Title to Indian land, part one

Back around the turn of the 20th century the US government divided up Indian lands into individually-owned parcels. Naturally, they didn’t ask the Indians if they liked the idea. But what could be more American than private property? And the US government wanted the Indians to be as American as possible. The policy was called “allotment.” As Peter Nabokov, editor of Native American Testimony, puts it: “[T]he parcels soon became so diced up among descendants that no single heir could possibly sustain a family [on their small piece]. … A non-Indian with enough money and know-how could lease adjoining squares from Indians to create a big, promising cattle operation — a practice on many reservations today.” 

Nabokov then quotes from Indians are People, Too (1944) by Ruth Muskrat Bronson: 

The usual way a white family handles [inheritance] is for the family member who wants to keep the farm to mortgage the land for enough to buy out the other heirs. [Indians] can’t do this for this land cannot be sold because [they are] ward[s]. … In a country ill adapted to agriculture, [even] thirty-five acres are not worth much money, so the land will probably not be partitioned. Instead, the government will go on leasing the land, dividing the lease money among the heirs down through the generations.  

There are pieces of land on the books of the Indian Office so divided among heirs that the annual lease income therefrom to any one heir is less than one cent. Yet the annual cost to the government to administer the estate is estimated at approximately fifty times as much as the annual lease the heir receives.

Indians were considered wards of the state. They did not, in other words, have full US citizenship and the rights that come with it. They lived in a separate nation, sort of, though not a nation allowed to make its own decisions. (The South African government took inspiration from the US system when setting up its own sovereign-in-name-only “homelands” for black South Africans.) 

Growing up I was told I had Indian heritage through my father. Sioux, he said. I didn’t have any more information than that until well into adulthood when I learned that some Ingersoll cousins were registered as heirs to property on the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the border between North & South Dakota. My blood siblings and I registered as heirs, too. I don’t think Dad knew we could do that. Not that registering came with much benefit. I’m not a member of the Sioux Nation, a Lakota, not officially. I did start receiving lease income statements. Which was cool. Except that, as Ruth Bronson says, the money earned was eaten up by administrative costs. Pretty easy, as the amount earned was less than the postage spent on the envelope. Yup, I found myself looking at statements recording income of less than fifty cents.  

This seemed silly. But, like I said, here was evidence to back up the family story. I liked having that evidence. That it meant nothing as far as money was concerned didn’t bother me. If there had been money, I thought, better it go to the people on the reservation than me. Seems to me they ought to have it. 

source: 

Native American Testimony: a chronicle of Indian-White relations from prophecy to the present, 1492 - 2000

by Peter Nabokov

1999. Penguin Books, New York

A dozen Dorothys

It’s 1970. Lesbians are just beginning to distinguish themselves as lesbians within the women’s rights movement. Judy Grahn writes about standing up to authority: 

[A] group of us attended a lecture by a well-known, thoroughly published psychiatrist, an ‘expert’ in female homosexuality. From the audience, we questioned him, what was his authority based in? What real reasons did he have for pathologizing our lives? For emphasis, we stood up, scattered throughout the audience. There were at least a dozen of us, perhaps more. We didn’t yell or threaten, just stood. At our standing up, declaring our sanity to him, he gathered his papers and fled the room. We felt like Dorothy discovering the Wizard as a tiny man behind a curtain of false authority.

The emperor has no curtain. 

source:

A Simple Revolution: the making of an activist poet

by Judy Grahn
2012. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco CA

“a strange sort of sparring”

Ben Fong Torres had a paper route in Oakland in the 60s. His experience and mine were similar. I like his little collecting for the bill scene. 

After school, Barry and I worked together delivering the Oakland Tribune around the neighborhood. …  

[O]nce a month … we had to collect. Most of the subscribers paid promptly, but there were always procrastinators and a few who played hide-and-seek with our $3.50 a month, of which I would get fifty cents.  

With them, it was a strange sort of sparring; a kid, not yet a teenager, trying to get a grownup to pay for a month of papers they’d had delivered to their front steps daily. 

‘I don’t have it.’ 

‘Oh.’ A downward look. ‘Tomorrow?’ 

