by John Smelcer
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
