Tuxedo With Eagle Feathers

Tuxedo With Eagle Feathers


Six years ago, or maybe it was eight or ten,
I went to a powwow at Riverfront Park
in Spokane, Washington. I ate fry bread,
watched the dancers--especially the
beautiful young women shaking their jingles--
and listened to my mother and aunts tell
dozens of highly sacred dirty jokes.
Later that night, after the dance,
as I walked back to my car,

The man who, as a boy, had bullied me--
who screamed, "You ain't no fucking better
than the rest of us Skins!" --drunkenly
approached me with an eagle feather

Hand fan and said, "Hey, cousin, can I pawn
this to you?" If I had wanted revenge
then, I could have bent him like a damn hinge
and left his body to be found at dawn

By some early rising powwow dancer.
But violence is never the answer
(Until it is), so I thought,
"What the fuck?" and gave my enemy
ten bucks.

Don't sing honor songs for my mercy.
I bought those feathers because of pity,

because I realized I had defeated my
childhood bully. I was the rich and famous
writer and he was a drunk.
No, I need to qualify that. There have
been plenty fo rich and famous drunk writers;
it's my sobreity that separates me from my
drunken childhood and my drunken profession.
Of course, being sober doesn't prevent me
from being a raging, incoherent, vindictive,
self-loathing, and needy asshole. But
my sobreity does give me sovereignty.
Most Indians use "sovereignty" to refer to
the collective and tribal desire for
political, cultural, and economic independence.
But I am using it here to mean, "The Individual
Indian artist's basic right to be an eccentric
bastard." I am using it here to attach
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the Sioux Indian writer
and scholar, who

Has written, with venomous wit,
that Skins shouldn't write autobiography.
She believes that "tribal sovereignty"
should be our ethos. But I call bullshit!

My tribe tried to murder me--and I don't
mean that metaphorically. I have been
to dozens of funerals and wakes;
I've poured dirt into one hundred graves;

And if you study what separates me,
the survivor, from the dead and car-wrecked,
then you'll learn that my literacy
saved my ass. It was all those goddamned texts

by those damn dead white male and female
writers that first taught me how to be
a fighter,

So let me slap Cook-Lynn upside her head
with the right hand of John Kennedy
and the left hand of Emily Dickinson.
Let me kick her in the shins with the
left toe of Marianne Moore, and the right toe
of John Donne. I wasn't saved by the
separation of cultures; I was "reborn"
inside the collision of cultures. So
fuck Cook-Lynn and her swarm of professional
locusts. But wait, literary pretensions
aside, here I am dry-drunking my way down
the page. Instead of insulting Cook-Lynn's
ugly fundamentalism, why don't I celebrate
beauty? Why don't I celebrate Dorothy Grant,
the Haida fashion designer and artist?
O, Dorothy Grant, who blends traditional
Haida symbol and imagery with twenty-
first century fashion. O, Dorothy Grant,
who makes tuxedos with gorgeous eagle ravens
flying up on the lapels. O, let me tell you
about

A June day in a Target parking lot
where I waited to meet Ms. Dorothy Grant.
On the phone, we'd agreed it was an odd
place to try on a formal coat and pants,

But I needed a tux within a week,
and she happened to have a 44
regular that she thought might fit me.
I had never met Dorothy Grant before

But I recognized her when she drove up
in her hybrid car. She pulled the black
tux out of her trunk and handed it to me.
Unafraid of some partial nudity,

I pulled on the pants and coat. But, shit, shit,
Dorothy Grant's gorgeous clothes did not fit,

and I howled with pain and shame.
"Looks like you've had a little too much
commodity cheese," Dorothy said and laughed.
I laughed too. I am a big-shouldered man
with a belly and thin legs.
"I'm just like every other Indian guy,"
I said to Dorothy. "I'm built like a chicken.
Do you have a tuxedo sized for a giant human
chicken?" "All my tuxedos are made for Indian
guys," she said, "So they're all sized for giant
human chickens." We laughed. "Well," I said,
"I can't buy this one but maybe you can make
me a custom one in the future?" "Anytime
you want," she said. I was happy to meet her and,
as I stood there in the Target parking lot in
Albuquerque, I studied the careful stitching in
Dorothy's garment. Ah, it was hand sewn!
Ah, it was so formally constructed! "Hey,"
I said. "Let me hug you goodbye while I'm
wearing your design." And so we hugged.
As I changed back into my street clothes,
I told Dorothy that I was going to write a
poem about her. "What kind of poem?"
she asked. "A hybrid sonnet sequence," I said.
"An indigenous celebration of colonialsim or
mayhbe a colonial celebration of the indigenous.
O, Dorothy, it's going to be a hand-sewn sonnet!
You'll be able to count the stitches!
and so, here it is, but

This sonnet, like my reservation, keeps
its secrets hidden behind boundaries
that are simple and legal at first read
(14 lines that rhyme, two rivers that meet,

Poem and water joined at one confluence),
but colonialism's influence
is fluid and solid, measurable
and mad. If I find it pleasurable

to (imperfectly) mimic white masters,
then what tribal elders have I betrayed?
If I quote Frost from memory faster
than I recall powwow songs, then what blank

or free or formal verse should I call mine?
I claim all of it; Hunger is my crime.


Sherman Alexie

from his book FACE