‘How about Friday?’ 

‘Think you could have it Wednesday? I need to pay up.’ 

‘All right.’ Reluctantly. ‘We’ll see.’ 

That meant they wouldn’t even be home Wednesday. … 

For all the grief, there was nothing like counting up the month’s take — before the Tribune got its majority share.

I don’t remember how much the monthly subscription fee for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat was. But $3.50 doesn’t sound far off the mark. And I was a paper carrier this and that side of 1980. Huh. Was The Press Democrat so much cheaper than the Trib? Or were all newspapers still that low cost? 

I do remember covering the dining table with cash at the end of the month. It sure looked like a lot of money! 

Like Ben, my brother and I shared a paper route. Eventually it was officially divided between us. We didn’t deliver from bikes. We walked our routes after school. I kept working my route after David quit his.

Mostly customers were nice — I got some great tips at Christmas. At least, they seemed huge to me. $2! $3! 

Yes, there were a few who would tell me to come back another time. I’m sure I was making well under minimum wage. I don’t remember what arrangement there was for the deadbeats. I think at first we were on the hook, but maybe our mother protested? 

source: The Rice Room: growing up Chinese in America, from number two son to rock ’n’ roll

by Ben Fong Torres

1994. Hyperion, New York

notes toward an autobiography by others

The streets of Ho Chi Minh City make for rather desperate exercise for even the most enthusiastic of pedestrians. Footpaths can vary wildly, and occasionally disappear into deep drains. When they are not serving as motorcycle parking lots they make excellent extensions of shop display space, and so the Saigon flaneur must spend much time walking in the road itself, right in the midst of the traffic, praying wildly that a bus or truck doesn’t come speeding up behind you.

When one is making plans to visit Saigon what seems like the most daunting part of walking the city is the crossing of streets. Typically one does not wait for a crosswalk signal or a traffic light or STOP sign, or even a break in the traffic flow, one just steels oneself and steps off the sidewalk. The traffic is mostly motorbikes and the drivers take note of you and swirl around you. I watched videos of this before we left for Vietnam and it looked crazy. But once we were doing it it made a kind of sense. This is not to say it’s a stress-free adventure, especially at night when the oncoming traffic consists of glowing cyclopean eyes, but you kind of know what you’re in for.

What stressed me out more than crossing streets was discovering that the distinction between street and footpath is, well, let’s just say it’s contingent. If the street beside which you are walking is one way and a motorbike pulls out of a driveway and the driver wishes to travel against the traffic flow he doesn’t go all the way around the block. He uses the sidewalk. Thus the footpath is an optional bike lane. And parking space. And dining area for sidewalk restaurants. My tummy felt queasy most the time I was in SE Asia and I did not have the resilience necessary to be constantly on the alert. When our itinerary said it was time to leave Saigon — I was ready.

quote source: Destination Saigon: adventures in Vietnam by Walter Mason

Best Poems of 2014

Ingeborg Bachmann ….. Every Day
Ellen Bass ….. Ode to Repetition
Ellen Bass ….. Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One
Ellen Bass ….. Worry
John Elsberg ….. The Stone
John Engels ….. Hummingbird on a Telephone Wire
Kerry Hardie ….. The Avatar
Penny Harter ….. one haiku from Lunar New Year: a Kasen Renku
Jane Hirshfield ….. The Envoy
Jane Hirshfield ….. Evolution & Glass from Seventeen Pebbles
Ted Hughes ….. November
Jusammi Chikako ….. “On this summer night”
Jack Kerouac ….. sixteen haiku
Elizabeth Searle Lamb ….. three haiku
Mirabai ….. The Coffer with the Poisonous Snake
H. D. Moe ….. “Between no dust”
Gregory Orr ….. Domestic Life
Pedro Serrano ….. Inventory
Edward Thomas ….. One Sail at Sea
Manuel Ulacia ….. Arabian Knight

In the new year I like to read aloud all the poems I’ve gathered in the preceding year. Last night I sat on the couch and read to the cats. They showed neither delight nor distress at the words, but I think they liked the company.

