on the prairie diamond

Image: Paula Lackie

*With apologies to Phil Deloria.

Pictured left to right is Gideon Young, Marilyn Nelson, me, Allison Hedge Coke [standing], Orlando White [blue shirt], Santee Frazier [baseball cap], and Lara Mann. With three of the American Indian poets coming out with new books this next year, you’d think the talk would be about poetry. Not so. Ice cream was our heated debate! Santee Frazier [Cherokee/Choctaw] and I believed Braum’s Ice Cream is #1. It’s only natural. Braum’s is a chain out of Oklahoma. But the Okies were out voted by the Salem Valley Farms lovers. Homemade in Connecticut. After the second bowl, I had to agree that Salem Valley’s peach ice cream ranks right up with winning the lottery.

Meanwhile watch for these new works — Santee Frazier’s “Dark Thirty” (University of Arizona Press, Spring 09); Orlando White’s “Bone Light” (Red Hen Press); and Lara Mann’s “A Song of Ascents and Descents,” due out in a collection from Salt Publishing, UK) — at a bookstore near you soon.

No, it’s not the famous song by Willie Nelson, but a Nelson is involved. From the generosity of Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson (2001-2006), I was awarded a writing fellowship at Soul Mountain Retreat in East Haddam, CT, along with poets Allison Hedge Coke, Rhonda Ward, and MFA candidate from UIUC, Lara Mann. We gave a reading on May 10th at the Central Gallery in Old Saybrook. Yippee. Summer is finally here.

* Apparently, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo is a grammatically correct sentence in English. (Buffalo the verb = “to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.”) via Tayari.

* Indian Country Today reports that upwards of 1,600 buffalo were killed while migrating outside of Yellowstone this year.

* No gloves allowed: NPR on Throwback Baseball Leagues playing the game the 19th century way.

* Tis the season for Baseball Books. Spring Reading for Fans of Batted Balls and Thirty Baseball Books in April.

* If you have yet to, Southwest Semiotics: Native American Roadside Texts is a must read post.

And here are other echoes of my travels over the past two weeks. Pictured here, historian and Ojibwe scholar Brenda Child [author of Boarding School Seasons] and I are caught watching historian and Ojibwe scholar Jeani O’Brien [author of Dispossession by Degrees] demonstrate a baseball pitcher’s official wind up. Yes, we are in a hotel kitchen in an “after party” at the University of Georgia’s Native American and Indigenous Studies conference. PS: I am not Ojibwe.

Here I am in Rochester, New York at a Barnes and Nobles bookstore with the very savvy Moving Beyond Racism Book Club. They had all read Miko Kings and had some of the best questions about American Indian history contained in the book. They asked about the Dawes Act, The Four Mothers Society, and the difference between Civilized Indians and not so Civilized Indians. I told them to watch for the pictures on Dean Rader’s blog!

Here I am with my pub-buds, back home in Champaign, Il. From left to right are: Jan Davis, [AIS], Kelly Roberts [Geonpul], Jodi Byrd, [Chickasaw], Aileen Moreton-Robinson, [Geonpul] and me.