That citizens of color must confront racism daily in America's traditionally white power culture is no news: nor is it news that white citizens, for the most part, being able to, are more likely to ignore and to evade both their own racism and that of so-called minorities which is directed towards them. By inclination,…
I didn't intend to walk the old road at midnight but there I was, surprised to see my faint shadow on the dirt. I looked up to that open moon coming down through all the mist. A few more steps and there lay my shadow across a jack rabbit dead on the road. I whispered…
At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's turned farther to the right, and then the flesh turns paler, pink; the gray walls behind the silent faces shimmer, and next the sound's turned up, the lips are moving, the hands, the voices, rising, moving— is this…
The question I am asked, as a teacher and writer, is: Why do you read Native American literature? What is your justification or rationale for studying the thought and cultures of American native peoples? Not merely enjoying or appreciating, but actually studying, immersing yourself in it? Likewise, you might wonder, how much of the Plains…
Barbarians were churning the farms into mud, polluting our wells. I had to escape. This was 1969. I was thirteen years old, hiding in the basement. The frayed plastic webbing of my father's green lounge chair tickled my legs, which were only half-shaped-curved here, blockish there. A photo from Life was taped to the window:…
1. Do you pay any rent? Do you pay any taxes? Is this property yours? —I know where I am Do you own a set of keys? Is the lease in your name? Is the deed in your name? —I know where I am What right have you to remain here? —I know where I…
The day the shortstop died, Katie Mays was in the kitchen, arranging a sprig of baby's breath, fresh from the garden, onto her father's breakfast tray. Merely glancing at the front-page headlines, she opened the Daily Oklahoman to page five-sports scores and standings-and placed it neatly next to the cut-glass pitcher of orange juice. More…
Every day, the man next door locks his wife out in the yard. Under August's tattered cottonwoods she talks back to steel guitar chords that slide out of loudspeakers strapped to the cyclone fence— a slurred contralto, lyric from the Love Generation already twenty revolutions gone under a sun that will never be younger. The…
It is two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in April. The willows along the river north of town are a tender grasshopper-green; patches of henbit and bitter cress sprout like tufts of hair in the winter-weary yards. In the basement of the library on Main Street, Miss Lucy McKewn, age thirty-six, assistant librarian, cleans up…
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