I was a little surprised how many times the moon made an appearance. In Ellen Bass’ “Ode to Repetition” the narrator “look[s] out at … the moon rinsing the parked cars.” In the tanka by Jusammi Chikako (tr. E. Cranston), the moon is a visitor who won’t come in: “[I]n the doorway … open after dark, / Stands the moon …” Jack Kerouac sets his evening schedule by the moon (this is the whole poem): “When the moon sinks / down to the power line, / I’ll go in.” Kerouac also spots the “moon in the bird bath.” In Robert Bly’s version of Mirabai’s “The Coffer with the Poisonous Snake” the moon is even more invasive: “[A]round my neck … a string of lovely pearls, each with a moon inside. / My room then was full of moonlight, as if the full moon / Had found its way in through the open window.” H. D. Moe’s moon is more distant: “mirrors become water / swimming as each other until the plow is our lunation.” (A “lunation” is also known as a “lunar month.”) For that matter Penny Harter’s haiku is excerpted from a renku for the “Lunar New Year.” In Edward Thomas’ prose poem night comes in like the tide and “[i]n the moonlight one strange flower glistens, white as a campanula …” (A “campanula” is also known as a “bellflower.”)

It didn’t take long to read what isn’t a large batch of poems. 63 of the titles I read in 2014 contained poetry. Sometimes it happens that way. I read a lot of poetry — and enjoy it — but none of it strikes me in just the right way, that is, in just that way that makes me want to devote my crampy hand to copying it out. Then again when I read the poems in the notebook, the ones I have copied out, I sometimes find myself wondering why that particular poem got in there. I always figure it out somewhere in the reading. Oh yes, that’s why I kept it. Good thing.

This is the second time the Ted Hughes poem (“November”) got marked for possible saving. As I read it over I gradually remembered considering it years back. What stopped me that time? I have to admit it was the gruesome quality of the “keeper’s gibbet,” the bodies of predators (“owls and hawks … weasels … cats, crows”) that the keeper has killed displayed on it. “Some, stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits // In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape, / … hung, chins on chests.” I didn’t like it. Though I fell into the poem’s sensuousness, the rain, the cold, all of it intense and strange, I didn’t want to be confronted by that gibbet and its human vindictiveness. In a later year I copied out a poem in which a human corpse hangs in a gibbet outside the walls of a town. So when I came upon the Hughes poem in 2014 in another book I didn’t feel so skittish about the awful scene. Instead I let Hughes seduce me with the supposed “pride” of the dead, “Patient to outwait these worst days that beat / Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.”

