In the Veins Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

POETRY | First Nations and American Indian Poets | Native Studies | History 

 

In the Veins Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects 

I'm honored to have my work included.

Refection of Veins from Dr. Carol A. Hand, Anishinabe poet:

We are inter-connected branching vessels
carrying the pain of the earth back to source
like the roots of the sacred cedar
to heal and breathe new life into being? 
Have we been forced deep underground, 
pressurized through the weight of suffering,
to become a treasure sought by others
who don’t understand that we carry
healing powers in the wisdom of our ancestors?

Sacred life interwoven with sorrow, blood memory, in our very DNA 

The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal

The University of Oklahoma Press 

Native literature, composed of western literary tradition is packed into the hyphens of the oral tradition. It is termed a “renaissance” but contemporary Native writing is both something old emerging in new forms and something that has never been asleep. The two-hundred-year-old myth of the vanishing American Indian still holds some credence in the American Southeast, the region from which tens of thousands of Indians were relocated after passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Yet, a significant Indian population remained behind after those massive relocations. 

I'm honored to have my work included in the first anthology to focus on the literary work of Native Americans with ancestry to “people who stayed” in southeastern states after 1830. 

This volume represents every state and every genre, including short stories, excerpts from novels, poetry, essays and plays. Although most works are contemporary, the collection covers the entire post-Removal era. While many speak to the prospects and perils of acculturation, all the writers bear witness to the ways, oblique or straightforward, that they and their families are connected and honor their Indian identities despite the legacy of removal. 

The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal 
edited by Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams, and Kathryn Walkiewicz