Honoring the Poetics of Native Music
As Native peoples, music permeates our lives in various and diverse ways. It may manifest in traditional songs, soundtracks to personal histories, memory, acts of love, resistance, poetics. In “BLACKLIST ME” (Academy of American Poets), which this exhibition draws its title from, poet Kinsale Drake (Diné) writes about destroying and re-centering the canon, penning love poems to Native rock icon Buffy Sainte-Marie, and working against erasure through mechanisms of joy and community.
As Indigenous writers working against and within what constitutes the so-called “American” canon, how can our words lift up, celebrate, re-center, or pay homage to genealogies of Native music, whatever that may mean for us? How can they locate intersecting violence between settler colonialism and acts of erasure within the literary, musical, and broader worlds? Or, how can they exist joyously or tremendously on their own, as part of what has always come before?
none of my ancestors are
but my sister refurbished
an 8-track and I want buffy in her
purest form: NDNs huddled in a basement
somewhere, listening to bootlegged
tapes, except the basement’s
not a basement. it’s a truck bed—
(someone’s uncle’s GMC) wheedling
over a lip of river cuz
the best thing about rock n roll is
you don’t have to do anything right
to make sense to a white english
professor who wants chronology
when I want buffy and a truck careening
into the horizon. I want the explosion
as grand as cicadas amping
out the sound of night as the 8-track
rolls and rolls and buffy
lives forever instead of on
some balding president’s blacklist,
and through the smoke I almost want
to mistake a splinter of moonlight
for her yellow dress, all the NDNs
dusting themselves off
and laughing at the smolder,
the little wheel spin and spin
the little wheel spin
(Santa Clara Pueblo, NM / Diné (Navajo Nation))
(White Mountain Apache)
fruit at my feet
sitting in an abalone shell waiting
bluebird brought our teachings
bluebird brought our songs
bluebird performed my ceremony
bluebird brought the rain
when you passed things were hard
i couldn’t remember my introduction
my throat was full of tádídíín
my hands were cut open
i asked my creator what do we do
tádídíín muffling my voice
i asked them for a sign
bluebird brought our teachings
bluebird brought our songs
bluebird performed my ceremony
bluebird brought the rain
the cottonwood sees me waiting for you and he uses his branches to braid my hair
placing small cotton buds into my hair
knotting the end with a small leaf
dló’ dotł’izh come tell me a teaching
dló’ dotł’izh come sing me a song
dló’ dotł’izh come help me with ceremony
dló’ dotł’izh dló’ dotł’izh dló’ dotł’izh dló’ dotł’izh
After War
Meek Watchman
(Diné)
(Diné)
If you're travelin to North Country dread
Where the winds hit heavy on the Red
I wonder if they remember me at all
Many times, I've often thought
In the dawn of my morning
In the sleepy sun of my evening eye
It all becomes clichéd memoir
and scribbled journal entries
A doused liver dances in midnight mixes
Eyes swell
Into a sweaty toe of a hindrance
Glory, guts, and punk
three Diné girls
kissing the anti-american dream
A red dodge neon
cigarette hot box
gallop towards malt drenched alleyways
A CD lasers Nekoromantix’s “Subcultural Girl”
I hear a full heart yell WHERE HAVE YOU GOOOOONE?!
into Mother Mountain’s lighting ear
she hears our spirits
in this back-country sky
Our torpid spirits teether bottle caps
& laugh into violent liquid
Death is at every corner
but we don't know it
so, we listen to music about it
Punk, psychobilly, rockbilly
One would say it's the
seafood of music
for navajos, yeeyah!
but little did we know
when we weren't taught that way
many would say, so we astray
Silent woes
hide in the sands of internal suffocation
Gives way to choked seeds
How silly to be an age of any kind
Mind mumps
Viral thoughts of the minds past
If you're travelin to North Country dread
Where the winds hit heavy on the Red
If you go when the snowflakes fall
When the sky deepens, and the snow is tall
Please see for me, they are wearing a coat so warm
To keep them from the deathly wind
I wonder if they remember me at all
Many times, I've often thought
Remember me
for they were once true loves of mine
(Cherokee Nation)
(Kiowa/Winnebago)
She could sing,
ancestral to my ears or maybe
it hurts all the same
pictograph on stone,
jagged flames,
warm wind on my face
Oh, oh, oh.
from sky to earth,
it might have been soft rain—
pendleton blanket hanging over the window
blowing, flowing, like long hanging locks
down her back.