Titles read in 2014

Wolverine & the X-Men: Alpha &Omega Brian Wood
The Scalawagons of Oz John R. Neill
Locke & Key, v.4: Keys to the Kingdom Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
The Word for World is Forest Ursula K. LeGuin
True Rae Armantrout
Locke & Key, v.5: Clockworks Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
Homesick Jason Walz
QU33R: new comics from 33 creators ed. Robert Kirby
Invincible, v.17: What’s Happening Robert Kirkman
Lucky Bucky in Oz John R. Neill
High Risk 2 ed. Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg
The Certificate Isaac Bashevis Singer
Smarter Than You Think Clive Thompson
Big Plans #2 a mini comic by Aron Nels Steinke
Nobody Uses an Umbrella in Portland a mini comic by Shawn Granton
In the Tall Grass #2 a mini comic by Tessa Brunton
The Runaway in Oz John R. Neill
I Cut My Hair #1 & #2 a mini comic by Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg
Across the Windharp Elizabeth Searle Lamb
The Magical Mimics in Oz Jack Snow
The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame ed. Graham Kolbeins
The Human Line Ellen Bass
Death Kick H. D. Moe
The Shaggy Man of Oz Jack Snow
King Cat #72 John Porcellino
Primahood #1 & #2 mini comics by Tyler Cohen
Invincible, v.18: The Death of Everyone Kirkman & Ottley
Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times Kenneth Koch
My Life Is Poetry ed. Steven Reigns
Rob Kirby’s Snack Pack #1 mini comic by Robert Kirby
King for a Day mini comic by Robert Kirby
One Big Happy Family Lisa Rogak
Mules of Love Ellen Bass
The Honduran Coup: a graphic history Dan Archer & Nikil Saval
Alex a graphic novel by Mark Kalesniko
A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind Alfred Starr Hamilton
Pocket Poems 12 mini broadsides from Mrs Dalloway’s
Barack Obama: the story David Maraniss
The Culture of Make Believe Derrick Jensen
Gulp: adventures on the alimentary canal Mary Roach
Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland Harvey Pekar & Joseph Remnant
Thread Winding in the Loom 1987 CPITS anthology
Escape from Special Miss Lasko-Gross
The Hidden Valley of Oz Rachel Cosgrove
Super Trooper #5 Angela K. Roberts
Slant Greg Bear
The Wicked Witch of Oz Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Reversible Monuments: contemporary Mexican poetry ed. Monica de la Torre & Michael Wiegers
Faithiest Chris Stedman
Of Separateness and Merging Ellen Bass
All That: collected chapbooks Jim McCrary
Dorothy, v.1 Greg Mannino & Mark Masterson
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill Mark Bittner
Gulf Coast, v.24, no.1 winter/spring 2012
For Earthly Survival Ellen Bass
Night Julia Vinograd
Bay Area Poets Coalition Anthology 17 ed. Dale Hermann
Arts and Letters Edmund White
Merry-go-round in Oz Eloise Jarvis McGraw & Lauren Lynn McGraw Wagner
The Bonobo and the Atheist Frans de Waal
The Incredible Double Owen Hill
The Voyeurs Gabrielle Bell
Bug Music: how insects gave us rhythm & noise David Rothenberg
Our Stunning Harvest Ellen Bass
David Chelsea in Love David Chelsea
RASL Jeff Smith
A Simple Revolution: the making of an activist poet Judy Grahn
American Savage Dan Savage
What the Body Told Rafael Campos
Tesserae & other poems John Hollander
The Forbidden Fountain of Oz Eloise & Lauren McGraw
Spinadoodles: the third year Sam Spina
Fourteen Stephen Zanichkowsky
The Rice Room Ben Fong-Torres
The Rundelstone of Oz Eloise McGraw
What If the Moon Didn’t Exist Neil F. Comins
Sky Ward Kazim Ali
Mexican Poetry 20/20 Voices ed. Brandel France de Bravo
Native American Testimony 1999 revision, ed. Peter Nabokov
Asimov’s Science Fiction #457 Feb 2014
Forcing the Spring: inside the fight for marriage equality Jo Becker
Octopus! Katherine Harmon Courage
Of Gravity and Angels Jane Hirshfield
Our Deep Gossip: conversations with gay writers on poetry and desire Christopher Hennessy
Book of Haikus Jack Kerouac
The X-Men, v.5 Arnold Drake & Werner Roth, et al
Neanderthals Rediscovered Dimitra Papagianni & Michael Morse
The Floating Brothel Sian Rees
New Poetry of Mexico ed. Octavio Paz & Mark Strand
Couch Tag Jesse Reklaw
The October Palace Jane Hirshfield
The X-Men, v.6 Roy Thomas & Neal Adams
Saga / Circus Lyn Hejinian
Invincible, v. 19: The War at Home Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley
