i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes 
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver 
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you 
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man 
and whenever I said good morning, 
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether. 

when the clerk says how are you 
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’ 

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot. 
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + intellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun, 

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings 
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car, 
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat, 
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but I won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star 

After Benji Hart

1. How many hands have touched this food?
2. What were their intentions?
3. How vast is the range?
4. What makes them hands at all?
5. How many seeds survived their birth for this?
6. Did you count yourself?
7. From sprout to pluck, how many breaths old was the oldest?
8. What’s become of its homeland?
9. How many breaths will it add to yours?
10. Or is this a thing that takes?
11. Which things were born dead for this?
12. Did you count yourself?
13. Which born free?
14. Which born food?
15. Is there a state in-between?
16. How old was the well of that answer?
17. If governments and their signed scrolls are Plato’s cave wall shadows, where is the real sun?
18. What’s become of its homeland?
19. How many generations removed from the land are you?
20. What floor takes its place?
21. What is it built on top of?
22. Are the people who tended that place still alive?
23. Are there any living descendants?
24. Is their language still spoken on earth?
25. If you heard it, would your feet twitch?
26. Or does dead mean gone?
27. How many gone things in your place?
28. Did you count yourself?
29. What does your body and the day it makes cost?
30. What is its price, in gone things?
31. Is this sustainable? Better—regenerative?
32. Or will this make you the most gone thing alive?
33. Is god or the human the cave wall shadow?
34. Who says the shadow is nothing at all?
35. Are you still eating?
36. Who?
37. What for?
38. What have you grown in its place?
39. How much is enough?
40. Is enough a place or a count?
41. Is there a state in-between?
42. Or does enough mean gone?
43. Did you enough yourself?
44. In the language of the oldest gone thing, how do you say devour?

I refuse to choose
between lynch rope and gang rape
the blues is the blues!
my skin and my sex: Deep dues
I have no wish to escape

I refuse to lose
the flame of my single space
this safety I choose
between your fist and my face
between my gender and race

All black and blue news
withers the heart of my hand
and leads to abuse
no one needs to understand:
suicide wipes out the clues

Big-Time-Juicy-Fruit!
Celebrity-Rich-Hero
Rollin out the Rolls!
Proud cheatin on your (Black) wife
Loud beatin on your (white) wife

Real slime open mouth
police officer-true-creep
evil-and-uncouth
fixin to burn black people
killin the song of our sleep

Neither one of you
gets any play in my day
I know what you do
your money your guns your say
so against my pepper spray

Okay! laugh away!
I hear you and I accuse
you both: I refuse
to choose: All black and blue news
means that I hurt and I lose.

Chilocco Indian School, Oklahoma, 1922: A disciplinarian says, There is no foolishness, do everything just so… such as keep your room clean, keep yourself clean, and no speaking of your Native language.

For now I can
             just whisper 
kál’a sáw

                  the ’óx̣ox̣ox̣ 
      of your hím’ k’up’íp

wrecked at the base
                         of a century that burns

through my slow blood

/

                                 kiké’t caught

in the blink                                       silúupe

so draw the eyelids
       shut & forget the fire 
tangled among the branches

of your spine
             start where the skin meets

half an autumn
       rusting the edge of winter that is

knifing                        between me & ’iin

you & ’iim ’ee

/

boy     have you forgotten us
                                                is not what they are saying

or are they        asks another century

        how are we remembered
in our choreography
of bones?

/

mouth your birthplace          boy
without mouthing off           tim’néepe    is at the heart

or the heart of the monster
                                         or the grass blood-soaked

from the fresh kill that finally isn’t
                                                             your father

& pray héwlekce when your body is given away       says the
     orphan boy

with lashes licked into his shoulders

forget ’im’íic   because they can         tear every lip from every
     memory

                                     of your mother

/

because you are
torn & because you are
what song fills
your throat
with the color
of carved out tongue

peewsnúut & hi’lakáa’awksa
              is what is voiced in the dark
& so what does it mean
                           asks the boy

/

as the moon
glows mouth open
to the unbearable
taste of ash
blown among the stars

that the boy learned
the ghost’s trail

that milky way
is lit by the dying
brightly echoed

/

c’ewc’éewnim ’ískit
so there had to be breathing

there had to be.

