Birdie, by Tressa Brittin Berman
A prose-poem excerpt from collection, Postcards from Indian Country, USA.
"Geese in Flight," Gary Geff, 2001, Enchanted Highway, Interstate 95, North Dakota.
Photo by T. Berman, 2016.
Birdie
Now I am going to tell a story. What they used to tell about.
—Ella P. Waters [1]
IF IT WASN’T FOR BIRDIE, daughter of Matilda Waters, great-grand-daughter of Sitting Bear, I would not have touched into that small opening that held me to this place from the inside. Birdie Waters Chase came from the Sa'hnish, keepers of corn and its woman-seeded knowledge. Her people had traveled north and west from dislocated villages, moving with hungry limbs from the Heart River to rest in the crook of Like-a-Fishook village, before the Fort, before the damming of the river. From Son-of-Star to Billy Bear, the hereditary chiefs held generational council in descending lineages, put down the weight of abandonments and axe-cut camps on the maps of government allotments. Joined with strangers, made friends out of enemies, planted corn, and when the buffalo were driven across killing fields, raised horses and cows and sang the coffee kettle tunes of ranchers and farmers along the edge of a river, adrift with steamboats and the makings of railroad ties.
Birdie's grandmother, Hattie Waters, came from these into the white man's ways, set down stakes for log houses and juneberry jam, before there was the present-day town called Max (population 282), or later, after the war and the dam and television took away attention, the people divided themselves around segments of what remained, the uprootedness of soil and river water feeding the gardens where women sang to corn seeds and scattered their progeny across the hills, sloping into cities of turn-around dead-ends, bringing home their boys in body bags (Vietnam, Desert Storm), their relatives out on relocation (San Francisco, Los Angeles), the hand drum calling them home.
All this, before the baby moccasins beaded for the naming of one they called Medicine Bird. A little one who kicked his limbs, his feet in an astonishing display of sun-lit yellow seed beads, dotted with red as true as the painted bluffs. Later, he ran over blacktop and diesel towns, his man feet remembering the soft buckskin hold of women's hands wrapping baby feet in the skin of a doe. This line of women raced in his blood, then caught the hook of a question mark lodged in his throat. Where are you from, little one, little one? Where are you going? Turn around, turn around.
Birds fly over sharp blades of prairie grass, stay away forever. Mothers mourn sons, and sons of sons return, braver than before. They deconstruct dams, restore the buffalo, inherit the potent planting seed, dig in and feed the rooted nation with river water and remember grandmothers and their grandmother's fathers, and the ones who came before, moving up river, then again, renaming the new place from other places of beginningless times. Towns called Sah'nish. White Shield. Arikara names that connect to the other world that is not broken. It is just one long continuous beginning.
If it weren't for Birdie Waters Chase I would never have come to know the way to sit quietly in a room full of women, until the burst of laughter could be held down no more, to sew stitches onto a quilt, to hold the center star in place. I would never have known all the names of all the people settled in clusters of HUD houses, mirroring the matrilines of former villages that moved only with the seasons, close and far from river bottoms, frozen and plowed. I would never have shoveled snow with the women who took pity on me for my efforts, a sad turnip shovel in a city girl's hands, and they loved me like a sister anyway. Sisters all. Birdie at the center, holding the stitches together. If it wasn't for Birdie, daughter of Matilda, whose great-great-grandson now grows like a corn stalk from the first seed, he would not hear the urgency of the future calling.
[1] from Douglas Parks’ Myths and Traditions of the Arikara Indians. (Bison Books, 1994).
Tressa Berman photographed in front of John White's Bird on a Wire, Ventura, California 2020.
Tressa Brittin Berman (Ph.D.) is an anthropoeta, locating herself at the crossroads of anthropology, poetry and visual culture. Her "prose portraits" are excerpts of oral history, inextricable from the places from which they spring, their kinship with the land and its peopled histories. The selected piece is part of the collection: Postcards from Indian Country, USA (forthcoming). Her art, writing, and poetry have appeared in Cultural Daily, New Art Examiner, Art Papers, Arte LImite, Fabrik, SharksReef, Wordswell Literary Journal and others. Her nonfiction books include Circle of Goods: Women, Work and Welfare in a Reservation Community and No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession. She is the recipient of a Judy Chicago Art Education Award, Rockefeller and Mellon Fellowships, and various poetry prizes, including first place for the City of Ventura Poetry Project. She has contributed to anthologies with the 23rd Street Poets (San Francisco) and the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective. She can be reached at: transformational-creative-coaching.com
