the next day. Nora was not paying good money for someone else’s used dress. This caused some difficulty for the clerk, who remembered us well, but for whom issuing a refund of $800 in cash was not a usual occurrence.  Apparently, Saks didn’t keep that kind of cash on hand in the till.  Nora stood quietly at the cash register, a little like a barnacle on a rock.  “I paid cash,” she said, “And I live in Alaska – I can’t use a store credit up there. Why don’t you go ask your manager what you can do about this.”  The clerk hustled off, and although it took some time, Nora did indeed get her cash refund.  She tucked it back into her Ziploc bag firmly.

As we left the store, Nora reached out and fingered a few other dresses, but she’d already seen them all; nothing was quite right.  "Oh well," she smiled, "there's plenty more fish in the sea. I did want to spend my fish money while I was down here, though."

Later, Nora was passing through Seattle and came to visit the Native Lit class I was teaching at the UW as a grad student. We reminisced about the "black dress incident" and how a couple of Indian women ransacked Saks (I asked if she'd ever found "the dress," and she said she had - but I don't remember where). She was a mischievous, loving, brilliant soul. She taught me how to walk through a store like Saks and act like I owned it, instead of the other way around.

Dignity. It's a lesson I haven't forgotten. Micha eni hikpalala, Nora. I'll see you.

                           Read Nora's obituary here.

The Language of Truth

In 1769, the arrival of two Spanish ships in Alta California coincided with a total eclipse of the sun, in conjunction with the shock of a powerful earthquake. "So it seemed," wrote Junipero Serra in his diary, "that the insensible things of earth and heaven had in this way manifested themselves in the new conquests as heralds and advents to the benighted gentiles, to incline their hearts to receive the truths of the gospel, proclaimed by the ministers of the living God."

The giant snakes stirred inside earth, struck

a few hours after dawn.  Thrown down

on our faces, we cried out – rocks thrust

upward, a fearsome roar rattled our ears –

how our Mother writhes! Then Sun, source

of life, disappeared mid-day, covered

by Moon’s broad face; star-beings shown

like abalone shell in sudden night.

Our star-mapmaker offered fervent prayer

to each sovereign direction, brought light

creeping back, though it felt a lifetime

till we breathed balance again.

We were wary, therefore, when a ship –

bigger than a whale – came over the horizon,

and men, more corpses than living bodies,

crawled from floating grave to shore.  Pale

skins, hairy faces, blue-eyed, green-eyed,

brown-eyed, they died and died. The sands

where their white tents stood stank of death.

Did they not know how to catch fish?

Did they not know to seek out berries,

heavy on the bush?  Did they offend

their gods, or travel beyond the reach

of their gods?

Another ship arrived, pale but abler men

who buried and buried; then men on foot,

strange gray deer bearing burdens of food

and hard heavy tools smooth as stone, sharp

as our best obsidian. When the beasts lay down,

too exhausted to carry any more, the pale men

beat them. It did not make the animals rise. 

In the morning, some men raised up barren

prayer trees; others in long skirts chanted

ugly foreign words, hands waving bowls

of smoke, meaningless gestures in the air. 

Was it the end of the world?  Now,

I wonder we did not hear these warnings

more clearly. Some of us broke traditions

of welcome; the law of sharing food, shelter,

story. Where once we would have brought

baskets of meat and sweet dried cherries,

now we drove off the pale men, their strange

stupid animals not-deer, not-elk.  Vacas.

We drove them all to the north. Some of us

said that was not far enough. Now,

I do not think any distance could spare us

the evil that followed. Earth spoke to us!

Sun and moon warned us!  We did not heed.

Now, we die of disease in their missions,

our blistered bodies weeping pus; women

and children mere vessels of rape and rage.

Perhaps the pale men killed their all wives;

none came with them.  Perhaps their women

revolted, exiled the pale men here,

and somewhere, on an island across the sea,

those wise women live peaceful, free.

