Indian Giver Read online

  Praise for Indian Giver

  “What impresses me most about John Smelcer, aside from his powerful writing, is his indomitable spirit.”

  — James Welch, author of The Indian Lawyer & Fools Crow

  “When it comes to revisioning the Native American experience, few are as triumphant as John Smelcer.”

  — Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

  “Replete with irony and wit, Indian Giver is an astute and intelligent exploration of what it means to be Native American in the 21st century.”

  —Maria Gillan, American Book Award winner

  “There’s an authority of landscape here—true grounding and not just the flippant acknowledgment of sources in so much contemporary poetry. I feel the primal grain and temper of the genuine here.”

  —William Heyen

  “The very title of this strong, somber, and beautiful collection prepares the reader for the long familiar list of injustices practiced upon the Native Peoples of this continent, and for the fully justified bitterness and anger left behind by those injustices. This dark, unflinching book tells its own truth persuasively and starkly.”

  —Rhina Espaillat

  “Angry, honest, proud. . . . The huge range of poems gathered here create a lament, a protest, and an inextinguishable song.”

  —Sherod Santos

  “I would argue—and rightly so—that John Smelcer is among the best and most original poets in America.”

  —Stanley Kunitz, former Poet Laureate of the United States

  “Nothing short of splendid. Like an alley fight fought on the petals of a rose.”

  —Robert Nazarene, author of Margie

  “Smelcer’s deceptively direct poems have the kind of energy found in the poems of William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder. Worth hearing or reading again and again.”

  —Joseph Bruchac

  Praise for Without Reservation

  “Clear, rueful, courageous, sardonic, hard-lived. Poems with a sweet clarity that leaves us with no excuse. To be taken straight.”

  —Gary Snyder, original Beat and Pulitzer Prize winner

  Praise for Songs from an Outcast

  “John Smelcer’s poems bring one a strong sense of his ancestry, his constant and haunting awareness of the indigenous life so grievously wounded yet still alive around and in him. This gives his work an unusual and valuable resonance.”

  —Denise Levertov

  “John Smelcer is among the most brilliant younger poets in recent American literature.”

  —Allen Ginsberg

  “This poet speaks from the land and for the land and for the people who belong to it.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin

  Indian Giver

  Books by John Smelcer

  Fiction

  Stealing Indians

  Savage Mountain

  Edge of Nowhere

  Lone Wolves

  The Trap

  The Great Death

  Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land

  Native Studies

  The Raven and the Totem

  A Cycle of Myths

  In the Shadows of Mountains

  The Day That Cries Forever

  Durable Breath

  Native American Classics

  We are the Land, We are the Sea

  Poetry

  The Indian Prophet

  Songs from an Outcast

  Riversong

  Without Reservation

  Beautiful Words

  Tracks

  Raven Speaks

  Changing Seasons

  Indian Giver

  John Smelcer

  Poems

  Forewords by

  Ruth Stone, Diane Wakoski & X. J. Kennedy

  Illustration by R. Crumb

  Leapfrog Press

  Fredonia, New York

  Indian Giver © 2016 by John Smelcer

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published in 2016 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 505

  Fredonia, NY 14063

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smelcer, John E., 1963- author. | Crumb, R., illustrator.

  Title: Indian giver / John Smelcer ; forewords by Ruth Stone, Diane Wakoski & X. J. Kennedy ; illustration by R. Crumb.

  Description: First edition. | Fredonia, New York : Leapfrog Press, 2016. |

  St. Paul, Minnesota : Distributed in the United States by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015036505 (print) | LCCN 2015041088 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781935248804 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781935248811 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / Native American. | POETRY / American / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.M387 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3569.M387 (ebook) |

  DDC 811/.54--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036505

  for Howard Zinn

  Acknowledgments

  Poems in this collection first appeared in: 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, American Voice, Appalachia, Artful Dodge, Art Times, Asymptote, Bombay Gin, Clay Palm Review, Common Review, Contemporary Literary Horizons (Bucharest), Crossborders, Cumberland Poetry Review, Forma Fluens (Italy), Fox Cry Review, Free Press, Fugue, Generation X, Georgetown Review, Harpur Palate, Hawaii Pacific Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, International Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Iron Horse, Journal of Alaska Native Arts, Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, The Literary Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Modern Literature in Translation, Nimrod, Natural Bridge, North American Review, Oklahoma Review, Orbis (UK), Papyrus, Paterson Literary Review, Paradox, Pebble Lake Review, Pembroke, Pemmican, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Puerto Del Sol, Ragazine, Raven Chronicles, Rosebud, Runes, Seventh Quarry (Wales), Verse Daily, Wisconsin Academy Review, Witness, and Yuan Yang (UK).

