Ray Young Bear is a respected Native American poet known for his powerful exploration of Indigenous identity, memory, and spirituality. As a member of the Meskwaki Nation in Iowa, Ray Young Bear’s poems reflect the deep cultural roots and traditions of his community. His writing stands out in contemporary Native American literature for its emotional depth and symbolic imagery.
One of his most important works, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives, blends poetry and autobiographical storytelling. In this collection, he explores childhood memories, tribal history, and the challenges of preserving Native language and culture in modern America. Themes such as cultural survival, identity conflict, and spiritual connection to nature are central to Ray Young Bear’s poetry.
- Ray Young Bear poems often highlight the importance of ancestors, oral tradition, and sacred landscapes. His lyrical style combines dreamlike imagery with realistic experiences, creating a unique poetic voice. Through his work, readers gain insight into the struggles and resilience of Native American communities.
- For those interested in Native American poetry, Indigenous literature, and cultural identity themes, Ray Young Bear’s poems offer meaningful and thought-provoking reading. His work continues to inspire discussions about heritage, language preservation, and the power of storytelling.
In the First Place of My Life
Ray Young Bear
In the first place of my life
something which comes before all others
there is the sacred and holylike
recurring memory of an old teethless
bushy white-haired man
gesturing with his wrinkled hands
and squinty eyes for me to walk to him
sitting on the edge of his wooden
summer bed
being supported and guided along
like a newborn spotted fawn
who rises to the cool and minty wind
i kept looking at his yellow
and cracked fingernails
they moved back and forth against the stove
and they shined against the kerosene-
darkened
kitchen and bedroom walls
i floated over the floor towards him
and he smiled as he lifted me up to the
cardboard
ceiling and on there were symbols i later read
as that of emily
her scratched-in name alongside the face
of a lonely softball plater
remembrance two: it was shortly after he
held me
or else it was a day
or a couple of months
or a couple of years later when i saw him next
the bodies of three young men leaned against him
as he staggered out towards the night
i never knew what closed him
why i never saw him again
he was on the floor with a blanket
over his still and quiet body
above me there was a mouth moving
it was the face of a woman who had opened
the door for the three young men
she pointed to his body
this is your grandfather
and then i remember the daylight
with the bald-headed man in overalls
he too mentioned the absence
of my grandfather
i understood them both
i picture the appletree and its shade
as he was talking to me i saw a group
of people on the green grass
on the ground were table and linen cloths
with bowls and dishes of fruits and meats
the bald-headed man in overalls stood
in the brilliance of the summer daylight
his eyebrows made his face look concerned
or worried
later he stood on the same grass
he had been chosen to fill my grandfather’s
empty place
the new colored blankets around his waist
and chest glistened with fresh
fibrous wool
the beads reflected the good weather
the earth and its people stood and danced
with the beautifully clothed man
who was my grandfather
standing in between time
watching the daylight pass through
his eyes
from then on i only saw him occasionally
he would stand on his tractor
waving to each passing car on the road
as he drove home from
the soybean fields
or else he would converse with my two uncles
that the blood which ran through their
father’s veins
and theirs was unlike the rest of the tribe
in that it came from the beginnings
unlike ours
To See as Far as the Grandfather World
Ray Young Bear
The photograph. On this particular March day
in 1961, Theodore Facepaint, who was nine
years old, agreed to do a parody. With hand
balanced on hip and the left leg slightly
in front of the right, my newly found friend
positioned himself on Sand Hill before turning
to face the hazy afternoon sun. This was a pose
we had become familiar with:
the caricature
of a proud American Indian, looking out
toward the vast prairie expanse, with one hand
shielding the bronze eyes. When I projected
the image of the color 35 mm slide onto
the wall last week I remembered the sense
of mirth in which it was taken. Yet somewhere
slightly north of where we were clowning around,
Grandmother was uprooting medicinal roots
from the sandy soil
and placing them inside her flower-patterned
apron pockets to thaw out.
Twenty-nine years later, if I look long enough,
existential symbols are almost detectable.
The direction of the fiery sun in descent, for example,
is considered the Black Eagle Child Hereafter.