We cannot see the sun of our next

generation. We cannot feel the earth

of our Ancestors beneath our bloody bodies.

We did not listen well enough. At night,

or behind trees in daytime, in fields

of strange crops, beneath blows from leather

cat o’ nine tails, we pray: let enough of us

live to tell this story. We will memorize it

in our hearts, trembling in awe. Let us live;

we will teach it to our children forever.

If we live, we will heed our Mother's

thunderous voice: Her dark language never lies.

- Deborah A. Miranda

Filling Up

Took the long way home from Floyd yesterday after a visit to Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary ... stayed on the Blue Ridge Parkway the whole way. Soaked myself in solitude, green, wildflowers, and the company of Bonnie Raitt and Santana ("Road Tested" still one of my all-time favorite live albums).

There is nothing in the world like that Parkway in early spring: the unexpected swaths of wild violets massing in purple, huge carpets of trilliums right next to the road, and dogwood gone brilliantly mad; the bald eagle flashing above me, the flocks of wild canaries in the trees, the orange bursts of wild azalea, and that first glimpse of mountain laurel in bloom!

At a couple of places the views of the rolling Blue Ridge mountains were so devastatingly gorgeous that I couldn't believe I was expected to drive under their influence. It was like being confronted by a past love in the middle of your regular routine and not being able to throw yourself at her feet. Somehow, I kept driving, and not off the road, either.

Hours of this. I arrived home late, happy, saturated in beauty. I had to apologize to my wife for missing the delicious dinner she had cooked. Eventually, I was forgiven (the giant macaroon drizzled with dark chocolate from the Floyd Country Store might have helped). But oh, it was worth any inconvenience to make that drive, windows down, air rushing in. Worth the tangled hair and the time. In fact, I think it might have added years to my life.

“ . . . the truth is that you're empty...fill yourself back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories...everything you need is in your head and memories, in all that your senses provide, in all that you've seen and thought and absorbed." - Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  

I’ve been wanting to take that drive for a long time. It’s a medicinal experience.  Especially now, with all the ugliness, our own fear and anger, injustice in the world, I need to refill my body, my soul, with beauty -- so that I can continue to recover from previous wounds, and so that I have something to offer in current and future struggles.

But this drive (and the visit to Spikenard Farm’s intensely loving work with honeybees) came at a good time for other reasons, as well. This week something terrible happened at my university.  A small group of white male students posted horrific hate-memes online – and were found to have been doing so for some time. Words and images of homophobia, racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, able-ism, of the worst kind; brutal images posted by young men whose only concern seemed to be topping the outrageous posts of one another.

As an Indigenous, queer woman, I felt these memes and the actions of these young men personally, and deeply; as a faculty member, I was devastated to think that I interacted with these young men in the hallways and gatherings of my university, that quite possibly, one or more of them might turn up in my classroom; that, perhaps, I already have or have had students thinking and acting on such things my classroom.  Perhaps, they were thinking these kinds of things about me.

This kind of thinking is paralyzing.  It is soul-killing.  It goes to the heart of the vulnerability I experience as a person of color, as a queer person, as a woman, every time I step onto my predominantly white, affluent campus – and most other places I might go.

Alerted to these memes by someone outside the community, the university sent out an email telling our community that “The matter has been referred to the appropriate University officials and student conduct bodies” and planned a gathering on campus to “express solidarity for our community values.”  Neither one of these actions provided me much comfort.  I didn’t go to the gathering, fearing that it would follow the usual pattern: POC and queer speakers baring their souls in front of a sympathetic, mostly white group.  If I had gone, I would have asked to speak first, and I would have said, “Not one person of color, not one queer, not one woman should speak tonight.  White men need to be up here, speaking against the culture of privilege and violence that allowed this, and figuring out how to educate and guide their white brothers who do such things.”

