Indian Education

Indian Education


Crazy Horse came back to life
in a storage room of the Smithsonian,
his body rising from a wooden crate
mistakenly marked ANONYMOUS HOPI MALE.

Crazy Horse wandered in the halls, found
the surface of the moon, Judy Garland
and her red shoes, a stuffed horse named
Comanche, the only surviving

member of the Seventh Cavalry
at Little Big Horn. Crazy Horse was found
in the morning by a security guard
who took him home and left him alone

in a room with cable television. Crazy Horse
watched a basketball game, every black & white
western, a documentary about a scientist
who travelled the Great Plains in the 1800's

measuring Indians and settlers, discovering
that the Indians were two inches taller
on average, and in some areas, the difference
in height exceeded a foot, which proved nothing

although Crazy Horse measured himself
against the fact of the mirror, traded faces
with a taxi driver and memorized the city,
folding, unfolding, his mapped heart.


Sherman Alexie............from Old Shirts & New Skins