Original dedication in April 2015 at the AWP 2015 Conference: I want to dedicate this to my 1st cousin and dear friend Joycelyn Shade who passed away earlier this week after a battle with breast cancer. We were closing growing up... she was a member of many sacred societies, taught Blackfoot -- and taught me so much about our family history and our Blackfoot nation. May her memory be a blessing.
On the great plains, there’s a feeling of freedom -- stretching out to the vanishing yet quiet horizon which is an edge around the world, along the places where the eye rests and glides, the horizon is close then farther away. On horseback it looms so wide and long and I remember the feeling of easy freedom, gliding along the top of the ground, my horse beneath me -- poised and muscular as she runs.
My mother’s reserve, the Blood or Kainai reserve is in southern Alberta Canada, twelve miles from the border near the Mormon town of Cardston -- which actually sits on Kainai land. We leased part of our land early on to determined Mormon settlers rumored to have been escaping then new anti-bigamy laws in Utah. Cardston, notably is also the hometown of Fay Raye. That supple blonde who languished in the arms of King Kong as he towered over skyscrapers. Faye Raye was one of the original “scream queens”. A memorial fountain featuring an etching of King Kong with Fay Ray screaming in his clutches greets visitors to Cardston right before they journey a few miles more into the Blood Reserve - which is, the largest in Canada.
However, I don’t live on the Blood reserve, or near Cardston or in Alberta -- I don’t even live in Canada. Of course I have visited, many times as a child and teenager -- though not very many times as an adult. Even so, the Blood reserve appears in dreams. Dreams of horses moving over the land, of the moon feral over the prairies and the barn burning as summer raises heat and memories of drums and pick up trucks. Dreams of my relatives... Yet, the reserve is always somehow * my Mother’s reserve * and not my own... my own place is outside. I am on the outside, I have no place -- no one static place of rest, of belonging. As the child of a career US Army father I moved with my family constantly, usually every year and a half. I am always observing from the outside even as I enter into life from various vantage points, from many distinct places -- sometimes wanting to belong and other times refusing that belonging.
My own engagement as a writer and poet with my Native background has been at once tenuous, deep, and unconventional. My own actual ethnic and racial background is also complex and singular. I am an odd mix. My mother is from the Blood or Kainai reserve in Alberta, Canada, our band is a member of the larger Blackfoot Confederacy. My mother was brought up on the reserve, I was not. My father is not Native but Hispano from Taos New Mexico. He was the first of his family line to marry outside the tightly knit group of Hispano families in Northern New Mexico who had been there since 1598 or 1684. The group of families that had intermarried for generations, literally hundreds of years, usually in arranged marriages up to his time. And, usually within the same groups of families... We have found through study that many of these families were crypto-Jews and/or Conversos who voyaged or fled to remote parts of what was then New Spain, seeking some reprieve from the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition. His marriage to my mother, was apparently -- a scandal at the time. My parents met in Provo Utah when my mother was attending Brigham Young University. Her successful and enterprising father Chris Shade was a rancher and farmer and paid her way to this private university, just as he had paid for her and her sister to attend a private high school in Calgary Alberta -- in a time when Indians were not supposed to be educated beyond the 8th grade in Canada. My father was stationed in Germany at the time, they married and I was born in Heidelberg Germany in a US Army hospital. In about two years, we would move to the Presidio Army base at the edge of San Francisco near Baker’s Beach. Then, as military families do -- we would continue traveling in the years to follow.
I don’t really follow any Blackfoot narrative, or Indigenous narrative, no particular idea of what Indians should write about or what that writing should be. Though it is certain that I draw on my American Indian background both intentionally and without intention. Possibly the “without intention” aspect is the most interesting. Again, I am not entirely sure what that is, at least not always -- but I will try and name some aspects of my writing that have at least a trace of that influence. Certainly, some of these could be ascribed to other origins, and I think that what drives me in writing is complicated.... but that said here are my musings...