But as I said, I didn’t go. I could not drag myself to one more gathering to show my support for my right to be myself. I stayed home as much of the non-teaching day as possible, went into my office to do some class prep, and went right back home.  Some colleagues reached out to offer comfort, but others didn’t even realize what was happening (the university’s oblique email left many of us scrambling for information that was not easily discoverable). My community, my larger social network (which exists primarily online, as I am the only Indigenous faculty member, and one of a handful of faculty of color), reacted with sadness and anger, and consolation, and support, but I couldn’t really feel it – the poison of hatred was working on me.

I tried meditation, and I worked on a poem about a memory I’ve carried for many years – which just happened to be a memory about the old land in Washington State I grew up on, the riot of salmonberries in the spring, my hours of wandering in the woods, feeding myself from what I found there.  Looking back, I see that even as a child, I was feeding myself beauty so I could survive another day in a small, dark trailer filled with smoke, violence and depression, a place where the only thing I was taught was how unimportant I was, how little my body mattered, and my soul, even less.

That land saved me.  I know this.  I was incredibly lucky to have had those three acres, and the surrounding land where I also wandered. I know that, too. Not everyone has those opportunities; not every lost child is found by the mothering of a piece of earth.

Not every faculty member of color has access to the Blue Ridge Parkway at the end of April, or the time to drive it. I’m lucky, and I know it.

I need that medicine now, in the middle of a battle that has lasted my whole life, and will last long after I’m gone. My social community, my colleagues, do make a difference, but perhaps I could not let my guard down for them in this moment of fear and hurt. 

I can throw myself down on my knees before the beauty of this planet. And I will.  Over and over and over again.

Homing In

Salmonberries:
fat orange suns,
solar systems
explode on your tongue.
You love these untamed berries;
the way they are only yours,
illuminated with welcome,
soft white core left behind
on the vine like a note of farewell.

You learn from your mouth down.

These lush green woods
give refuge.  You flee
the small dark trailer,
cases of empty Rainier and Oly bottles,
leather belts and absence. 
Salmonberries,
one by one
or a handful all at once: 
you suck out juice, pulp,
swallow tiny seeds.  Bright little
spitbugs, bitter-spicy, sometimes;
you try to be watchful,
but you know so much hunger.

You swat mosquitoes,
side-step stinging nettles,
swab creek mud
where the tall fanged
leaves swipe an arm or leg. 
This is a world you understand:

Red ants with black heads bite
without hesitation;
honeybees ignore you;
Blackjacks bang around
like bumpercars but don’t sting.
Wasps careen through warm air,
wobbly legs trailing terror.
Trilliums, rich white
or purple petals on thick
jade stems: secret wealth.
You count and count until you lose
track, giddy at such inheritance.

Leggy spiders whose names
you can never find in books
spin among the thorns
and scratchy wide leaves;
beetles, caterpillars, millipedes,
centipedes swirl like jewels
on the crumbling red bodies
of ancient felled cedars. 
And the earth, black
with life – willing
to grow this wilderness,
willing to let you roam –
the earth beneath your footsteps
oozes into mud
made of pine cones,
cedar needles, maple leaves,
made of death and decay
and resurrection
and transformation.

You learn from your feet up.

You are small.
This world is busy,
hard-working, alive.
The longer you stay,
the further your body takes in
this place that takes you in,
the more you understand:

you are no exile.
Salmonberries
glow like lanterns.
Salmonberries
light the way home.

Deborah A. Miranda

In the Heart of Providence

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In the Heart of Providence
                                              (for Fredi)

she is a small house of memory
fine as glazed porcelain;

feathered bone’s delicate arches
curling like a galaxy center to edge –

hold inside this vessel –
singing with what those walls

remember; a hollowed-out heart,
today like a cathedral of the eye:

she bends time toward yesterday tomorrow
in starry design

where evening glimmers a covenant
carved out of the soul’s own stone

carved out of the soul's own stone
where evening glimmers a covenant

in starry design
she bends time toward yesterday tomorrow

today like a cathedral of the eye:
remember, a hollowed-out heart,

singing with what those walls
hold inside this vessel --

curling like a galaxy center to edge --
feathered bone's delicate arches

fine as glazed porcelain;
she is a small house of memory

in the Heart of Providence.   



