Poetry
Sherman Alexie
Late summer night on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Ten Indi-
ans are playing basketball on a court barely illuminated by the
streetlight above them. They will play until the brown, leather ball
is invisible in the dark. They will play until an errant pass jams a
finger, knocks a pair of glasses off the face, smashes a nose and
draws blood. They will play until the ball bounces off the court
and disappears into the shadows.
This may be all you need to know about Native American literature.
from One Stick Song, Hanging Loose Press, 2000:
Migration, 1902
The salmon swim
So thick in this river
that Grandmother walks
across the water
on the bridge
of their spines.
from Crow Testament
1.
Cain lifts Crow, that heavy black bird
and strikes down Abel.
Damn, says Crow, I guess
this is just the beginning.
2.
The white man, disguised
as a falcon, swoops in
and yet again steals a salmon
from Crow’s talons.
Contributor
Sherman AlexieSHERMAN ALEXIE is an author. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his 2009 novel, War Dances.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Dale Herd’s Dreamland Court
By Dale Martin SmithJUNE 2023 | Poetry
Dreamland Court presents a complex range of human experience and desire through vernacular soundings. In a way, this book is more like an epic poem than a novel, derived from the monologues of men and women searching for the meaning to the actions of their lives, making sense, or not, of experience at the often-overlooked extremes of the so-called American Dream.

Philip Guston Now
By Barry SchwabskyJULY/AUG 2023 | ArtSeen
What comes through, again and again, is the intensity of Gustons self-questioning: his recurrent wish to have dismantled everything and started from scratch, his incessant sense of internal conflict, his conviction (pun intended) that in his art, the canvas isnot, as his old friend Harold Rosenberg had said, an arena in which the individual artist has the freedom but also the obligation to act, but rather a different kind of space, one in which Guston felt divided against himself, a space of judgment: a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge.
Legacy Admissions and The Myth of Social Mobility
By Adam Theron-Lee RenschSEPT 2023 | Field Notes
In the wake of the Supreme Courts recent vote to end affirmative action, legacy admissions have become a convenient scapegoat for the massive inequalities that pervade higher education in The United States. Derided by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as affirmative action for the privileged, and by countless others as affirmative action for white people, legacy admissions are transparently nepotistic and contradict the self-professed meritocratic ideals of university mission statements. Education, we are told, is precisely the sort of institution where anyone can succeed by dedication and hard work alone, not by being born into a wealthy, connected family.
Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker
By William DavieJULY/AUG 2023 | ArtSeen
Lavinia Fontana (15521614) is widely considered to be a woman of many firsts in western Europe. She was the first woman to achieve professional success as an artist beyond the confines of a court or a convent. She was the first woman to run her own workshop at a time when women were not allowed to conduct business of their own. She was the first woman to paint large-scale public altarpieces and nudes. All this while giving birth to eleven children, only three of whom survived her.