  This manuscript, originally entitled American Indian Dreams, was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award from Southern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin Poetry Series Award. “After a Sermon at the Church of Infinite Confusion” received Honorable Mention in the 2004 James Hearst Poetry Prize awarded by the North American Review and appeared in Native American Classics (2013). A version of “Road Map” received an Honorable Mention in the 2010 AWP College Writing Awards. “The Road to Chitina” and “Potlatch” appeared in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Eds. B. Swann and A. Krupat, 2000). “Durable Breath” appeared in Durable Breath: Contemporary Native American Poetry (1994). “The Book of Genesis, Revised for American Indian History” and “Indian Re-Education” appears in Genocide in America (Open University of Israel, 2009, renewed 2013). R. Crumb illustration from The Book of Genesis Illustrated (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. © 2009) used with permission.

  The author thanks X. J. Kennedy, Ruth Stone, Diane Wakoski, R. Crumb, Mark Strand, James
Welch, Seamus Heaney, Bard Young, Robert Nazarene, Stanley Kunitz, Maria Gillan, Catherine Creger, Aeronwy Thomas, Joe Weil, Aaron Fine, Amber Johnson, Jenny Marcus, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Joseph Bruchac, and Lisa Graziano.

  The Great Spirit gave this land to us.

  Then he took it away

  and gave it to someone else. Indian Giver.

  “The conquest of the earth,

  which mostly means the taking it away

  from those who have a different complexion

  or slightly different noses than ourselves,

  is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  “History is not history unless it is the truth.”

  —Abraham Lincoln

  Contents

  Praise for Indian Giver

  Acknowledgments

  Forewords

  The Book of Genesis, Revised for American Indian History

  After a Sermon at the Church of Infinite Confusion

  The Incomplete & Unauthorized Definition of American Indian Literature

  Deer on a Snowy Field

  What the Old Man Said

  An American Indian Dreams the American Dream

  Dream Walker

  Kite Runners

  How to Make Blue Ribbon Indian Fry Bread

  The Alternate History of the United States of America

  Thing You Didn’t Know About American History #138

  Template for Treaties Between the United States of America and Indian Tribes{U.S. GPO Document 7342-1; 1868-Rev.}