Deborah A. Miranda

"Anger is loaded with information and energy" - Audre Lorde

Anger has its roots in grief. 

Old Norse, in fact, gives us “angra,” meaning “to grieve, vex, distress.”  Old English, “enge,” means “narrow, painful.”  In Latin, “angere” is to throttle, to torment. Old Norse also gives us “angr-lyndi,” a word for sadness, low spirits. 

I feel rock-tumblers in my heart, in my belly, those old machines my grandfather had out in his workshop, screwed to the bench.  Rocks went in rough and ugly, heavy with history but not much else.  When Tepa opened the little doors – sometimes a week later – the beauty of those rocks astonished me.  Deep greens, ocean blues, bright bronzes and gold. How did that happen?! I’d wonder.   

It’s the grit, the water, the tumbling, he’d say.  The pretty colors were there all the time.  This statement might be the closest my literal-minded grandfather ever came to crafting a metaphor.

My anger is tumbling, tumbling, tumbling.  Ugly rocks: fury, impatience, resentment, despair. The grit is my grief, my distress, my pain.  The water, my torments let lose.  And in the meantime, I have angr-lyndi – sadness.  My spirit is low, sometimes crawling on the ground, sometimes just sitting there, overwhelmed by gravity.

Oh, angr-lyndi: you are way too pretty for the feeling you conjure. Maybe you’ve been tumbled a few thousand years, a few billion turns.  

Maybe my anger has years yet to tumble; but I swear to you, I am making something transcendent out of it.  I swear to you, I am polishing my anger until its earthly beginnings dazzle your eyes with celestial hues.  I swear to you, someday, you will want to hold my fabulous, gleaming anger in your hands, marvel at the colors I've released from inside such raw skin.  

Someday, you will pay for the chance to gaze upon my anger, and I will offer it to you as a gift.

Deborah A. Miranda

WORDS FOR WATER at the Whitney Museum, NY

On March 5, 2017 I had the honor to be part of Words for Water, a multi-genre performance by Indigenous women held at The Whitney Museum in New York.  

Comprised of storytelling, poetry, live music, prose, video poem and music video, the evening gave back to me an essential, but lately lost, sense of belonging and collective strength. I have been struggling under the weight of personal grief and national mourning, of anger and hopelessness in the face of a great tragedy-in-progress.  And even though I knew with my mind it was not true that I was suffering alone, my heart, my body, felt alone anyway.

Last night infused me with the knowledge - in heart, mind and spirit - that I am not alone, that I am part of a dear, dear community of Indigenous women who put their hearts on the line every day, every hour, alongside mine.  Last night we linked arms and sang our resistance song, which is a love song, which is our Mother's song, a wild composition of fierceness, of tenderness, of longing and holding and celebratory reclamation.  We are each just exactly who we are: seeing the world from our human perspective, offering our best gifts in open hands with our own unique touch.  All different - Lakota, Ojibway, Muscogee/Creek, Mojave, White Mountain Apache, Metis, Esselen/Chumash - could we be any more different?! - and yet, meeting on the common ground of aching, unrelenting love for this planet, who is the Mother we cherish as we must learn to cherish our own bodies, the bodies she made, the bodies in which She is present.

Our purpose, officially, was to draw attention to, and make manifest in the world, the courage and horror of Standing Rock, and the ways in which these threats to clean water from fossil fuel development and dependency are, quite literally, suicide. But it is also matricide, it is also a contribution to the murder of the complex being of Earth.  And it is also the reinscription of colonization's primary crime: the rape of women, the trafficking of women's bodies, and the rape and desecration of our Mother's body through fracking and oil extraction.