Translations:
kál’a sáw—just in sudden silence
'óx̣ox̣ox̣ —sound of bones and flesh tearing
hím’ k’up’íp—sound of a mouth breaking
kiké’t—blood
silúupe—at or in the eye
’iin—I
’iim ’ee—you (with emphasis)
tim’néepe—at or in the heart, where the mind and felt emotions are housed. Also, the name
of the Nez Perce creation site, Heart of the Monster, located in Kamiah, Idaho.
héwlekce—I disappear
’im’íic—your mom [more intimate] (as opposed to your mother)
peewsnúut—without tongue, or cut tongue, or removed of one’s tongue
hi’lakáa’awksa—he, she, or it is lit all through the night
c’ewc’éewnim ’ískit—the ghost’s trail / the Milky Way

White Earth Reservation, 1938:
wigwam
peaked lodge
bark house
tipi
log house
tar-paper shack
frame house
u.s. rehabitilation house.
sister hilger
you counted each one—
seventy-one tar-paper shacks,
eight united states rehabilitation houses
two wigwams
bark houses at rice camps—
you graphed
photographed
measured dimensions
calculated cubic air space
ennumerated every construction detail—
23 with broken windows;
99 without foundations, buildings
resting on the ground;
98 with stove pipes for chimneys.
house, dwelling, place, structure—
home. Endaayaang.

June to November
the year my mother turned five,
Mary Inez you walked these lands
the fervor of your order tucked
under one billowing black-sleeved arm,
amassing details of crowded quarters,
common-law marriages, miscegenation,
illegitimate children, limited education,
economic dependence on the WPA and CCCs
for charts that have outlived
those Anishinaabeg of the
one hundred and fifty chosen families.

Now you perch in my history
at one of  71 homemade or 79 factory-made tables
sitting tall and precise on one of the 84 benches,
49 backless chairs, or 81 arm chairs,
or standing, Mary Inez, in the homes
of one of the 16 tar-paper-shack families
or 8 frame-house families
for which you record none
under the heading of chairs.

Methodically you recite
like prayers of deliverance
each prepared question:
Why are these so many
unmarried mothers on the reservation?
Why are there so many common-law
marriages on the reservation?
What do you think can be done
to stop
the drinking to intoxication among the Indians?
I hear you interrogate each family
daily gathering indulgences
or ink smudged statistics
on what you label in caps SOCIAL PROBLEMS.
Any unmarried mother in the home?
Any intoxication in the home?
So dutifully you prompt each betrayal—
Father? Mother? Son? Daughter?
and then remind yourself, in print,
in a parenthetical aside
of the unreliability of the interviewee—
(Check this information
with some outside person.)
As if anyone then or now could forget
with whom resides the authority
for your social accounting

Ah, sister, I pity you
the prickly mystery of those questions
whose answers could not be checked
nor changed
by some reliable outside person.
So confidently you asked
Would you like to leave this home?
But seventy-three per cent of the occupants
of tar-paper-shacks on White Earth Reservation
in northwestern Minnesota in 1938
said no.
No matter, you wrote, how dilapidated
and inadequate the homes were,
the tar-paper shack families
were quite unwilling to leave them.

So they were asked again
asked another way
because it was thought
knowing the alternative
might change their mind:
Would you like to move into a rehabilitation
house; one of those fine new houses
the Indian Bureau built for the Indians?
But the negative answers grew.
Fewer still would think of leaving their home.
Not thirty-five-year-old Anna,
fifty-year-old Mary,
not a widowed mother, sixty-one years of age,
living on the outskirts of one of the highway towns,
not Old Man Mink, seventy-eight years of age,
nor his wife, ten years his junior,
who agreed they liked their one-room shack,
not Mike, twenty-nine and a regular League of Nations,
nor his white wife Jane, twenty-eight,
nor their ten-year-old son.
Gaawiin. Gaawiin niwii-naganaasiin.
Like Jim, forty years of age
and Ella, thirty-eight,
they wanted to stay
in the old ramshackled, tar-paper-covered homes.

And did you hear the bullrush psalms
of Gaa-waabaabiganikaag
as you painstakingly recorded each
softly intoned explanation?
And does the land remember you
Sister Inez, of the tar-paper-shack dwellers?
As surely it remembers Mary 
who felt well acquainted with the woods,
or Anna, who believed she was living
more like the old Indian ways?
Somewhere in that rolling land of rich loam
is the adorned body of Old Man Mink
and perhaps somewhere roams the spirit
of the Midē wiwin elder who vowed
I’ll stay right here. I won’t leave here.
I’ve lived here too long.
I wonder, Mary Inez,
did your BIA-commissioned sojourn
in the land of white clay
somewhere lay its soul mark
looming crow dark
at the ruled edges of report ledgers
spilling into cautious recollection
even as the measured drip of black ink
might draw tabulations
upon white pages?

Before Minnesota winter winds
rattled the 162 full-sized, 104 half-sized,
and 47 less than half-sized unbroken windows,
before that biboon nodin blew through
those 23 houses with cardboard-covered
broken windows or blew through
your tight-lipped post-allotment spirituality
you returned to the Order of St. Benedict
and to the list of standards set out in 1935
by the National Association of Housing Officials,
those standards against which all our measurements
fall short, become sub–sub-standard, sub-human.
You left Mary Inez, the Latin Mass
and rosary zipped safely in one pocket—
the names of each Midē wiwin elder
drumming and chanting in the other.
                    

*All italicized words are taken from Sister M. Inez Hilger’s Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation, 1938.