Could I be seeing too much? Past the west
and into the Grandfather World? Twice
I’ve caught myself asking:
Was Ted’s pose portentous? When I look
closely at the background of the Indian Dam
below—the horizontal line of water that runs
through the trees and behind Ted—I also know
that Liquid Lake with its boxcar-hopping
light is nearby.
For Ted and his Well-Off Man Church,
the comets landed on the crescent-shaped
beach and lined themselves up for a ritualistic
presentation. For Jane Ribbon, a mute healer,
a seal haunted this area. But further upriver
is where the ancient deer hunter was offered
immortality by three goddesses. While
the latter story of our geographic genesis
is fragmented, obscuring and revealing
itself as a verisimilitude, it is important.
Ted and I often debated what we would
have done had we been whisked through
a mystical doorway to a subterranean enclave.
Ted, unlike the ancient hunter who turned
down paradise, would have accepted—
and the tribe never would have flexed
its newborn spotted wings. In the hunter’s
denial we were thus assigned as Keepers
of Importance. But the question being asked
today is, Have we kept anything?
Our history, like the earth with its
abundant medicines, Grandmother used
to say, is unfused with ethereality. Yet in
the same breath she’d openly exclaim
that with modernity comes a cultural toll.
In me, in Ted, and everyone.
Stories then, like people, are subject to change.
More so under adverse conditions. They
are also indicators of our faithfulness. Since
the goddesses’ doorway was sealed shut by
our own transgressions,
Grandmother espoused that unbounded
youth would render tribal language
and religion inept, that each lavish
novelty brought into our homes would
make us weaker until there was nothing.
No lexicon. No tenets.
Zero divine intervention. She was also
attuned to the fact that for generations
our grandparents had wept unexpectedly
for those of us caught in the blinding
stars of the future.
Mythology, in any tribal-oriented society,
is a crucial element. Without it, all else
is jeopardized with becoming untrue. While
the acreages beneath Ted’s feet and mine
offered relative comfort back then,
we are probably more accountable now
to ourselves—and others.
Prophecy decrees it. Most fabled among
the warnings is the one that forecasts
the advent of our land-keeping failures.
Many felt this began last summer when
a whirlwind abruptly ended a tribal
celebration. From the north in the shape
of an angry seagull it swept up dust.
corn leaves, and assorted debris,
as it headed toward the audacious
“income-generating architecture,”
the gambling hall. At the last second
the whirlwind changed direction, going
toward the tribal recreation complex.
Imperiled, the people within the circus tent-
like structure could only watch as the panels
flapped crazily. A week later, my family said
the destruction was attributable to the gambling
hall, which was the actual point of weakness
of the tribe itself.
Which is to say the hill where a bronze-eyed
Ted once stood is under threat of impermanence.
By allowing people who were not created
by the Holy Grandfather to lead us we may
cease to own what Ted saw on the long-ago day.
From Rolling Head Valley to Runner’s Bluff
and over the two rivers
our hold is gradually being unfastened by
false leaders. They have forgotten that their
own grandparents arrived here under a Sacred
Chieftain. This geography is theirs nonetheless.
and it shall be as long as the first gifts given
are intact. In spite of everything that we are
not, this crown of hills resembles lone islands
amid an ocean of corn, soybean fields,
and low-lying fog. Invisibly clustered on
the Black Eagle Child Settlement’s slopes
are the remaining Earthlodge clans.
The western edge of this
woodland terrain overlooks the southern
lowlands of the Iowa and Swanroot Rivers,
while the eastern edge splits widely into several
valleys, where the Settlement’s main road winds
through. It is on this road where Ted and I walked.
It is on this road where Ted met a pack
of predators.
Along the color slide’s paper edge the year
1961 is imprinted. Ted and I were fourth
graders at Weeping Willow Elementary.
Nine years later, in 1970, a passenger train
took us to Southern California for college.
It proved to be a lonely place where winter
appeared high atop
the San Gabriel Mountains on clear days.
