Standing at the gravesite of his good friend, Marlon Footracer felt a bleakness that was difficult to speak about. So he wrote a poem:
In that wind, I pulled my blanket in to me,
The edges of it beat against my legs.
Above, clouds germinated over
Grey-grass hills, hiding the land line.
The finality of a grave is hard to see.
Dirt piled on wood and bones.
I wished to see a sapling, budding blue,
Or even a prairie fire in all that space.
North Dakota Elegy is the kind of poetry Footracer writes in a “quiet, quiet space.” But when the fifth-year senior is performing his work onstage for the Spoken Word Collective, Footracer is more apt to shout it out. “He’s definitely loud,” says pal Tanaya Winder.
Footracer, who grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, and Winder, a Duckwater Shoshone from the Southern Ute Reservation in Colorado, met in 2004. “But with the poetry bond between us, I feel like I’ve known him for centuries,” Winder says. “I didn’t really understand poems until Marlon read some through with me. And then I thought, ‘Wow, this kid is really smart!’”
Footracer and Winder now tutor undergraduates in the Native American Cultural Center on Sunday nights, and they have launched the Stanford Native American Poetry Society—SNAPS. In spring quarter they are co-teaching Since the Pulitzer, a student-initiated course about the work of Native American writers Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz and N. Scott Momaday, MA ’60, PhD ’63.The idea for the class emerged last year when they took Introduction to Chicano Literature and Culture, taught by English professor Paula Moya. Using that as a framework, says Footracer, “We saw [our course] as a way to talk about the problems and presentation of Native American identity—how it’s included, or not, in the American literary canon.”
At a time when the number of reservation students at Stanford is declining, Winder hopes their class can help others in the Native American community find their voices on campus. “A lot of Stanford education is, ‘You have to speak and you have to participate in order to get good grades,’” she says. “But if you’re raised traditionally, you have no authority to say that you’re right and assert your opinion—your job is to listen to your elders.” Traveling back and forth between home and the Farm requires “code switching,” she adds. “Trying to find a compromise, to live between those worlds, is something I’ve constantly struggled with.”
In teaching, Winder draws on her experience working with an Upward Bound program last summer at the University of Colorado-Boulder. With funding from a summer fellowship provided by the Haas Center for Public Service, she started a program for 27 high school students from 13 different reservations called Many Hearts, One People: A Celebration of Poetry in Native America. The students all wrote poems that began with the prompt, “I come from a place where. . .” and the poetry ultimately was collected in a booklet and on a DVD. “I wanted to have all the students from all these different places be able to relate to one another—like, ‘I’m struggling with that on my rez, too.’”
Some of the work is intensely personal, like the images that resonate in many of Winder’s poems. Consider these lines from “What I Remember Most About Sleeping With You”:
You tell me how you grew up.
Mother in high school, father too young.
One night your mother threw a plate at him.
It wasn’t the only thing that shattered . . .As you sleep I listen
to the short gasps in between
your deep snoring. Each breath releasing
a piece of your spirit for me to breathe in.
Footracer looks back on the months he spent as a volunteer English teacher at his high school, during the three years he stopped out from Stanford, as a time when he learned about the “magical quality” of writing. “I grew up with oral history, and spoken traditions have always been part of my culture,” he says. A former biomedical research intern at the National Institutes of Health, Footracer had planned on majoring in biology and returning to his reservation as a doctor. Then he took a course with Cherrie Moraga, an artist in residence with the drama department, that required “a lot of creative writing,” and another class with Irish poet and English professor Eavan Boland. Footracer says he was “astounded with the intimacy and intensity” of writing poetry, and he hopes to share that revelation with other students.
Footracer and Winder will apply to the MFA program at the University of New Mexico, where they hope to study with Harjo. As they look beyond graduation in June, a freshman in the Native American community is taking to the stage with compelling works about potential and possibility. Lyla Johnston, who has performed for Nobel laureates in Bali and won a slam poetry award in New York, stood in front of her biggest audience ever when she was featured in Faces of the Community at last fall’s Orientation.
A Diné tribe member, the Taos, N.M., native has written about the threat of development in Llano Quemado, the valley where she grew up riding horses through flowering orchards. She now is writing to encourage her classmates to open their eyes to their surroundings. “It’s a beautiful place here, but there’s also a lack of compassion and it can feel a little heartless,” she says. “I’d like to do something crazy in White Plaza—like a love experiment, where we could have everyone supporting each other, growing and blossoming together.” Johnston pauses. “Because when you’re bogged down worrying about how the other person is talking in IHUM discussion, then you’re not able to reach your potential.”
Here’s how she tells it:
We want action, results Now!
so we absolutely will save the earth
let our sorrows fall like dominoes
our love: sprout like warriors shouting
finally, we’ve won the war on wars because
we realize we are all on the same side.
