Indian Cartography by Deborah Miranda

Here is one of Deborah's most famous American Indian poems:

Indian Cartography excerpts by Deborah A. Miranda, Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen

Indian Cartography My father opens a map of California— traces mountain ranges, rivers, county borders like family bloodlines. Tuolomne, Salinas, Los Angeles, Paso Robles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Saticoy, Tehachapi. Places he was happy, or where tragedy greeted him like an old unpleasant relative. A small blue spot marks Lake Cachuma, created when they dammed the Santa Ynez, flooded a valley, divided my father's boyhood: days he learned to swim the hard way, and days he walked across the silver scales, swollen bellies of salmon coming back to a river that wasn't there. The government paid those Indians to move away, he says; I don't know where they went. In my father's dreams after the solace of a six-pack, he follows a longing, a deepness. When he comes to the valley drowned by a displaced river he swims out, floats on his face with eyes open, looks down into lands not drawn on any map. Maybe he sees shadows of a people who are fluid, fluent in dark water; bodies long and glinting with sharp-edged jewelry, mouths still opening, closing on the stories of our home.