The Cherokee Word for Water

I grew up within in a large extended Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca family, with lots of cousins, grandparents and great-grandparents, with roots in Oklahoma. Great-grandma could fix a meal to feed fifteen of us and I loved to sit beside her coal black stove, listening to her stories. I’m the granddaughter of sharecroppers, and I was born to a teenage mother and father in 1953. When I was young, we were poor—but we had water. 

Having water meant we always had plenty to eat. We had fresh running water to rinse, soak and simmer pots of pinto beans and black-eyed peas. In the summer when rainfall was not plentiful, since the water table was usually high, we could turn the hose on to soak the apple and peach tree and their fruit fed us in return.

There was water for pie baking, and when the sun seared overhead water to mix with Kool-Aid to freeze into popsicles. Home canned goods must be put up in hot, sterilized jars and we had water for boiling before we used them. We had water to wash our hands before pressing a tortilla on a hot skillet, and it was clean and safe to drink.

 

When no one else believed in them, they believed in each other. 

Set in the early 1980s, the story of The Cherokee Word for Water begins in a small town in rural Oklahoma where many houses lack running water. The film tells the story of a tribal community joining together to build a waterline by using traditional Native values of reciprocity and interdependence and is told from the perspective of Wilma Mankiller and Charlie Soap, who join forces to battle opposition and build a 16-mile waterline system using a community of volunteers. In the process, they inspire the townspeople to trust each other, to trust their way of thinking, and to spark a reawakening of the universal indigenous values of reciprocity and interconnectedness. This project also inspired a self-help movement in Indian Country that continues to this day.

“The Cherokee Word for Water” is dedicated to Wilma Mankiller’s vision, compassion and incredible grace, and tells the story of the work that led her to become the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. The film was funded through the Wilma Mankiller Foundation to continue her legacy of social justice and community development in Indian Country. 

Yellow Medicine Review

Indigenous writers, young, old, established, emerging, traditional, urban, two spirt, academic, incarcerated, are brought together. We are sharing our voices, our best words, the thing we do in our community.  

I’m honored to have my work included. 

Learning to Grow Right as an Elder, an excerpt from my memoir, We Who Walk the Seven Ways, shares space with a unique tapestry of voices, and speaks to the diversity and complexity of Native writings and culture. 

 

Yellow Medicine Review

A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought

Yellow Medicine Review: Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Strength

“Remember that I am just a woman who is living a very abundant life. Every step I take forward is on a path paved by strong Indian women before me.” 

—Wilma Mankiller 

 

From our grandmothers and aunties and sisters to the women who write stories, lead states, and sit as poet laureate for the United States, we turn to Native women for their strength, wisdom, and leadership. 

“Oh woman 

Remember who you are 

Woman 

It is the whole earth.” 

“The Blanket Around Her” 

—Joy Harjo 

I’m honored to have my work included. Growing Old in a Beautiful Way (page 59) is an excerpt from my memoir, We Who Walk the Seven Ways, forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, Spring 2023.

Yellow Medicine Review: Women's Wisdom, Women's Strength

A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought

10 of my favorite places in the US where you can experience Native American cultures responsibly

One of my earliest memories is watching Grandma sew beads on Uncle Elmer’s deer skin leggings. Listen to my grandmother and you’ll hear stories about me in diapers moving to the heartbeat of the drum. 

Talk to me and I’ll tell you about my husband recalling how unfamiliar he felt when he first met me and found himself the only non-Indian person among American Indians. Blending our lives (and later raising our children) helped me gather opportunities where he could begin to understand and learn about Native lifeways.  

Recently an editor invited me to contribute an article about friendly places to experience Native American cultures. While researching the piece I had fun traveling from my armchair revisiting some of my favorite places. 

You will notice that the title of the original article says culture. It ought to read cultures, reflecting the fact that Native American people are of many tribes, Nations, cultures, languages and histories. 

I greatly enjoyed researching and writing the article and I’m thankful for the invitation to take my readers into Native America to visit the thriving lifeways of a continuing land and people. 

Read my article at Matador Network to see 10 of my favorite places to discover modern-day Indian life and to observe tribal descendants echo and give expression to cultural traditions. 

Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits

University of New Mexico Press

I’m honored to have my work and portrait included.

Tending the Fire by photographer Christopher Felver with an Introduction by Linda Hogan and a foreword by Simon J. Ortiz, celebrates the poets and writers who represent the wide range of Native American voices in literature today. In these commanding portraits, Felver’s distinctive visual signature and unobtrusive presence capture each artist’s strength, integrity, and character. Accompanying each portrait is a handwritten poem or prose piece that helps reveal the origin of the poet’s language and legends.

