“I’m sorry, Mom. Listen, I picked up this book of poems—”
“Corliss, you know how your father feels about those poems.”
“They’re poems, Mom, not crack.”
“I know you love them, honey, but how are you going to get a job with poems? You go to a job interview, and they ask you what you did in college, and you say ‘poems,’ then what are your chances?”
“Maybe I’ll work in a poem factory.”
“Don’t get smart.”
“I can’t help it. I am smart.”
Corliss knew she was smart because her mother was smart, but she also knew she’d inherited a little bit of her mother’s crazies as well. Why else would she be calling to talk about a vanished Indian poet? The crazy mother — crazy daughter telephone ceremony!
“So did you call to break my heart,” her mother said, “or do you have some other reason?”
“I called about this book of poems.”
“Okay, so tell me about your book of poems.”
“It’s written by this guy called Harlan Atwater. It says he’s a Spokane. Do you know him?”
Her mother was the unofficial historian of the urban Spokane Indians. Corliss figured “historian” and “pathological liar” meant the same thing in all cultures and countries.
“Harlan Atwater? Harlan Atwater?” her mother repeated the name and tried to place it. “Nope. Don’t know him. Don’t know any Spokanes named Atwater.”
“His book was published in 1972. It’s called In the Reservation of My Mind. Do you remember that?”
“I don’t read books much.”
“Yes, I know, Mom. But you’re aware there are inventions called books and inside some of those books they have things called poems.”
“I know what books are, smart-ass daughter.”
“Okay, then, have you heard of this book?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“I thought you knew every Spokane.”
“I guess I don’t. Have you looked him up on the Internet?”
“How do you know about the Internet?”
“I’m old, Corliss, I’m not stupid.”
“Oh, jeez, Mom, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be such a jerk. It’s just, this book, is pretty cool. It’s getting me all riled up.”
“It’s okay. You’re always riled up. I love that about you.”
“I love you, too, Mom. I got to go.”
“Okay, bye-bye.”
Corliss hung up the telephone, grabbed her backpack and coat, and hurried to the campus computer lab. She was too poor to afford her own computer and was ashamed of her poverty. Corliss talked her way past the work-study student who’d said the computers were all reserved by other poor students. She sat at a Mac and logged on. Her user name was “CrazyIndian,” and her password was “StillCrazy.” She typed “Harlan Atwater, Native American poet, Spokane Indian” into the search engine and found nothing. She didn’t find him with any variations of the search, either. She couldn’t find his book on Amazon.com, Alibris.com, or Powells.com. She couldn’t find any evidence that Harlan Atwater’s book had ever existed. She couldn’t find the press that had published his book. She couldn’t find any reviews or mention of the book. She sent e-mails to two dozen different Indian writers, including Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Adrian C. Louis, and those who responded said they’d never heard of Harlan Atwater. She paged through old government records. Maybe he’d been a criminal and had gone to prison. Maybe he’d been married and divorced. Maybe he’d died in a spectacular car wreck. But she couldn’t find any mention of him. The library didn’t have any record of where or when the book had been purchased. The Spokane Tribal Enrollment Office didn’t have any records of his existence. According to the enrollment secretary, who also happened to be Corliss’s second cousin, there’d never been an enrolled Spokane Indian named Atwater. Corliss was stumped and suspicious. Every moment of an Indian’s life is put down in triplicate on government forms, collated, and filed. Indians are given their social security numbers before the OB/GYN sucks the snot and blood out of their throats. How could this Harlan Atwater escape the government? How could an Indian live and work in the United States and not leave one piece of paper to mark his passage? Corliss thought Harlan Atwater might be a fraud, a white man pretending to be an Indian, seeking to make a profit, to co-opt and capitalize. Then again, what opportunistic white man was stupid enough to think he could profit from pretending to be a Spokane Indian? Even Spokane Indians can’t profit from being Spokane! How many people had ever heard of the Spokane Tribe of Indians? Corliss felt like a literary detective, a poetic gumshoe, Sam Spade with braids. She worked for hours and days, and finally, two weeks after she first came across his book, she found an interview printed in Radical Seattle Weekly:
Harlan Atwater grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State. His work has appeared in Experimental Rice, Seattle Poetry Now! and The Left Heart of Love. The author of a book of poems, In the Reservation of My Mind, he lives in Seattle and is currently a warehouse supply clerk during the day while writing and performing his poems long into the night.
How did you start writing?
Well, coming from a culture where the oral tradition is so valued, and where storytelling is an everyday and informal part of life, I think I was born and trained to tell stories, in some sense. Of course, this country isn’t just Indian, is it? And it’s certainly the farthest thing from sacred. I am the child and grandchild of poor Indians, and since none of them ever put pen to paper, it never occurred to me I could try to be a poet. I didn’t know any poets or poems. But a few years ago, I took a poetry class with Jenny Shandy. She was on this sort of mission to teach poetry to the working class. She called it “Blue Collars, White Pages, True Stories,” and I was the only one who survived the whole class. There were ten of us when the class started. Ten weeks later, I was the last one. Jenny just kept giving me poetry books to read. I read over a hundred books of poems that year. That was my education. Jenny was white, so she gave me mostly white classical poets to read. I had to go out and find the Indian poets, the black poets, the Chicanos, you know, all the revolutionaries. I loved it all, so I guess I’m trying to combine it all, the white classicism with the dark-skinned rebellion.
How do your poem ideas come to you?
Well, shoot, everything I write is pretty autobiographical, so you could say I’m only interested in the stuff that really happens. There’s been so much junk written about Indians, you know? So much romanticism and stereotyping. I’m just trying to be authentic, you know? If you look at my poems, if you really study them, I think you’re going to find I’m writing the most authentic Indian poems that have ever been written. I’m trying to help people understand Indians. I’m trying to make the world a better place, full of more love and understanding.
How do you know when an idea is worth pursuing?
Well, I don’t mean to sound hokey, but it’s all about the elders, you know? If I think the tribal elders would love the idea, then to me, it’s an idea worth turning into a poem, you know?