good evening happy to have you all hear i'm kimberly nightingale and i'm the executive director of the same farm act as the mask in the kitchen if we could turn the sound off please thank you it's good to see all of you tonight if you have never seen a st paul mn act here it is and we put a new book out every year our new one two thousand and fourteen will be coming out september twelfth and our big party is right here at the black dock cafe so if you want to come and buy a book and get to know some of the authors come and show up here it's a free party and we have a big greeting next door at the clouds and water scent center and there's lots of artwork from the new book that'll be at the gallery this is this year's book and it's been out for almost a year if you'd like to purchase one you can purchase it right here at the the same almanac is a literary organization and we create opportunities for understanding learning and building community through sharing each other stories and we like to think our sponsors tonight this activity is made possible in part by funds provided by the lowertown future fund of the st paul foundation and we'd also like to think nigel perry he will be doing some of the filming tonight and also st paul neighborhood network shelley behind us is filming this and it will be airing on s p n and dan tilson is doing our sound so we give them all a big shout out writer she's a former recipient of the loft in rhodes writers of color for native americans and she studied poetry and writer jim northrup she's won many awards one was a st paul company's leadership  hundred six and her second children's book the farmer's market families working together was released in the spring of two thousand and one please welcome marcy rended thank you kimberly thank you all for coming out i know that there's some big events happening in the community tonight they're having like ceremony and prayers because of the supreme court decision that set back the equality act and the supreme court decided that this little girl should go live with the white adoptive family instead of with her native american dad so i know that the indian community in the twin cities is doing a lot of things that i think a lot of them are happening at the same time as this event when i was asked to curate this show one of the things that i thought about was that before contact as a people we didn't sit down and write poetry one we didn't have a written language so our  were actually songs that came to us in dreams or that came through us through visions one of the earliest books that recorded some of them is this book by  the englishman military officers who had asked him to explain his position in the new world kishka mung responded to the question with a personal woodland song the song belongs of the  imaginative events magical and spiritual flights and intuitive lyrical images of woodland life so one of them is the first to come epitaph among the birds bringing the rain crow is my name the initial abbey hear music not only in the human voice but in the sounds of animals and trees and an ice cracking on the lakes the people are surrounded with what is alive in dreams and visions in stories and in ceremonial events are never alone and so when i was putting together the performance for tonight i invited people to come and perform  not only write poems but also create music and our first performer is going to be he's fourteen he's from in a role that fund a lot  this is called freewriting three or why do i deserve to not remember i have trouble remembering things my social environment that's my crutch my mother tells me i love playing with those ridiculous tin plastic stove smell for children with their parents always on the work with their alternate jobs and lives i don't remember it all too well i wish i could remember maybe maybe maybe my memory as a dead bird found outside my house on a frigid windy day lay it on with wicker basket hang it on the handle of an umbrella and let it go the sky shall b i am the river you skip stones upon as a child those were always good days i would remind your feet of where they really blind you skipped rocks across me teasing my skin at intervals which only can decide the sun would sink in envy i don't want to let you go i would pull at your toes in eager frustration that you left i still keep the stones you gave me am the stones you skips upon the river when you were a child i watched you helplessly as you cast me into the depths of the water feeling myself less than now i must wait wait for time to pity me wait to regain myself along beach sides where i truly belong i have been poisoned by next gen source no longer natural you ate me and i be you friend i am you as a child yet i am you no more i didn't realize i was fading until i was already gone i do not understand what you become but we are not the same we used to co exist i could play well you could work you forgot me come back to us the river the stones and i come back some day we will wait for you and you alone take your shoes off feel that infinite and perfections on the cold dusk beach pick up  feel yourself step back planting your foot back harder at the sound feel the pebbles and the clay filter through your toes and to spit in your next move feel yourself throw feel yourself throw the rock a blur composed of the forgotten melodies of your childhood of our childhood washed the river rock pull itself away from you loosening breaking the boundaries of distance  time aside from below never leave us again weathered cracks body and soul caged just for us last hour and run to the corner of your cage in the corner closest to home you real home don't struggle don't worry this is your home now weathered cracked body and soul stirring as we pass gilts denial now the round of applause for jay ok i'm i was stunned by like how you can read it off the phone i know that some of you came because my granddaughter said one is on the fire to future that i want to enhance whether you want to it's all a game we've got to play and you gotta fight hard like america on d day but people don't know today is that you can get vast amounts of knowledge from books but all these kids tr drugs and are hooked walking down the ghetto streets were broken homes are as common as broken glass and the underpaid teachers rubbing their head looking around their empty class knowing just knowing their students are out the building around the corner selling drugs because at home there's no such things as kisses and hugs home is a small dilapidated house with the front door gone and every kid on the block has a dad who's an ex con they watch as their life and dream slowly crumble away even though the media and the government says it all will be ok but they know in their shattered community where they stand beaten yet still standing hurt it would take a lot more than just their voices to be  mixed signals are being sent and creating mixed feelings you see it's our creativity that the money's been stealing because the songs that were in the book that i read from before are like from the late one thousand hundreds in the early one thousand nine hundred and the young people that are creating songs and poems today are the ones that are going to be read in books like that one in the next millennium the next car is like just one of the most