That Injun Panhandling at Pioneer Square

Gazing into a cold grey drizzle
during the moon before
return of his Salmon cousins,
he raises a coatsleeve of habit
across the moisture of his nose.

Passersby step around him
looking pointedly away
from rags and blankets
tangled in the doorway
where he slept last night.

Asking for money
only with his bleary eyes
he holds his tongue
or mumbles drink-slurred
prophesies of obscurity.

Look at him.
He used to be Chief Joseph,
this tattered old fool
who has obviously pissed
in one leg of his
odorous, sagging trousers.

Only when it became necessary
in order to save the remaining few
of his starving women and children
from another US Army massacre
did he allow soldiers to touch him.

Now he stands on concrete
where a forest stood, and
he watches oily filth
run down the gutters
toward the Salmon People.

Look at him.
He used to be Crazy Horse
this weak old derelict
who spends his BIA shekels
to buy skidrow bottles of the
poison that brings forgetfulness.
Only because General Crook, whom
he had defeated at Redbud River,
called for a meeting, did Crazy Horse
enter that small, treacherous room where
authorities murdered the great warrior.

Now he serves as the butt
of ridicule from evening revelers
who after drinking and eating
stroll boldly like real men and
make light of the broken, old brave.

Look at him.
He used to be Sequoyah
this inarticulate, blubbering drunk
who neither reads nor writes
the invaders’ language and
long ago forgot his own.

Only after President Jackson gave to Georgia
the Cherokees’ gold-bearing ancestral lands,
and congress passed the Removal Act,
only then did Sequoyah carry his schools and
bilingual newspaper away to Oklahoma.

Now descendants of those Georgia militia
repair autos and do odd jobs
pursuing Andrew Jackson twenty dollar bills
while plantation owners’ offspring
manage investments and vote republican.

Look at him.
He used to be Chief Pontiac,
this flabby statue of remorse
whose shame stems
more from loss of his world
than from his daily excesses.

Only when his confederacy of tribes exhausted
ammunition their French friends had supplied
did Pontiac turn over those eight captured forts
to the British, who later paid a barrel of whiskey
to have him murdered.

Now hip young students learn a
one-sided history in the university named for
Lord Amherst, who cunningly devastated
Pontiac’s Shawnee and Delaware allies
by gifting them with smallpox blankets.

And these rude, ignorant ghosts
enjoying the bounty of his ancestral home
will never understand his reasons
for wallowing in filth, will never appreciate
his terrible, crippling loss.

But don’t pity him, just
look at him and see why
in his alcoholic stupor
the only faith he still holds
is that after the invaders pass away
his people will survive
and their heroes will live on
in the faces and deeds
of those yet to come, the ones
he will never know.

©2003 Thomas Hubbard