Wa-Ho, Wa-Ho
The soft rhythm of her breathing.
Chest rising and falling like small waves over redstone shores, thump of a thunderheart,
worker bees in cottonwood or birchbark or neither
Oh oh oh.
baby eyes flutter, long lashes the color of the rock beneath the world Are you safe in my arms?
Ah khaw-khaw gyah bone daw
It is all you need, the smell of a season’s first storm. The First song.
Ahle ah thaw mah.
Sing it one more time.
Wa-Ho Oh Oh Oh.
Untitled
2022
Jessica Begay
(Diné)
(Disenrolled Pechanga)
Though we never knew how to play a single instrument,
Somehow convinced that there was music in us.
So, we sang.
We orchestrated revolutionary sound, with loose string guitars and spontaneous drum-sets. We laughed till we cried- thinking about how we would be heard.
Mostly we sounded like shit.
But, the mind lets go of terrible tunes, for the infinite loop of bliss.
Our rez band didn’t survive the heat of that summer.
Band practice turned into cuzzinz sleepovers,
And we never forgot the rhythm of a good story.
Damn, She the One
Kimberly Robertson
(Mvskoke)
(Diné, Unangax̂, Hopi & Akimel Oʼodham)
Boy
Charitie Ropati
(Yup’ik & Samoan)
(Yurok/Karuk)
A cave remembers the echo of voice speaking
meykwele’we’y (i cry, i weep)
Like the water dripping
Slowly down
Its body
A cave wants to remember holding you as you cry
Where your tears, can follow its hum on cold rocks
The ashy rocks, as grey as hair before its fall
Carry the tears
It turns to synth
Falls down the metallic edge
Of a dancehall
Your ribs vibrating against mine,
hand behind back
We move like our bones never forgot language
Like our bones never forgot the beat
Of a mouth
Moving in a motion
That it no longer moves
But still moves
In the pressure between our heels, palms of feet,
And concrete
A cove remembers the tremble of a mouth sounding
Soo’oo
It remembers spirit on the abalone shell
The abalone shell itself holds god
The shell hollow, repeats “soo’oo”
like a duet between the skies and the sands
Pebbles for shore, upriver to river mouth
This beach takes a form of a room we once met
Low bass, eardrums full
Spine as chord, as cable, as
Teme’m (buzz)
Tememehlek’ (rattle)
Mouths moving with no words coming out
A kiss on the dancefloor could bring me back to the first
Sound spoken between the cave and the cove
And it moves me the same
(ᏣᎳᎩ/ Purépecha/ Chinese)
Jesse Ed Davis
Solange Aguilar
(Mescalero Apache & Yo’eme)
(Mescalero Apache & Yo’eme)
For John Trudell
This home is a mouth
that swallows your name
whole
eats the spirit
renames our children
ember
but today, I think about
a gold field
your black hair
the wind running through it
like my hands did
so long ago
(Ihaŋktoŋwaŋ [Yankton Sioux])
Elizabeth Skye
(Oglala/Standing Rock)
Pale faces can’t save us from angel dust
God's faith replaced peace with hate and lust
Now somehow our visions been escaping us
But don’t let them tell you nothin’
Don’t let them til you sh*t
Don’t let them sell you somethin’
That’ll make you wanna quit
Set fire to the bootstraps
Set fire to the feet
Put your bellies to the dirt and
Always listen to your dreams
They fired on us first
They cut down all the trees
They sabotaged our births and
Sabotaged our seas
How do we return
If we’re traumatized by greed
Let me put it in a verse
For those with ears and eyes to see
I found out all I’m worth is
F*cking everything
So I gotta get the word out
You can hear it when I sing
Letting all the birds out
Release my fears up to the breeze
Cause no matter how much it hurts
It’s so seven generations ahead,
Don’t feel a thing.