More Than Peace and Cypresses Cyrus Cassells
Journey into Mystery: Fear Itself Kieron Gillen & Doug Braithwaite
The Oath: the Obama White House and the Supreme Court Jeffrey Toobin
Young Avengers, v.2: Alternative Culture Gillen & McKelvie
Young Avengers, v.3: Mic-Drop Gillen & McKelvie
We Are Here: stories from the BPL Memoir-Writing Workshop ed. Frances Lefkowitz
Journey of the Jihadist Fawaz A. Gerges
Radical Relations Daniel Winunwe Rivers
The Lives of the Heart Jane Hirshfield
Siege: Battlefield Gillen, Reed, Gage, et al
Like a Beggar Ellen Bass
Making Love to Roget’s Wife Ronald Koertge
Avengers: the Children’s Crusade Heinberg & Cheung
The Ozmapolitan of Oz Dick Martin
Locke & Key, v. 6: Alpha & Omega Hill & Rodriguez
The Quiet American Graham Greene
Six Amendments John Paul Stephens
The Giant Garden of Oz Eric Shanower
The Ogre’s Wife Ron Koertge
Blue is the Warmest Color Julie Maroh
Moominpappa’s Memoirs Tove Jansson
Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: selected haiku of Basho tr. David Young
Given Sugar, Given Salt Jane Hirshfield
Pierced by a Ray of Sun ed. Ruth Gordon
Carsick John Waters
Partings at Dawn: an anthology of Japanese gay literature ed. Stephen D. Miller
After Jane Hirshfield
A White Tea Bowl: 100 haiku Mitsu Suzuki
Carnac Guillevic
Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings, Jane on Her Own Ursula K. LeGuin
Paris Is Burning: a queer film classic Lucas Hilderbrand
Come, Thief Jane Hirshfield
Gathering the Bones Together Gregory Orr
Mr. Bluebird Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
My 1980s and other essays Wayne Koestenbaum
fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world Anne Jamison
The Salt Sorcerer of Oz Eric Shanower
Hallucinations Oliver Sacks
Mirabai: ecstatic poems versions by Jane Hirshfield & Robert Bly
Crow Milk Rick Agran
A Book of Women Poets: from antiquity to now ed. Aliki & Willis Barnstone
Gay Soul interviews by Mark Thompson
The Thrill of Living in a Dying Empire #2, Quincy’s Terrible … Blind Date, When Naked Hallway Dudes Attack, Do You Suffer for Your Art? 4 mini comics from Mission Mini Comix
The List mini comic by Maia Kobabe
Childhood mini comic anthology edited by Justin Hall
Tortilla #2 and #3 mini comic by Jaime Crespo
paperdummy #5, 6, 7, and 8 mini comics by Peter S. Conrad
Police Log Comics #2 Owen Cook
Jin & Jam #1 Hellen Jo
Tyranny of the Muse #1 Eddie Wright & Jesse Balmer
The Rabbi’s Cat Joann Sfar
Bonobo Handshake Vanessa Woods
Adam’s Navel Michael Sims
Sinking Creek John Engels
Fourteen Hills 20.1 2014
Two Lines #17: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal 2010
Nine Gates: entering the mind of poetry Jane Hirshfield
Women in Praise of the Sacred ed. Jane Hirshfield
Good Sense & the Faithless Michelle T. Clinton
Walking Across the Pacific Judy Bebelaar
Sudden Dreams George Evans
Oz Before the Rainbow Mark Evan Swartz
Narwhals: arctic whales in a melting world Todd McLeish
Far from the Tree Andrew Solomon
At the Back of the North Wind George MacDonald
Short: an international anthology ed. Alan Ziegler
Revenge: a story of hope Laura Blumenfeld
Barrow Street, v.1, no.2 Sp 1999
The Rabbi’s Cat 2 Joann Sfar
Over the Transom #22 2012
Poetry, v.190, no.3; Poetry, v.197, no.1
Clerks Kevin Smith & Jim Mahfood
Snapshots: 20th century mother-daughter fiction ed. Joyce Carol Oates & Janet Berliner
Poets of Our Time ed. F E S Finn
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls David Sedaris
Treasury of Mini Comics, v.1 ed. Michael Dowers
Poetry, v.197, no.2 Nov 2010
Prime Green: remembering the sixties Robert Stone
In Pharaoh’s Army Tobias Wolff
Horse Ballast Patrick Culliton
Words for Empty and Words for Full Bob Hicok
Holy Terror Terry Eagleton
A Short History of Cambodia John Tully
Bed-Knob and Broomstick Mary Norton
The Cruising Diaries Brontez Purnell
Poetry, v.197, no.3 Dec 2010
Juice Renee Gladman
This in Which George Oppen
Poetry, v.197, no.4 Jan 2011
Angkor & the Khmer Civilization Michael D. Coe
Blobography Brendan Monroe
A Simple Life, A Good Life? Katie Haberman
When We Were Kids mini comic by Andy Warner
Self-Destruction & Self-Growth: a zine Kristen Leckie
The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip Amy Wright
Adult Contemporary mini comic by Leo Puppytime

Titles in bold I loved.