In the Indian Casino I Get Who I Am

Facing each machine a vinyl-clad stool
supports a gambler's end. Cigarettes lodged
in the corners of their mouths, they pull
impotent levers and wait for warm milk

to spill. Ancestors wink from their graves,
listen to the Indians scoring their loose change.
The slots sting my ears with their singing,
with their quickening music of loss

jostling loose the memory of a memory
my mind traces the edges of: the story
of a story told to me by my father,
of a great-grandmother, full-blooded Blackfoot,

choosing to marry into the white man's race,
which means, if I do the soft division, the solution
of my blood contains a sixteenth of her.
That’s equal to how much Indian

I see in this casino, with its Italian restaurant, Vegas-style
buffet, and, at the top, The Space Bar, collecting stars
in it's purse, crowning this high-rise hotel
like a newborn born of a newborn. At its feet:

two pools, two jacuzzi's, a water slide and a lazy
river moving faces that look no more Indian
than I do. I am ashamed of my forefathers
who stripped skin from the back of a way of life,

made bridal reins of its beaten hide
and rode its stolen horse into history.
Another grandmother story: An Iroquois woman
washing by a stream, come upon by soldiers

who beat her to almost-death because she was
savage. Instead of dying she bore a child
who resembled the man whose name
she would never know.

I wish I knew the name of that child; 
there will always be a measure of her
in my children's children. When they forget
who they are – because they will forget – 

show them the Indian's casino. Name their dead.