Last night we engaged in the greatest resistance of all:  love.  

To love ourselves, as women; to love one another as women, companions, lovers, sisters, mothers, daughters, granddaughters; to love the bodies that hold our spirits, our female bodies that are so despised by corporations, by patriarchy, by institutions - this is an effort so great, we cannot do it alone, not even in the deepest prayer, not even with the most determined intentions.

We need each other.  When we try to live disconnected from one another, locked into my work, my life, my responsibilities, my writing, my music, my art, we will fail.  We will fail, and we will fail alone.  

This must be our work.  Our lives, our responsibilities, our writing, our music, our art.  

We come from the earth, every bit of us, every mineral, ever molecule of water, every starburst of soul.  And the earth created us in Her image: a vast pulsing network of rhizomes, spiderwebs, veins; we breathe and pray and exist as one multitude, one community.

Talking with Jennifer this morning, she helped me articulate this sensation of collaborative connection even further.  "As each person went up to the stage, if felt like she was the center," she said, "and yet, we were all the center . . . "

YES.  The center kept shifting, cycling through each of us.  We each took a turn being central to the ceremony, the song; bearing that center, carrying the weight of that larger moving, circulatory ceremony.  And then we would pass that center on to the next woman, for her to add her own irreplaceable words.  Thanks to the hours, days, weeks Natalie and Jennifer spent planning, thinking, crafting the evening, that movement was seamless and loving, every single time.  Until Laura's exquisite, radical violin voice brought us around to home, to completion of a ceremony we could only have attempted as many coming together as one.

Last night, I remembered that.  Last night, it was remembered for me by my sisters Natalie, Layli, Toni, Laura, Jennifer, Heid, Louise, Joy.  Last night was a ceremony for resurrecting the lost, the grief-stricken, the dead.  Last night was our renewal ceremony, an offering not just for ourselves, not just for our communities, not just for our audiences both in the flesh and on livestream, but to Her.

Some moments go beyond prayer.  Some moments are a vow.  Last night, we took that vow.  We will love You with every bit of our fiercest abilities.  We will be relentless and joyful and yes, we will be women who love ourselves so that we may better love You.

Nimasianexelpasaleki.

Layli Long Soldier, Laura Ortman, Deborah Miranda, Natalie Diaz, Jennifer Foerster, Toni Jensen.  With gratitude to Megan Heuer of The Whitney Museum for her vision, guidance & loving support.

Eating a Pear on the Front Porch, Late February

Eating a Pear on the Front Porch, Late February

Bird songs like sweet nothings, or your mother coming into the room when you’re having a bad dream.  She swoops over your trembling body and croons, “it’s all all all right little one!”  Off to the West, angles of azure and delicate clouds spread a deep yes you want to fall into, oh sky the color of infatuation, of throwing caution to the wind.  But over to the East, there’s no sky at all, only Mordor on the march like a storm of orcs, and they have blades with thunder and lightning embedded in the steel. You sit on the porch with two dogs, both gray of muzzle; one bears the pink scars of cancer. They sleep that blessed dog sleep of simplicity, paws twitching, a tail thwacking against the deck.  You eat a pear with skin reminiscent of fall maple leaf colors: brightly tender salmon, deep golds.  The flesh is a manifestation of giving, so you take.  Lick your fingertips of sticky juice, watch the clouds roll in closer, feel the temperature drop like someone opened a walk-in freezer.  Your porch stands exactly where the two skies meet: this house, the cusp of everything.  Don’t think about climate change, or water wars, or the leaflessness of a Spring that has come too early.  Listen to the birdsong, the whistle of mourning dove wings in mating flights.  Smell rain hovering over your American town like a memory you can’t quite retrieve.  Feed the pear core to that dog at your feet, the one with the scars who wakes up, nudges your hand; scold her when she asks for more.

Deborah A. Miranda