LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe
b. 1951


Half-breeds live on the edge of both races. You feel like you're split down the middle. Your right arm wants to unbutton your shirt while your left arm is trying to keep your shirt on. You're torn between wanting to kill everyone in the room, or buying 'em all a round of drinks. Our erratic behavior is often explained away by friends and family as "trying to be." If you're around Indians, you're trying to be white. If you're around white friends, you're trying to be Indian. Sometimes I feel like the blood in my veins is a deadly mixture of Rh positive and Rh negative and every cell in my body is on a slow nuclear melt-down.
- "An American in New York"

LeAnne Howe, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, was born on April 29, 1951. She was raised in Oklahoma City, and educated in Oklahoma as well. In addition to being an American Indian author, she is a scholar, and she has read her fiction and lectured throughout the United States, Japan, and the Middle East.

As an American Indian scholar, she has presented programs on recruitment and retention of American Indian students at higher education institutions. She is currently teaching at colleges and universities around the country, and she is finishing a novel.

Howe has led an extraordinary professional and academic career. From 1977 to 1989, Howe worked as a newspaper journalist, Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. In 1984, she worked for four years on Wall Street in Institutional Sales, selling and trading government bonds. She worked the two professions at the same time. During the day, she sold bonds, and at night, she wrote for the Dallas Morning News. Over the course of the next 8 years, Howe's career shifted towards the academic world, and she began teaching, lecturing, and developing courses in Native American studies at the University of Iowa and Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Her numerous publications range from short fiction anthologies to literary journals, and her work has included theater, films, and radio. In a span of ten years, Howe has been involved in five theater productions, with one radio production entitled "Indian Radio Days" in 1993. Howe wrote and directed this production, which was broadcast on American Public Radio stations throughout the Midwest, and uplinked via satellite to Alaska Public Radio stations on Columbus Day.

Her work has been anthologized in several collections of short fiction. "Moccasins Don't Have High Heels" appears in both Native American Literature, edited by Gerald Vizenor, and American Indian Literature, edited by Alan Velie. "Danse de L'amour, Danse de Mort" appears in Earth Song, Sky Spirit: An Anthology of Native American Writers, edited by Clifford Trafzer. Another short fiction piece titled "Indians Never Say Goodbye" appears in Reinventing the Enemy's Language, edited by Joy Harjo.

Howe's 2001 book, Shell Shaker, received the American Book Award for 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. She is currently on tour promoting her most recent book, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story.

Song For the Shell Shaker

Painting by Anita Endrezze

Song for the Shell Shaker



For LeAnne Howe


The stones in the hills outside Durant
are silent this evening,
But so are those
in the river near Nanih Waiya.
Tonight, even the wind is weary.

It's worn shoes press against the limbs of the cedars,
A wounded body
on a secret mattress.

Abandoned, invisible
the wind stopped
Believing in God long ago, or maybe
It was just yesterday, or
The moment before this poem.

Maybe it was the day when something passed
between the woman
And the words she spoke,
A private understanding,
like the silent nods of the blind,
Or an absence that blows
through the winds themselves.

Or maybe, it was when the wind rose from its black bed,
Pushing the river rocks
toward their memory of ocean
And the stones in the hills
toward their premonitions of river--
Turning within as the spheres might turn,
a music of sediment drums
and sticks of water--
To a place on the other side of the mounds
Where you stand,
waiting.


Dean Rader

Evidence of Red

Painting by Howard Terpning

Evidence of Red

First, night opened out.
Bodies took root from rotting salt
and seawater into evidence of red life.
Relentless waves pumped tidal air
into a single heartbeat.

In the pulp of shadow and space,
water sucked our people from sleep.
That’s how it all began. At least
that’s all we can remember to tell.
It began with water and heartbeat.

In minutes we tunneled through
corn woman’s navel into tinges
of moist red men and women.
Yawning, we collected our chins,
knees, breasts, and sure–footed determination.

A few thousand years before
Moses parted the Red Sea, and the
God with three heads was born in the Middle East,
the Choctaw people danced
our homeland infra red.