incredible performers that i've seen here in did you guys like jake i thought he did a really great job i also have a phone and i used to really kind of heat on people who read poetry off their phones like oh wow you're really cool you have an i phone and then i got one i mean they're really useful that makes us bruises and linger long after everyone else has gone home and the places that hurt us the most the same that makes us refuse medicine for the fear that we won't be healed for fear of not knowing how to be without the chips on our shoulders that have grown down into our bones for fear of success or failure that plucks away at the possibility of hope when my brother and i were young we patched each other's scripts and punctures packed them with cotton balls and sealed them with masking tape always so carefully because when he broke his hand my face you state this is how i know that when you close a wound that's never been cleaned that bester ears and burns my generation has learned to wear scars w years ago that we're fine but sometimes they still keep me up at night and when i finally sleep i dream of atomic bombs unjust wars middle passage boarding school they didn't happen to me but i heard the stories they say forgiveness brings peace but peace is that god never stays with any of us for long so we go to bed early stay up all night till pipes and the bottles do yoga go to meetings cut risk go to the gym stay home stay away pop pills meditate look for ways out from under old hurts that seem like south minneapolis arsenic into the soil that nourishes our reds maybe we can't help it that we put isn't the very things we tr sustain prick our fingers as we try to sit china narratives from the threads of our own lives someone's child will carry these one day slip into them like old coats and say that it didn't happen to them but they h our stories so that's what i get for not checking my sound thanks oh god thank you this is a lot of up and down but i think i'm making it work i hope so i'm going to do one more poem and i will relinquish the  phone to our next amazing performer indigenous land and sea did i sign treaties with no man i don't need one to need me love me adore me beat me cheat on me strip my resources and leave me only to return when he learns the wor my heart is an indigenous land raped over years and years of take over that made over the earth into someone she doesn't know now the color of scar tissue is fair skin tone my heart is indigenous land torn apart and carved by chain link fences topped with wire barbs that dig deep and leave ragged welts and train track marks on legs and stomachs and chest and arms my heart is not broken but it's come close years and years of strip mining taking liberties and making holes is nothing sacred not to you my heart i kind of put her on the spot because i said the evening is an issue not the songs poems and i said so if you've got something to sing bring it she said most of the time she does your poetry up here and then we have a guest raphael whose last name i won't even begin to try to pronounce and raphael is going to sing as one song my mom and my aunties have been doing show business for about sixty or seventy years and i'm hearing their i add to this its voice right now going let me tell you somethin song you never go up on stage people you're not prepared on stage i'd see i got sober around nineteen ninety two so this is a song i was singing back in the middle eighty's when i was still getting paid to sing at bars for seventy five bucks a night and all i could drink that's not one of my socks and i was and i'm winging it so i hope i remember the chord progression this is a jimmy buffett song called the why you know and i know i did i think of it a few months  ago one of marcy's nieces tagged me up on facebook and said post as one of your favorite songs post a song that says something about you was to song that speaks to you or says tells your story living my life me which got even more pissed off by the year or two later i finally told the story good old buddy of mine who was living at luther the same time and he was so tickled g this is a true story you see there is going to be this big feast at my place of employment so i wanted to get there early and help out so you're at about four m in the morning and i kind o lumber down the front steps of my house and into my car it was a whole day and a of a michigan and i knew the roads would be icy the tree on my front lawn i dropped some tobacco in the eastern direction and thought good thoughts but then i turned to the southern direction and thought good thoughts we should well for everyone even the people who annoyed me and i turned to the western direction and i asked f sorry a couple seconds later there was this big old flood light shining right in my face now since i was asking for acceptance i decided i would not speak my mind just yet and i turned to the northern direction hoping to avert the glare of the flood light mr police man was still in his vehicle when he asks me are you all right cannot change and the courage to change the things that i can what is baffled my dedicated public servant and as he pulled onto the driveway he instructed me not to go anywhere you just hang on a second b you gotta be kidding me i thought visions of being laughed at in jail for prayer and where right through my head the officer with flashlight in hand driver's license i'm telling myself you do want to make it to work this morning mr policeman and pointed to my house and asked me if that was my place of residence why yes i replied thinking better of i did mention this is a true story right i wanted to laugh at this man but i was just too outraged officer actually spoke the words oh he got  serve they ran my driver's license through the computer to make sure i wasn't some dangerous criminal after that they wanted to make sure my auto insurance and registration was current in my name and they shine their flashlights inside of my vehicle in search of a concealed weapon while about ten minutes of gone by before they were convinced i was not a minister society and i was free to go on my said i'll accept whatever you got for me better be careful what i ask for because i got to put down the tobacco and step away from the  thank you raf yeah so our next performer is mark ericson i have no one mark probably as long as i've known anybody except for my kids here in the twin cities he sings on the sing a couple of them and take it from there oh back quite a few years thirty some years ago anyway and so anyway when my father and my grandfather and  i've been learning learning the language i'm kind of a baby talker but i started singing to my daughter when she was a baby and then more more so i want to thank again all the performers i just think it's really important that as native people i mean it's like we've always had our own voice and we've always had our own way of expressing ourselves and talking with our spirits talking with our hearts and today when i mean when the whole spoken word community and there's this way of sort of taking on other people's traditions but what i really wanted to do tonight was to show who we really are as native people  had this evening one last one the end again this is from the last minute linnean all around the sky with my sound i come to you