(Indigenous/Chicana)
de los laureles
parecían algodones
como los que
mi mama
remojaba
en aceite de olivo
y enrollaba con ruda
para mis dolores
de oídos
se escuchaban tantos
cantos distintos
desde la huerta
¡RADIO PARAISO!
un paraíso en el desierto
algunas canciones
salvajes y urgentes
¡DISFRUTALO MIENTRAS PUEDES!
otras
tiernas y brumosas–
un latido de corazón
¡ESTO SI ES VIDA!
los limones
y las naranjas
brillaban como estrellas
en los árboles–
las estrellas de antes
cuando apenas extendía
mis raíces hacia lo más profundo
de La Tierra
del Desierto
que me robo el corazon
cuando apenas era niña
incesante las canciones
a todas horas del dia
¡RADIO PARAISO!
¡CONCURSE Y GANE SU DISCO DE SONRISAS!
y de repente–
estática
y
silencio
ningún movimiento frantico
de antena
de gancho de fierro
regresaba la estación
paraíso perdido
señal perdida
si pudiera perderme
también para siempre
en un sueño
lo haría
(Diné/Mexican)
But they didn’t care to call him by either
He was the Mexican with a speech impediment / they told him he was dyslexic
But he just didn’t speak their language
Are time machines possible? I would take the chance
To go back and ask for three to five minutes
I imagine myself walking into that classroom / the smell of chalk and false history books
This is what I would say to them / In the year of 1967
Your words bounce off a shield of protection built from generations before
He loves his language, his culture / he’s Tejano
His brother is in a band / he’s their number one fan
Monino is my father, and I am my father’s daughter
Monino grew up to be a custodian during the week
And on the weekends, he DJ’s
I knew of Little Joe and Cumbia and anything for Selena’s before I could read
Because of him, I don’t know a life without rhythm
As a child I would beg to go to his gigs
Love songs in Spanish hold the power to heal
Cumbias ignite a proudness to be brown / Xicana / Xingona
If they could see my father today, would there be regret in their hearts?
There is forgiveness in ours but forgiveness is not weakness
If we carry generational trauma / Do they carry generational hatred? A
language forbidden to speak is now blasting through the speakers
And I turn the volume up.
(Diné)
hymns tattooing harmonies on brown skin
of drum
of drummer
a Diné country song
swinging in flea market smoke passing
from lip
to salted lip
undulating to tempos of
oh shí heart
oh ni heart
a mosaic of tongues conducting I will be
there
here
everywhere
unexpectedly & entire—dancing
toward home
toward the sun
language made lyrical made jingling
ululating humming sprouting
with the petaled remembrance of
nálí
kookum
toska
ninzigos
pokni
kisîmis
anaana
remember me
as we sing the silver into our hair
& the craters on my face meet
the constellations on yours
(Quechua-Kichwa)
Big Wheel/Little Wheel; Portrait of Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Rya Drake-Hueston
(Diné descended from Paiute and Hopi)
Antique and Vintage Fabric Tapestry, 1800's era mother-of-pearl buttons, graphite on canvas. 2022.
8 ft. x 6.5 ft.
(Aruaco/Kogi [Native Colombian])
My ancestors said once.
And that girl I’d been, I’m slowly understanding where she belongs.
“I cannot tell you who you are.” Yet often I try to make mountains out of bones.
Warriors from the pathetic faces of humanity. My ancestors,
Are dead. I do not believe the dead watch over me. But they left me words, stories and songs. Touch points.
I Know who I am, there has never been a day no matter how dark, that I have not known this fact.
Everyday I’m learning that my anchors and touch points cannot be
Other people.
That God and this beautiful earth He manifested are tools.
Through all of my phases broken, bloody and bruised
This is the one where I feel most, whole.
Learning that people can’t keep me here, it’s the ghosts that keep me
Moving. From every corpse I’ve shed I kept a ghost
Because spirits don’t rot. That girl I’d been, is buried somewhere long forgotten,
But her spirit lives inside me everyday. I’m learning to love her like a sister,
To heal her without giving into fear.
I can set sail chase the sun across the sea, and
The sun will say let the moon guide the way.
“Ahora tu cargas el amor el dolor, esperanza y sangre de tus ancestros...
no te pierdas en este mundo a menos que estás en la selva.”
I know we’re at war, but warriors need sleep too, try to see beyond that.
