WHITEWASH

by Eileen Ivey Sirota

About 100 people, many of them Native Americans, held a protest in Pierre in September to push for improved teaching of Native American history and culture in South Dakota schools and to decry removal of Native references from proposed social studies standards. Photo: Courtesy DRG Media Group via Kelo, November 14, 2021.

All the white pages lovely, unspoiled

by time, untouched by torment.

All aboard. 

 

An uninterrupted arc of progress. 

Heroes on horseback.  See Dick and Jane

in their triumphant ignorance. 

 

We have torn you

from our history books, those fairy tales

for innocents and children.

 

Unseen and unheard are the children we ripped

from their mothers, sent away

to boarding schools to be laundered

and whitened, their mother tongue ripped out.

 

“Kill the Indian and save the man,” proclaimed Richard Pratt. 

At the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania,

one hundred eighty-six graves

cradle their small bones.

 

From your mouths we tore         

the sacred place names and stamped them

on our suburban street signs.                                                 

 

So many ways of killing—the bullet, the blanket,

the exile, the pretending, the silence.                                   

The silence.

 

 

Eileen Ivey Sirota is a poet and psychotherapist, the author of a chapbook, Out of Order, published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.  Her poems also have appeared in Calyx, Ekphrastic Review, District Lines, The New Verse News, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. 

INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL

by Stephen Barile

 

Bill told me when he was a boy

Two federal officers and an Indian agent

Came to his parent’s hogan,

 

And against his mother’s will

Put him on a bus with other Navajo boys

He knew and delivered them to Tolatchi.

 

On the bus trip there,

From the window, he kept careful watch

Of the position of the sun

 

In the afternoon sky as a means

To guide him home to Chinle,

He said, pointing to the clouds.

 

Bill moved closer as he bragged,

Navajo were experts at disappearing

quickly and hiding in the vast lands.

 

At Chuska Indian Boarding School

He would be assimilated

Into American culture,

 

Given an American-style haircut,

Dressed in a white child’s clothes,

Forbidden to speak his only language.

 

From the moment he arrived,

He could no longer be an Indian.

They cut off his hair,

 

Forbade singing and dancing.

He waited until dark, then ran

In the direction of his family home.

 

Bill figured he ran south

Near Tse Bonito. At Separate Hill,

A search party nearly captured him.

 

He kept on running in the night

South to Mexican Springs and Nakaibito

At sunrise, he was west of Kinlichee.

 

Over the next two days, he found food

And rested, then ran to Nazlini, then Chinle.

It took him three days to get there.

 

His mother hid him carefully

When Indian agents came around

To check on his whereabouts.

Stephen Barile, a Fresno, California native, educated in the public schools, attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. He was a long-time member of the Fresno Poet's Association. Stephen Barile taught writing at Madera Community College and CSU Fresno. His poems have been published in Featured Poets, Santa Clara Review, Kathmandu Tribune, Tower Poetry, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Rue Scribe, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Metafore Magazine, From Sac Literary Journal, The Heartland Review, Rio Grande Review, The Broad River Review, The San Joaquin Review, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and Pharos, among others journals.