  Duke Sky Thunder Tries a Jedi Mind Trick on Non-Native America

  If Charlie Brown Had Been Set on a Reservation

  Indian Superheroes

  The Last Fancy Dancer

  The Day the Words Died

  What the Medicine Man Said

  Transfiguration Sunday

  The Ballad of Victor ComesAlong

  Literary Criticism

  The Party Crashers

  Politically Incorrect

  Hymn Singer

  Indian Policy

  Indian Blues

  Reservation Blues

  The Road to Chitina

  Cowboys & Indians #1

  The Birthday Party

  Road Map

  Riversong

  An Indian Poet Apologizes for His Color

  Dreamcatcher

  The Abandoned First Draftof the Preamble of the United States Constitution

  This Is Just to Say

  Telling the News

  Indian Time Machine

  Betrayal

  If Evel Knievel Were Indian

  Cowboys & Indians #2

  The Triumphant Conversion of Mary Caught-in-Between

  Our Lady of Sorrows

  Fahrenheit

  The Dead Are Lonely

  Intermission

  Boarding School Arithmetic

  A Wicked Irony

  Problem Child

  An Indian Boy Dreams of Being Billy Mills

  Durable Breath

  Call of the Wild

  Returning the Gift

  A Polar Bear Prays for Colder Days Ahead

  American Dreams

  Indian Scalper

  Indian Re-Education

  Willie Tensleep Wins the Lottery

  Fish Camp

  Tumbleweeds

  So Begins the Lasting Silence

  Potlatch

  Mileposts

  How to Conquer the New World

  Song of a Whale Hunter

  When Heaven Shits on the World

  How Reservations Got Their Name

  Indian Social Security

  If Willy Loman Had Been Indian

  What the Tour Guide Said

  Anchorage

  It’s All in the Blood

  Birthday Girl

  (Native) America Enters the Atomic Age

  High Anxiety

  Oneupmanship

  Jimmy Stands-Too-Tall

  Recipe for a Reztini

  Reservation Roulette

  Ceremony

  New Product Advertisement from Rezlon®

  Indian Stompers

  Salmonomics

  The Last Speech of Chief Sits-on-the-Fence

  The Virginia Woolf Suicide of Mary Caught-in-Between

  Dandelions in Full Bloom

  Home

  Red America

  Tax Evasion

  Smoke Signal

  The One-Minute Racism Test

  Real Live Indian

  My Frostbitten Heart

  Autobiography

  Skins

  The Author

  Forewords

  Daring, brilliant, and absolutely defiant! In a world where such poets are more rare than people might imagine, John Smelcer is one of the truly great poets I have come across in my life. His poetry is of genius, and in his country of snow, glaciers, and the inevitable loss of languages and traditions, each poem rides, as Robert Frost expressed it, on its own slow melting. In so doing, these poems are honest, exquisite, sad, funny, and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I am thrilled that this collection will bring people into further awareness of such an extraordinary poet and the unworried being of his heart-melting poems.

  —Ruth Stone, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award

  I wrote my original foreword to this book more than a decade ago. But over the years, the manuscript has evolved to the point it deserves a new foreword. In the earlier version I wrote that “while the poet has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the miseries he has inherited, he also is a good man, one who is trying to solve and understand the problems from the past.” In this new Indian Giver, this anger is more focused into an irony that shapes the book, as when Smelcer responds in “Skins” to another Native writer, one who has sold out his integrity of tradition:

  “Bigshot Indian-writer tells me to stop writing about Indian stuff, says none of the true skins will have anything to do with me.”

  Smelcer then contrasts their city-slick lives with his own before he walks home,

  in the dark

  to my little cabin on the bluff above the river,

  shake out my clogged dreamcatcher,

  and sit looking out the window

  wondering what the hell I’m supposed to write about.

  This more muted shaping of the anger and feelings of hopelessness that a well-educated traditionalist feels, turns this book into a dynamic drama. Smelcer’s biography allows the reader to see to what lengths an angry but non-violent man can go to, learning several Native languages, writing dictionaries and books that keep them from going extinct and writing, writing, always telling stories, keeping the fish being smoked by the river alive alongside the ironies of survivors. His opening poem, “The Book of Genesis, Revised for American Indian History” is a gorgeous piece of rhetoric, a great read-aloud poem which begins:

  and then one day God created Indians

  and he saw that they were good

  and he loved them for a really long time,

  but then he got mad at them

  because they didn’t speak English or something. . . .

  Even though Smelcer has a page full of credits and publications, he is not a rarified writer. He is clearly writing in Whitman’s tradition, speaking the language of the common people. He sings to the cosmos, as Whitman might say. And his words are simple, good. They bring light.

  —Diane Wakoski, author of Emerald Ice

  You won’t meet another book like Indian Giver this year, nor in any year. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, who touches this book touches an entire people, not only a man. Starting with its title, it abounds in b
itter humor. Reading it, I often felt torn between an impulse to laugh and a painful sense of compassion—which is how I respond to the greatest literature, from King Lear to War and Peace.

  Among our leading writers, John Smelcer is unique: novelist and poet, scholar and linguist and social commentator. An enrolled member of the Ahtna tribe, he sees the Native American from both outside and inside, giving him the rare insights so forthrightly expressed in these memorable poems. Smelcer beautifully demonstrates the stupidity of hate, and in vivid profiles of individuals shows the rampant injustice that still afflicts them, as in the case of Willie Tensleep, who has half of his lottery winnings seized for taxes and the other half seized for the “Indian Tax,” so that he stays poor. I’m amazed that so angry a book can be so sharp of eye and can bestow such pleasure. It’s probably futile to try to introduce Indian Giver when far and away the most satisfactory introduction is to turn to page one and begin to read.

  —X. J. Kennedy, editor of LITERATURE,

  An Introduction to Poetry, An Introduction to Fiction,

  and The Bedford Reader

  The Book of Genesis, Revised for American Indian History

  In the beginning,

  after forming the earth from the void

  God said, “Let there be light”

  and so there was

  And God saw that this was good

  so he divided light from darkness

  and water from land;

  and then one day God created Indians

  and he saw that they were good