Me Caigo del cielo con la luna, my diaspora stretches farther than the constellations.
Ojos claros, y no reso con ningún santo, solo dios del mundos y ceilos.
Confident not a God-complex.
And I feel every breath like it’s lasted a lifetime.
“I cannot tell you who you are.” But I no longer need them to,
When I see the sky, stars and put mis Manos en la terria, I know who I am.
When I see my reflection en la agua pura I see my ghosts, touch point.
The water speaks secrets of places iv’e never been, places I’ve only been through my ancestors eyes. These
touch points keeping me grounded, remind me of the love
And war thats worth fighting for.
“Abre los ojos, what do you see?”
I see me,
all of me,
heart, mind, body and soul.
(P’urépecha, Tepehuan, Coca)
(Chumash/Tataviam)
My heart began to pace
I felt my own love and embrace
Love for myself in this case
The singing birds began to race
No other thing can replace
This feeling inside
As I close my eyes
I find my peace of mind
And although I still cry
Till my tears become dry
I inhale and exhale and sigh
Because I know this brings healing inside
I knew right than and there
That love was in the air
Love for myself
because no one else can compare
I gave myself a truth or dare
Truth , are you scared you’re wasting your youth?
Yes I answered
Dare , I dare you to recognize that you’re rare
I began to discover more about me and not care
Not care for judgement or validation
Because there is not other relation
That matters more than me...myself ...and I
Untitled
Chantal Jung
(Nunatsiavut/Labrador Inuk)
(Anishinaabe)
i.
what we learn about slaughter
is top 40 sappy & netflix hypothetical—
until you raise bad dog noise
against flags r, w, & blues
ii.
a mixedblood skin playing funk—
jazz blues rock ‘n tribal drums
[A.K.A. Graffiti Man]
bandanas & croon over indian america
rez made, we live his dance-back songs
[Myth slayers undermine their own realities.]
iv.
he stood for you blue Indians
AIMed activism & drew fire
America’s oldest—scorched earth
stories of torched crops, bodies, lives
v.
they murdered Geronimo’s family
turned him into a resistance fighter
[Colonel José María Carrasco attacked Geronimo's camp while the men were in town trading. . . . killed in Carrasco's attack were Geronimo's wife, children and mother.]
they burned Trudell’s family
turned him into a song poet of resistance
[a fire “of suspicious origin” burned down Trudell’s home on the Shoshone Palute reservation in Nevada, killing Trudell’s wife, Tina, their three children and Tina’s mother]
vi.
this American dream is a tale of vengeance
don’t they love a neverending gun story
[That’s the way this fire burns. . . Protect your spirit because you are in the place were spirits get eaten.]
vi.
Dear Casey Casum, does the FBI list count?
(17,000 pages & ominous background music)
[John Frances Trudell has been. . . actively involved in militant activities. . . He has good rhetorical delivery and is considered to be an agitator.]
Dear Netfix, when they burn all our heroes,
who will see in the celluloid mirror?
vii.
Blue Indians being pulled into melting pots.
(Mexican, Navajo)
(Aniyunwiya/Citizen of the Cherokee Nation)
Every time she passed that photo booth after work,
one picture for a dime and then the prices kept rising.
She’d close the curtain and the bulbs would pop.
(Diné)
Are two people, very brown,
The only Natives, for miles around,
There to play some twinkly sounds.
Yet hands that were meant to play the Raindrops,
Are hands in a kitchen now going flip-flop.
Soft pearls of dough into oil drop,
Some are circular, some are blobs.
Minutes prior we are standing in,
A Rewe grocery story, where, to our chagrin,
We realized that Blue Bird flour, there is nothing akin.
We ask for lard, and once again.
All they have is coconut oil.
We make it work.
It’s fry bread with a little quirk.
Maybe call it a piece of vegan artwork?
I guess that’s the perk.
Of growing up learning how to make do.
It is summer again; I’m in a cafe.
A new song begins, so I look at the display.
“I think you should have your tribal ID revoked”
A rush of emotions, the nostalgia evoked.
“No seriously,” he says, as I look on skeptically,
The yeast packets, are actually baking powder, that he gives me.
“Who. is gonna eat. vegan. fry bread.?”
The Germans, with their barbecue spread.
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