Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga

: INDIAN RESERVATION: CAUGHNAWAGA

Where are the braves, the faces like autumn fruit

who stared at the child from the colored frontispiece,

and the monosyllabic chief who spoke with his throat?

Where are the tribes, the feathered bestiaries?"-

O Aesop's animals erect and red,

with fur on their names to make all live things kin!-

Chief Running Deer, Black Bear, Old Buffalo Head?

Childhood, that wished me Indian, hoped that

one afterschool I'd leave the classroom chalk,

the varnish smell, the watered dust of the street,

to join the clean outdoors and the Iroquois track.

Childhood; but always, as on a calendar,

there stood that chief, with arms akimbo, waiting

the runaway mascot paddling to his shore.

With what strange moccasin stealth that scene is changed!

With French names, without paint, in overalls,

their bronze, like their nobility expunged, -

the men. Beneath their alimentary shawls

sit like black tents their squaws; while for the tourist's

brown pennies scattered at the old church door

the ragged papooses jump, and bite the dust.

Their past is sold in a shop; the beaded shoes,

the sweetgrass basket, the curio Indian,

burnt wood, and gaudy cloth, and inch-canoes-

trophies and scalpings for a traveler's den.

Sometimes, it's true, they dance, but for a bribe;

after a deal don the bedraggled feather

and welcome a white mayor to the tribe.

This is a grassy ghetto, and no home.

And these are fauna in a museum kept.

The better hunters have prevailed. The game,

losing its blood, now makes these grounds its crypt.

The animals pale, the shine of the fur is lost,

bleached are their living bones. About them watch

as through a mist, the pious prosperous ghosts.