I have written:
<So, always my poetry attempts to be an artifact and ignition of a creative process where my conventional, known “self” is largely absent, and other selves are revealed in the poetic object...
The poem should be dynamic and the reader submerged in an internal landscape that is not ordinary or expected. The unexpected, subliminal, incomplete, the silenced: these energies emerge, elemental to a landscape that is also a journey –poetry. Words take on textures and supernal light, telegraphing strange, new points of entry -- portals to visions. > “Apocalypse Poetry” - from Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat -2013)
Journeying to a vision: Crying for a vision on vision quests... The Vision Quest of Plains tribes including my own, inspire me with the emphasis on rigor and a solitary, perilous journey to meaning, to a highly individual encounter with natural forces and to the spirit world. There is also, always an encounter with the self. There is an expansion of the senses, of viewing of the world. The point of entrance to that expansion is solitary praying and fasting in a remote area. The vision may come in the form of an animal and impart power in the form of a gift, a way of knowing -- of sensing and seeing. So in going to the work, the poem, the point of entry is a similar going out into an unknown. Stripping down to the essential form in preparation... building a portal of entry with language to visions. The writing can be a stripping down, a purgative release from the torsion of embodied desire - fasting, and a simultaneous building up and out -- a release into an immersion of the poet in language. Language as a a flooding, an overcoming perched on a scaffolding. And, while individual the working is not necessarily always personal.
As a child, my mother and my Blackfoot relatives would often relate their dreams. We would discuss our dreams in the morning, I thought this was just normal and that everyone did that often with their families. Apparently, they don’t. Of course people in Marin County -- or psychoanalysts and other psychologists, and yes -- New Age and other spiritual seekers have studied dreams. However, I think my own comfort with dreaming states goes back at least partly to this easy familiarity with the dreaming world and respect for it that I experienced while still a child.
The poem is an opening dream where a world is revealed and consumed by movement. Dreaming marks the every day world with a light stain that strains to a memory, a shanty song, a subliminal force -- poking up through consciousness to raging daylight.
the beast marking with a vector from my poem “Vector". Summer nights - humid and listeless with a megaphone and a tap dance ... Rectangular surfacing steel. Nocturnal segments of iron. A modular environment - unforgiving and hairless Ice cream eaters in paradise with two pairs of rubber gloves handy from my poem "The Criminal" from The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces <While post-modern, I feel apocalyptic... I privilege the imaginative faculty above the autobiographical. Imagination is foundation. Transformation is annealed to the imaginative skin of a poem, its entrancing poetic eye. > (Max Wolf Valerio from “Apocalypse Poetry” in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat -2013)
Risk taking, heroism, physical courage -- an ongoing respect for integrity and truth seeking... a love of games of chance and gambling... I connect these with my Blackfoot background and they have seeped into my writing, my visions walking along the edges. An ability to engage with vivid strands of life, the darkness and the struggles of claw and fist.
From my piece “Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity”:
< I went back to the reserve after a long absence. The land I watched roll by from the car window was still wild with spirits, old houses leaning up frail and gray. Cars stacked on small hills, coulees softly quiet. The land was vast and at night, in certain places, you might hear those spirits whipping around, or turning a doorknob, or see a trace of Tom Three Persons, the famous Kainai cowboy who was the world Champion Bronc rider from the Blood Reserve way back, in the 1900’s. He was the first Indian to win that Championship at the Calgary Stampede riding the horse Cyclone to a standstill... Or of the man who had snake power, a rare power, from his vision of snakes. You might spy him feeding a huge serpent at its hole close to the cliffs where the buffalo were run to their deaths in the old days.
My first stop was a hand game, small teams gambled with bones and sticks, singing hand game songs, long chants accompanied by small hand drums.>
And, finally again -- freedom, I think of that most when I remember the wild open lights, the moon and stars above the flat plains... and in the dark a sound far off of a drum. Always freedom, a scent in the air, a wild loping entanglement with life. Vital as daylight. Dangerous as an untamed and agile spirit.
Beautiful