As the individuals share their unique voices, Tending the Fire introduces us to the diversity and complexity of Native culture through the authors’ generous and passionate stories, reminding us that “Native Americans today are as modern as the Space Age, and each in their own way carries forth the cultural heritage ‘from whence they came.’ Their abiding legacy as the first people of this continent has found its voice in the hard-won wisdom of their art and activism.

Featured authors include: Francisco X. Alarcón; Sherman Alexie; Indira Allegra; Paula Gunn Allen; Crisosto Apache; Annette Arkeketa; Jimmy Santiago Baca; Dennis Banks; Jim Barnes; Kimberly L. Becker; Duane Big Eagle; Sherwin Bitsui; Julian Talamantez Brolaski; Lauralee Brown; Joseph Bruchac; Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle; Elizabeth Cook-Lynn; Jonny Cournoyer; Alice Crow; Lucille Lang Day; Susan Deer Cloud; Ramona Emerson; Heid E. Erdrich; Louise Erdrich ; Pura Fé; Jennifer Elise Foerster; Eric Gansworth; Diane Glancy; Jewelle Gomez; Rain Gomez; Sequoyah Guess; Q.R. Hand, Jr.; Joy Harjo; Allison Hedge Coke; Travis Hedge Coke; Lance Henson; Trace Lara Hentz; Inés Hernández-Avila; Charlie Hill; Roberta Hill; Geary Hobson; Linda Hogan; LeAnne Howe; Andrew Jolivétte; em jollie; Joan Naviyuk Kane; Maurice Kenny; Bruce King; Sharmagne Leland-St.John; Chip Livingston; Charly Lowry; James Luna; Lee Marmon; Molly McGlennen; Russell Means; Deborah Miranda; Gail Mitchell; N. Scott Momaday; Catherine Nelson-Rodriguez; Linda Noel; dg nanouk okpik; Simon J. Ortiz; Laura Ortman; A. Kay Oxendine; Juanita Pahdopony; Evan Pritchard; Mary Grace Pewewardy; Ishmael Reed; Martha Redbone; Bobby J. Richardson; Ladonna Evans Richardson; Barbara Robidoux; Linda Rodriguez; Wendy Rose; Kurt Schweigman; Kim Shuck; Cedar Sigo; Leslie Marmon Silko; Arigon Starr; James Thomas Stevens; Inés Talamantez; Luci Tapahanso; Nazbah Tom; Cecil Taylor; Rebecca Hatcher Travis; David Treuer; Terra Trevor; Quincy Troupe; John Trudell; Gerald Vizenor; Elissa Washuta; Floyd Redcrow Westerman; Orlando White; Kim Wieser; Diane Wilson; Elizabeth A. Woody.

Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education

 The University of Arizona Press

I’m honored to have an excerpt from my memoir, Pushing up the Sky, included.

Native American children have long been subject to removal from their homes for placement in residential schools and, more recently, in foster or adoptive homes. The governments of both the United States and Canada, having reduced Native nations to the legal status of dependent children, historically have asserted a surrogate parentalism over Native children themselves.

Children of the Dragonfly, edited by Robert Bensen, is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Through autobiography and interviews, fiction and traditional tales, official transcripts and poetry, these voices— Seneca, Cherokee, Mohawk, Navajo, and many others— weave powerful accounts of struggle and loss into a moving testimony to perseverance and survival. 

Included are works of contemporary authors Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, and others; classic writers Zitkala-Sa and E. Pauline Johnson; and contributions from twenty important new writers as well. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing through involuntary sterilization.

Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood.

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

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning The Universe

"All the tribes say the universe is just the product of mind... It fits perfectly with the quantum. Indians believe the universe is mind, but they explore the spiritual end of it, not the physical end." 

—Vine DeLoria Jr.

This brilliant anthology explores quantum physics in relation to Indigenous peoples' understanding of the spiritual universe. Includes writings from 40 Native writers from various nations, and I'm honored to have my work included.  

Contributing authors include, Suzan Shown Harjo, Gabriel Horn, John Trudell, Dean Hutchins, Lois Red Elk, Suzanne Zahrt Murphy, Amy Krout-Horn, Jack D. Forbes, John D. Berry, Sidney Cook Bad Moccasin, III, Trace A. DeMeyer, Clieord E. Trafzer, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Bobby González, Duane BigEagle, Carol Wille`e Bachofner, Lela Northcross Wakely, Georges Sioui, Keith Secola, Mary Black Bonnet, Kim Shuck, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Dawn Karima Pe`igrew, Stephanie A. Sellers, Natalie bomas Kindrick, Basil H. Johnston, Barbara-Helen Hill, Alice Azure, Phyllis A. Fast, Doris Seale, Terra Trevor, Denise Low, Vine Deloria Jr., Jim Stevens, ire’ne lara silva, Susan Deer Cloud, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Tony Abeyta, MariJo Moore. 

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time

Edited by MariJo Moore and Trace A. DeMeyer