I’m a former Kansas poet laureate. Comancheria is home to many Plains Indian groups. My grandfather of Delaware Indian heritage was among the dislocated Eastern Natives who settled on the Kansas Plains of the 19th century.
History is alive in the works of Native poets. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, gained national recognition in 1969 as a Pulitzer Prize winning author. His works present the Native oral tradition as a sophisticated way to preserve culture. He influences many contemporary Native poets.
One is Sy Hoahwah, a Comanche and Southern Arapaho poet, who uses rich sensory impressions of the grasslands in his poem called “Comancheria”:
Good-bye God, I am leaving for the Staked Plains.
It is truly a wolf’s road
spreading the sky open with red-stone rockets and powwows.
Bitterroot taste to the air oozing
through swirling locust.
Double-barreled sunset
the ashen face
the snake emblem.
There is no allegiance
even though part of my body belongs to the Comanche
and part to the Arkansas river.
The rest, Coyote holds close to his heart,
a handful of dirty pennies and blood pressure pills.
Night is being hauled in, piece by piece, on 18-wheelers.
Owls are hooting now and the prairie is dreaming.
Dreams carve into the treetops
and the black caped numupe throws pine cones at the moon.
To sleep like this
I don’t consider myself a wolf.
An Acoma Pueblo poet is Simon Ortiz. He wrote From Sand Creek, a collection of verse that commemorates the losses of Cheyenne people in 1864. This is his poem “Grief”:
memorizes this grass.
Raw courage,
believe it,
red-eyed and urgent,
stalking Denver.
Like stone,
like steel,
the hone and sheer gone,
just the brute
and perceptive angle left.
Like courage,
believe it,
left still;
the words from then
talk like that.
Believe it.
This poem is mine, about Custer’s Cheyenne descendants—I’ve heard the stories—and it is based on an actual incident when I met a very old man on the plains--who was Custer’s great-nephew. This is called, “Another Custer Story: Cemetery”:
Past the pronged iron gate
a dark figure lifts his hat
flicks ashes on gravestones
inhales says
I am Etienne call me Stevens
Nevin Custer’s grandson
I am a hundred years old
I remember everything
We come from Ohio like you
Grandmother was Shawnee
Custer himself was Indian
Boston and Tom died that day
and Bloody Knife the Arikara
Their spirits live here
Never am I alone
Cheyenne cousins visit
In dreams they are brave
they are restless
Your family plots are next to mine
Blood remembers everything
You will forget nothing
He crushes his cigarette underfoot
unlatches the gate walks North
Where he steps red cedars
spring back into place
These examples by Sy Hoawah, Simon Ortiz and myself, Denise Low, show how Native people continue to follow many roads to the present day.
