Apple: List 2

We are
Onondagas who have been with Tuscaroras
since the beginning, a string of memory from one
part of the confederacy to another.

I can see the extravagance,
even now, that such a toy should have been
beyond our means. Everyone said it was proof
I was spoiled, having a Batmobile when we,
as a family, didn’t even possess a car.

My brother continues to spend his Combat Pay,
expanding the map with each roll, a whole stack
of pictures, cousins, friends, kids from across
the Rez, showing off their own wide innocent
grins, these sweaty talismans perched on their
heads, hiding their eyes in the brim shadows.

...we were reduced to covering our high
school books in paper grocery bags, so we didn’t ruin
them in the carelessness our teachers assure us
is our way of life. We have to preserve them, for those
who cover after us, even though they house facts
rapidly becoming lies of omission.

(You can see here that no matter how hard they tried,
I was always going to have a different orientation,
that my antenna was tuned in to a more obscure channel.)

For you, she is absence, personified, an indelible
silhouette of ignorance and lost opportunity,
but you carry her tribal identity, clan, history.

She explains
vaguely our clan belongs to a system
tracking families, and when I probe
further, she says we remember them
so we don’t accidentally fall in love,
marry our relatives, ending by asserting
we have no more affinity with eels
than the rest of the reservation.

He first found work as an extra and a stunt man in Cowboy
Movies, slowly working his way up, being given line
after stilted line. His willingness to massacre the English
language regularly, eventually landed this role where, once
a week on the American Broadcasting Company, he screwed
up, needing to be rescued by his masked vigilante partner.

Every weekday at 5:30, between Batman and the local news
reporting all the crimes and tragedy surrounding us daily,
we tuned in to his exploits.

It’s maybe Columbus Day,
and the world has not yet changed enough for us to imagine
Indigenous Peoples’ Day will ever be a thing people develop.

My sister rests
from pushing her son's stroller and my niece
is restless, hot in the rawhide dress her grandmother
has tanned for her, burnishing it with the deer’s brains,
and smoking it to cure, before adding beads and fringe
for her.

We ride the dark back roads off the Rez to reach the upper escarpment, keeping the trunk tied almost closed with clothesline, so no cops see us riding where we are not supposed to.

It’s tricky since the car itself is already stuffed with adult Indians, which is, by this virtue alone, already begging to be pulled over and given an impromptu investigation, detained as long as the officer feels like asking questions.

Every year, teachers requested volunteer actors
for events parents were invited to attend: Christmas
pageant; Easter program; Halloween parade. And every
year, without fail, I would vie for the lead role, though
I had no talent for memorizing lines or acting them out.

I imagine she accepts the inevitable, that she will lose
track of all these variations, and to her, this year, I am
maybe just one more grandchild she can’t quite place
in the onslaught of young Indians in her family line,
reproducing, delivering new generations of feet to cross
that bridge on treaty day, confirming with the chain of DNA,
however it resequences itself in variation, that we are still
here, still standing, still walking, one resilient step at a time.