News From Native California - Spring 2016 Volume 29 Issue 3 | Page 34

Red Indian Road West: Native American
Poetry from California
Edited by Kurt Schweigman and Lucille Lang Day
Scarlet Tanager Press, 2016, 110 pp, $18
Reviewed by Ruth Nolan

for poetry lovers and those who long to know more
about California’s amazingly prolific and diverse Native cultures,
an exciting new book of poetry is now available. Red Indian
Road West: Native American Poetry from California, edited by
Kurt Schweigman (Lakota) and Lucille Lang Day (Wampanoag) with an introduction by James Luna (La Jolla Band
of Luiseño Indians), was published in January by Scarlet
Tanager Press and is a critical and compelling addition to the
body of literature and poetry penned by Native American
writers from across our Golden State.
Braiding together like the many rivers and mountains and
inland valleys of our state’s geography, the rich weave of
the many Native Californian voices in this collection crafts
its own unique and powerful pattern of poetry. The poems
in this collection, drawn from both well-established Native
California poets such as Natalie Diaz (Mojave), Janice Gould
(Konkow), and Wendy Rose (Hopi-Miwok), as well as an
incredible array of emerging voices, combine to leave a
powerful impression in image and verse. These writers use
the best of poetic language while at the same time honoring
and staying true to the accessible and enjoyable aspects of a
poetry written with an inclusive spirit for all readers.
The poems in this collection create, as Luna writes,
“a songbook of sorts, as I hear music when I read the voices
put forward.” Truly, the poems gathered here speak to the
beauties and tragedies and healing impulses inherent in
Native culture today throughout our
state and beyond. As Luna says, “There
is great joy, sorrow, pain and displacement for many of our tribes from other
parts of Turtle Island who have come
here (to California) to make this place

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our home. I felt all this and more in reading the thoughts,
reflections and memories of the writers who are contributors to this book.”
The writers in Red Indian West share poetry that speaks
from the heart of the impressive range of the California
landscape and its link to a deeply storied and amazingly
diverse, yet inter-related, Native cultural and historical experience. For example, a poem by Schweigman, “Ishi’s Hiding
Place,” revisits the pain and inspiration of the story of the
famous Yahi Indian. Deborah Miranda’s (Ohlone-Costanoan
Esselen Nation) “Indian Cartography” re-draws the map of
California, in metaphor, to the lived Native experiences of
her father. Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez (Barbareño
Chumash/Tohono O’odham) writes beautifully of Chumash
life along the Southern California shoreline, and Wendy
Rose shares a poem about Hopi people relocated by the
federal government and struggling to adapt to living in the
San Francisco Bay Area, far from their homeland.
In all, this powerful and beautiful poetry collection
is an important entry in the emerging and critical body of
literature written by Native Americans. It is a testament to
the survival and adaptability, as well as the beauty and history,
of Native California. Together, these poems combine to
powerfully flow and deepen our understanding of our state’s
widely varied Native people and the places and stories they
know so well, both past and present. Red Indian West: Native
American Poetry from California is a mustread for all those who wish to draw
closer to the Native California that these
poets convey so clearly, beautifully, and
powerfully.