Friday, March 18, 2005

''UNENDING STORY

That BS is still goin on,i had my first taste of it in highschool. Still askin the same dumb questions . But their the grand children of the 1's who asked me back in the sixtys. Now their off spring will carry on the stupitity..and on n on n on..........later............CHI.



http://www.jenniferfoxbennett.com/



Jennifer is an Ojibway and Odawa Band member of the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on the ethereal Manitoulin Island in Ontario, Canada. She has been published in anthologies (RESIST!, AK Press Inc.; Pinpoints), zines (Third Space; They Called Her A Firebrand), and literary mags (Other; Atlantis) in both Canada and the U.S. Her first chapbook, Left to Shatter (Monkey Book Press), is, sad to say, currently out-of-print.

Other than that, you'll have to talk to her personally to find out anything more. Lucky for you, she makes herself easy to find.

She has lived in many places between two oceans: a suburban wasteland in Florida, the menacing halls of Cornell University (where she received her B.S.), and the dirt roads and boréal forests of her Reserve. She now finds herself in the lovely San Francisco Bay Area.

all original work copyright. jennifer fox bennett.


blood



"Are you a full blood?" she asked.



"I have status," I said, "to a country club that enables me to walk invisibly among the streets of Toronto, a skeleton that made its way out of the closet to walk amidst the blank pages in history books."

"I'm part Creek," she said. "My great-grandfather was Creek."

"Oh, really?" I asked.

"He lived on the reservation in Oklahoma," she said.

"Have you ever been there?" I asked.

"No," she said. "But, my great-grandfather lived there."

"Oh," I said. "I used to think that their name came from the creek of tears they carved into the frozen earth to flow all the way back to Alabama, uphill."

"Do you know your language?" she asked.

"I know the language," I said, "of scientific federal government so that I can write a 50-page report that a dozen or more reserves are drinking a glassful of carcinogenic trihalomethanes every month because they have no first-world, Provincial-standardized water treatment system. I got a cousin who speaks intellectual federal government so that she can write the repatriation reports to have ceremonial artifacts, jewelry and the bones of her ancestors returned by museums."

"What do you do to carry on traditions?" she asked. "Do you go to pow-wows or anything like that?"


"I carry on the tradition," I said, "of being a mug shot on a bulletin board because of the coercion of child welfare agents who thought they were doing something good for these poor Native children by sending them as far as humanly possible from their brown earth."



"Do you know how to make beadwork?" she asked.

"I have a beaded bandolier bag," I said, "of chips on my shoulder I swept off with my own hand; a chip for every time someone presumed I wasnπt capable of anything more than the spot they reserved for me in the welfare line."



"Do you follow the traditions, or do you just carry the blood?" she asked.

"I carry many things," I said. "I know a recipe to make our most famous commodity from treaty rations of nothing but a sack of flour, sugar, lard and coffee beans. You see, when closed-door meetings of generals and unrepresentatives of our tribe shrank down our hunting grounds, some of us learned to make a diabetic's worst nightmare to be washed down with a pot of blackened determination. I carry a leave of absence from the agent who allowed my grandfather to pass through the gates to get a timber-cutting job. In my wallet, I carry his brotherπs status card that he traded for a permanent pass from the agent to take a job in Lansing. I carry that with me in case he ever comes back. I carry a recipe for hangover soup made with moose meat that my uncle shot and butchered himself. I carry the hope that someday I will learn the language that is an encyclopedia of the ecology, weather, and geology of the land that I come from. I carry the strength my grandmother has to work 12 hours a day because she has no social insurance from her tax-free status. I carry the same blood as 32 million people erased in one of the largest holocaust campaigns the world has ever seen.



"What do you do, aside from interrogating Indians, to carry your blood?" I asked

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