Spanish-influenced building styles, upper-middle-
class proclivities, and the arid climate had a subtle
asphyxiating effect. Instead of chopping firewood
for father’s nonexistent blizzard,
I began my evenings in Frary Dining Hall
where Orozco’s giant mural with erased privates
called Prometheus loomed above. My supper
would consist of tamales and cold shrimp salad
instead of boiled squirrel with flour dumplings.
Through mountain forest fires the Santa Ana
winds showered the campus with sparks and ashes.
In a wide valley where a smoke- and smog-darkened
night came early, the family album possessed its
own shimmery light. Pages were turned. A visual
record of family and childhood friends. Time.
Ted and I transforming,
separating. During the first Christmas break
in which we headed back to the Black Eagle
Child Settlement, Ted froze me in celluloid:
against a backdrop of snow-laden pine trees
a former self wears a windswept topcoat,
Levi bell-bottoms, cowboy boots, and tinted
glasses. Ted and I, like statues, are held
captive in photographic moments.
As the earth spins, however,
the concrete mold disintegrates,
exposing the vulnerable wire
foundation of who we are not.
Four Poems for Azalea and Aluminum Prairies
—Ray Young Bear
"...and when I found out
what she was heading for,
it was too late."
—The Guess Who
1.
It's Monday, the third week in July 2015.
At 10 AM, as it's done for thirteen years,
the tribe's garbage truck, now mud-
covered and moaning insidiously,
slides
its way down the long gravel driveway.
Imprinted on its doors are two spotted
wings, framing our Black Eagle Child
name. In the truck's cab are Ducks
Down
and Star Calf. Soon, from high above
the cat-tail marsh, small, fierce birds
take turns bull-riding a red tail hawk.
In sharp, audible protests, the raptor
surrenders
to the cottonwood shade to gaze
and marvel at the fat, writhing snake
impaled in its talons.
2.
Here, behind the picture window—
and like that prey, on a cottonwood
branch, who's about to be quartered
and splayed, I'm on the Lazy-Boy,
watching
in near-paralysis. Laconically,
the TV announces threat of afternoon
funnel clouds preceded by dangerous
heat. By sundown, as dark gray clouds
with
orange tips roll in from Jean Seberg
County, lightning sears the landscape.
After weeks of proofreading Aluminum
Prairies & Other Misnomers,
an
ice pack melts quickly over a surgery-
weakened belly. And Atom, once
a source of creativity, succumbs
to arthritis compounded
with
fatigue. At a point where I've
convinced myself elderly pain
is manageable, I tremble-point
to the cardinal points, hoping
to
re-enter hinterland normalcy.
3.
On the night Azalea vanished,
she wrote, "Long before sunset,
the shadows of Florentine streets
resonate. That's when Hombre,
the
beagle, lounges with Alchemists
and Master Blasters at the Piazza
Santo Spirito." But please be careful,
I replied, not to mix R-Cs with garrulous
company.
Its revelry might trigger galley oars
to nudge the Mediterranean awake.
Then, like pumpkins in an unkept garden,
some antiquities might cry from neglect.
Three
years ago, in hefty trunks stenciled
On the Premise of Change, she shipped
herself overseas to promote her Lake
Agassiz line of hats, scarves,
and
sunglasses. Thus, on that pivotal
night, a dream propelled me akameeki,
overseas to Florence, where a faceless
person and I were walking on dei
Serraghli,
a narrow street, looking for Hombre.
When we peered into a dimly-lit
butcher shop, I woke up. A week later,
news came that the polizia had filed
charges
on the last person the "American
fashionista was with." At some point,
it was also reported, the beagle
would fly back to South Carolina
alone
and under sedation.
4.
Not far from the hazy driveway,
while shadows of birds locked
in aerial combat flicker across
an un-mowed lawn, a crawdad
emerges
cautiously to peep from its dewy
hillside den. Laced with the scent
of dandelions and wild onions,
it scurries across the road,
reminding
me of a rebel who wears bandoliers
of Dragunov snayperskaya rounds.
Then, before the garbage truck
maneuvers past pools of rainwater,
the
crawdad backs up robotically into
the cover of cool grass, lifting
its lone claw high, like a rifle,
and mocking in defiance
the
madnesse.
