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Poet Jake Skeets explores how time and land hold “fields” of memory that open up through language, storytelling, and poetry.

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Shaina A. Nez is a Diné mother, writer, and doctoral student. She is Táchii'nii born for Áshįįhi. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from IAIA in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World from Woodhall Press, Chapter House Magazine, Abalone Mountain Press, and Between Pleasure and Pain: An Authentic Voices Anthology. She is an alum of Tin House and a recipient of the 2021 Open Door Career Advancement Grants for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) women writers. She guest read for events like Montana Book Festival, NOAZBOOKFEST, and Emerging Diné Writers Institute (EDWI). She is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ: Diné Writers' Collective. Shaina is now a second-year doctoral student in Justice Studies for the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her work is in the field of Native American and Indigenous Creative Nonfiction (CNF).

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Issue 14: Shaina A. Nez - Green Linden Press

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Indigenous Ecopoetry, guest edited by Beatrice Szymkowiak

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Honoring the Poetics of Native Music

As Native peoples, music permeates our lives in various and diverse ways. It may manifest in traditional songs, soundtracks to personal histories, memory, acts of love, resistance, poetics. In "BLACKLIST ME" ( Academy of American Poets), which this exhibition draws its title from, poet Kinsale Drake (Diné) writes about destroying and re-centering the canon, penning love poems to Native rock icon Buffy Sainte-Marie, and working against erasure through mechanisms of joy and community.

As Indigenous writers working against and within what constitutes the so-called "American" canon, how can our words lift up, celebrate, re-center, or pay homage to genealogies of Native music, whatever that may mean for us? How can they locate intersecting violence between settler colonialism and acts of erasure within the literary, musical, and broader worlds? Or, how can they exist joyously or tremendously on their own, as part of what has always come before?

BLACKLIST ME

Kinsale Drake(Diné)

none of my ancestors are on the radio
none of my ancestors are

but my sister refurbished

an 8-track and I want buffy in her

purest form: NDNs huddled in a basement

somewhere, listening to bootlegged

tapes, except the basement's

not a basement. it's a truck bed-

(someone's uncle's GMC) wheedling

over a lip of river cuz

the best thing about rock n roll is

you don't have to do anything right

to survive. you don't even have
to make sense to a white english

professor who wants chronology

when I want buffy and a truck careening

into the horizon. I want the explosion

as grand as cicadas amping

out the sound of night as the 8-track

rolls and rolls and buffy

lives forever instead of on

some balding president's blacklist,

and through the smoke I almost want

to mistake a splinter of moonlight

for her yellow dress, all the NDNs

dusting themselves off

and laughing at the smolder,

the little wheel spin and spin

the little wheel spin

Three girls from North Country

Amber McCrary
(Diné)

after Bob Dylan's Girl from North Country

If you're travelin to North Country dread
Where the winds hit heavy on the Red

I wonder if they remember me at all
Many times, I've often thought

In the dawn of my morning
In the sleepy sun of my evening eye

It all becomes clichéd memoir
and scribbled journal entries

A doused liver dances in midnight mixes
Eyes swell
Into a sweaty toe of a hindrance

Glory, guts, and punk
three Diné girls
kissing the anti-american dream

A red dodge neon
cigarette hot box
gallop towards malt drenched alleyways

A CD lasers Nekoromantix's "Subcultural Girl"
I hear a full heart yell WHERE HAVE YOU GOOOOONE?!

into Mother Mountain's lighting ear
she hears our spirits
in this back-country sky

Our torpid spirits teether bottle caps
& laugh into violent liquid

Death is at every corner
but we don't know it
so, we listen to music about it

Punk, psychobilly, rockbilly
One would say it's the
seafood of music
for navajos, yeeyah!

but little did we know
when we weren't taught that way
many would say, so we astray

Silent woes
hide in the sands of internal suffocation
Gives way to choked seeds

How silly to be an age of any kind

Mind mumps
Viral thoughts of the minds past

If you're travelin to North Country dread
Where the winds hit heavy on the Red

If you go when the snowflakes fall
When the sky deepens, and the snow is tall
Please see for me, they are wearing a coat so warm
To keep them from the deathly wind

I wonder if they remember me at all
Many times, I've often thought

Remember me
for they were once true loves of mine

"Kill the Man, Save the Indian"

Merciless Indian Savages
(Diné, Unangax̂, Hopi & Akimel Oʼodham)

T Smiles

Solange Aguilar
(Mescalero Apache & Yo'eme)

For John Trudell

This home is a mouth
that swallows your name

whole
eats the spirit
renames our children

ember

but today, I think about
a gold field

your black hair

the wind running through it
like my hands did

so long ago

Monino

Ariana Vega
(Diné/Mexican)

Monino is a nickname for Ramon
But they didn't care to call him by either
He was the Mexican with a speech impediment / they told him he was dyslexic
But he just didn't speak their language

Are time machines possible? I would take the chance
To go back and ask for three to five minutes
I imagine myself walking into that classroom / the smell of chalk and false history books
This is what I would say to them / In the year of 1967

Your words bounce off a shield of protection built from generations before
He loves his language, his culture / he's Tejano
His brother is in a band / he's their number one fan
Monino is my father, and I am my father's daughter

Monino grew up to be a custodian during the week
And on the weekends, he DJ's
I knew of Little Joe and Cumbia and anything for Selena's before I could read
Because of him, I don't know a life without rhythm

As a child I would beg to go to his gigs
Love songs in Spanish hold the power to heal
Cumbias ignite a proudness to be brown / Xicana / Xingona

If they could see my father today, would there be regret in their hearts?
There is forgiveness in ours but forgiveness is not weakness
If we carry generational trauma / Do they carry generational hatred? A
language forbidden to speak is now blasting through the speakers
And I turn the volume up.

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Honoring the Poetics of Native Music As Native peoples, music permeates our lives in various and diverse ways. It may manifest in traditional songs, soundtracks to personal histories, memory, acts of love, resistance, poetics.