Mongrel Dreams

for Thomas Raine Crowe

These nights bring dreams of Cherokee shamans
whose names are bright verbs and impacted dark nouns,
whose memories are indictments of my pallid flesh...
and I hear, as from a great distance,
the cries tortured from their guileless lips, proclaiming
the nature of my mutation.

NOTE: My “mutation” is that my family appears to contain English, Scottish, German and Cherokee blood, meaning my ancestors were probably at war with each other. In the same year, 1830, that Stonewall Jackson consigned Native Americans to the ash-heap of history, Georgia Governor George Gilmer said, "Treaties are expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people are induced ... to yield up what civilized people have the right to possess." By "civilized" he apparently meant people willing to brutally dispossess and kill women and children in order to derive economic benefits for themselves. Years after the Cherokees had been rounded up and driven down the Trail of Tears, John G. Burnett reflected on what he and his fellow soldiers had done, saying, "Schoolchildren of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point, to satisfy the white man's greed ... Murder is murder and somebody must answer, somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country ... Somebody must explain the four thousand silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile." Mark Twain would say: “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

Keywords/Tags: Cherokee, Native American, genocide, injustice, ethnic cleansing, Trail of Tears, relocation, reservations, shaman, shamans, medicine man, medicine men, warriors, cries, accusations, recriminations, guilt, shame