Finally when the stranger’s arms
reached to strangle the West,
Grandmother eavesdropped
on the three–faced deity
who said that chaos was coming.

When he turned his lips and tried to kiss her
she made it rain on him.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten
you were born of water and women,”
she said, walking away laughing.



LeAnne Howe

Pica

A pregnant woman painting
by Alexia Lound

Pica

If she craves clay or chalk, or coal, she should be given
cooked beans with sugar.--- Tortula


I
She drove the Honey-bun delivery van
well into her ninth month.
What she wanted to get hot off the rack;
coffee cakes, cake doughnuts, sweet rolls.
That cake, she says, brought my grandmother's
house right into my mouth. Yellow, yellow
as a kitchen in the fifties.
Her eyes glaze.
No one could stop her from dunking for comfort
as she drove.
Her tiny frame took the weight
in sweet elastic rolls.
Dough, she sighs, egg-dough--
that's what I made my girl of.

II
Water calls them to the edge
to watch the wash and smell how
earth gives in, suffuses, makes them flare
at damp spring scent from underground.
Dry horses can follow their noses miles and miles
to what they need.
It's that old instinct asserted early in pregnancy;
see them down by the lake,
women walking by the marshy margin of the bed;
hungry women with one appetite,
women up early
to bend and touch mud to their tongues,
women out to eat the world.


Heid E. Erdrich.......from The Mother's Tongue

The Deep

The Deep


Sparrows up the column of the maple
make a god awful racket first thing,
first light, ever since April.
The little twerps are easy to read:
I need, I need!.
The adults, hysteric with lusty pride
simply shriek and shriek without message.
They wake the newly pregnant woman,
who can't at first identify her feelings,

but remembers another dawn, an outing
by sea to watch for whales.
Who ever honestly expects to see creatures
so ancient, so huge?
Now she rides the same unexpected waves

of sickness in unstoppable rhythm, in swells
that tossed her hanging wretched at the rail.
No one else saw the great humpback whale
who eyed her, alone there
at the back of the boat.

The birds persistant racket, the jets at take off,
sound to her ill brain like doom.
She blocks it all,
hangs on her emblem of relief;
the rolling water,
the great being revealed, real,
watching her from the deep.


Heid E. Erdrich.........from The Mother's Tongue

The Red Toad

The Red Toad


One morning in a girl's bed,
a red toad, a lump, hopped
right into her lap.
She felt sorry for it--
helpless, bubbly, ugly,
yet hinting of transformation.
She's no fool,
she senses the myths
at work in the life.

She puts the creature to her breast.
In a while it smiles up at her--
then she is caught,
she feels a catch;
the red lump latched in her chest.

She knows what it is they won't tell us,
how we are born women without hearts,
born only the body
that will go on making other bodies
until blood and muscle
become spirit within it.

And we too must trust transformation,
know it is our only story--
we are sea fissures that suffer change,
lava caves, vats to cast raw materials,
that cast up treasures in forms
smooth and glowing as red gold.


Heid E. Erdrich......from The Mother's Tongue

In The Belly

In The Belly


of my baby
I breathe rushing water,
his element,
his blue air;
and I do not even miss the land,
though sometimes we swim close enough
to see creatures very much like me.
They sin and love it,
sin and forgive and go on.

In the belly of my baby
I am born and born and born
into the world a convert
whose old way had a tang;
who wanted to walk in the dust
tagging the powder-heeled minds.

In the belly of my baby
I have escaped the old suffering,
the self no longer dogs me, her teeth
dull as knitting needles against a silver blade
even now swinging to infant need.

In the belly of my baby
I grow another stroke, a hand
as clumsy as another set of toes.
My mouth learns to paint,
and pigment tastes the same
as ink--a bit more rich and rank.

In the belly of my baby,
I am home not alone.
In the belly of my baby
I have not forgotten sin and the city,
the mission I flesh, and the purge
still to come one day and spit me out.


Heid E. Erdrich......from The Mother's Tongue