Trigger Dance - Excerpt

ANADARKO POW WOW

WHAY NAH. THE OLD LANGUAGE LODGED IN THEIR HEAD. FOR this, then, the young men danced. Kiowa, Caddo, Creek, Chichasaw, Cheyenne, Ponca, Pawnee, Osage, Cherokee. For this, they danced in headdress & feather bustle, bells & leggings, beaded moccasins & breastplate. Not all of them, no, not the boys walking the fairgrounds snagging girls. They had already dropped into hopelessness. For them, the sun rolled across the plains & off the edge of Oklahoma like a gutter ball. But the young men in the bright arena danced the buffalo dance, snake dance, straightdance, the fancy war dance, while singers chanted "hey ye hey ye" & beat their drums in the heat. They danced on the trail up through the black sky where ancestors waited with the bruised face of the moon. Even if their lives were a hole they crawled into, they dances on the great plains of the country with a flag with red stripes of blood. A pah nuh. They heard the dead language again. Pin-cushion, all of them. How had they survived their struggle & defeat? Why hadn't their race folded up & disappeared in the dust where the feet of the young men beat the arena ground? Nuh hekka. The warrior moon steadied the dusty haze of the fairgrounds where a stream of cars still drove into the field to park. Meanwhile the young men strutted in the arena like prairie cocks, looking here, looking there, in step with the drums as though strange ballet dancers or tiptoeing bowlers, vibrant, transcending, in tune with the dead.