by John Smelcer
to hunt caribou. Must have been minus sixty
with the wind chill.
Frostbit a spot above one eye. Damn thing took years
to heal. But my frozen heart never did thaw.
I’ve tried the usual remedies:
soak in a hot tub
sit in a sauna.
Sometimes I feel it in my chest, my frozen heart,
fragile as a snowflake, fracture lines radiating out—
ready to shatter at any minute like thin ice on a pond.
Autobiography
I try to write
the story of my life
but the words swim
backwards on the page.
So, I tear it up
toss it into the river
where the pieces turn
into a school of salmon—
the first ever
to return to the sea.
Skins
Bigshot Indianwriter tells me to stop writing about Indian stuff;
says none of the true skins will have anything to do with me.
Afterwards, Bigshot goes shopping for designer jeans
at Abercrombie & Fitch, buys polo shirts at The Gap
and a double-shot macchiato at Starbucks on his way home
to his penthouse in a Seattle skyscraper where he checks
his portfolio balance and orders Chinese take-out
while I go home to my village,
take salmon and moose meat to elders,
haul water and firewood for them,
teach Indian children how to speak Indian,
listen to Grandmother tell stories about Raven,
then help her hand out blankets at a potlatch
for a cousin who killed himself,
before I walk 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.
The Author
John Smelcer is a tribally and federally enrolled member of Ahtna, one of the thirteen Alaska Native Corporations established by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. He is a member of the Traditional Native Village of Tazlina. For three years, he was the tribally appointed executive director of the Ahtna Heritage Foundation, charged with preserving Ahtna culture, oral history, and language, and administering the annual tribal scholarship program. Taught by every living elder in his tribe, John is one of the last speakers of his severely endangered language and the only tribal member able to read and write fluently in it. In 1998, he published The Ahtna Noun Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide (forewords by Noam Chomsky, Ken Hale, and Steven Pinker, revised 2011). He is also one of the last speakers of Alutiiq, a neighboring, yet unrelated language, and in 2010 he edited and published a noun dictionary of that language (foreword by H. H. The Dalai Lama). In 1998, John was nominated for the Alaska Governor’s Award for his contributions to the preservation of Alaska Native languages and cultures. In 2004, the Elihu Foundation of Chicago recognized John for his contributions to Native Peoples. In 2013, he was recommended to receive the Presidential Citizen’s Medal for his enduring efforts to preserve America’s Native heritage. John Smelcer is the author of fifty books, including his international gold medal winning short story collection Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land, and Beautiful Words: The Complete Ahtna Poems, the only existing literature published in Ahtna. John’s numerous books of poetry include Songs from an Outcast (UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, 2000), Riversongs, The Indian Prophet, and Without Reservation. His award-winning novels include The Great Death, Edge of Nowhere, Lone Wolves, Savage Mountain, and The Trap, which is listed among the 101 greatest novels to teach the English language. His poems appear in over 450 journals worldwide. His autobiography appears in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Random House, 2000). In 1994, John co-edited Durable Breath: Contemporary Native American Poetry. With Joseph Bruchac, he co-edited Native American Classics (2013), a graphic novel of 19th and early 20th century American Indian literature. John’s books of Alaska Native mythology include The Raven and the Totem (foreword by Joseph Campbell), A Cycle of Myths, and Trickster. For a quarter century, John has served as poetry editor at Rosebud, making him one of the longest serving editors at a major magazine in American history. Aside from a Ph.D. in English and creative writing, John’s education includes studies in poetry at Northwest Indian College and postdoctoral studies at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard.
Learn more at www.johnsmelcer.com
