I'm going to read you a couple more.
[WHISPERING] My phone is still playing the music.
The music is always playing in me, Hannah.
You can't stop the music.
[LAUGHTER] Isn't that a song?
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm going to have a soundtrack for the recording,
which is fine.
Not the typical flute music you would expect, right?
That'll be a big surprise for the archives.
My voice is a little scratchy or froggy.
I had strep throat a few weeks ago,
and so I had to take antibiotics and stuff.
But then I had an event in Chicago,
where I met your friend.
I see you back there, yeah.
I had a reading there at the Poetry Foundation.
And, you know, I was coughing, so I felt bad
and I wanted to have a disclaimer that
said that I had been sick and I wanted people
to know I wasn't contagious.
So I wanted to say that.
And then I couldn't resist, so I said I wasn't contagious.
And then I said, well, I might be,
and then I said that, actually, the reason why I had come
was to give back smallpox to them.
And it was like a Poetry Foundation audience,
and they're just like--
Yeah.
I'm going to read another basketball one.
So I'll read this and then the small prose piece,
and then I'll read a poem.
And then if you guys have any questions,
I'm open for questions.
But, like, not about if you have any land coming to you,
you know.
[LAUGHTER]
My friends said they're going to get
me a T-shirt that said, "I'm not Navajo
and you're not Cherokee."
Because every time I go to reading,
people just say that I'm Navajo, and then
they tell me all the types of native they are
and that they have land somewhere, do
I know where it is, and can I help them find it.
[LAUGHTER]
See?
That makes everybody uncomfortable, doesn't it?
They are just like--
no one will look at each other right now.
Nobody.
Now you know how we felt for, like, 400 years.
"Run 'n' Gun.
I learned to play ball on the rez,
on outdoor courts, where the sky was our ceiling.
Only a tribal kid shot has an arc made of sky.
We balled in the rez park against a tagged backboard
with a chain for a net, where I watched a Hualapai
boy from Peach Springs dunk the ball in a pair of flip-flops
and slip on the slick concrete to land on his wrist.
His fibula fractured and ripped up through his skin like
a tusk, which didn't stop him from pumping his unhurt arm
into the air, yelling, 'Yeah, Clyde the Glide,
motherfuckers!'
before some adult rushed him off to the emergency room.
I ran games in the abandoned schoolyard with an 8 foot fence
we had to hop, where I tore so many pairs of shorts
on the top spikes and where when my little brother got snagged,
trying to climb down, my cousin and I
let him hang by the waistband of his underwear
for an entire game of 11.
And if that cousin hadn't overdosed on heroin
a few years later, he might have proved us right
and been the first rez jump man.
I got run by my older brother on our slanted driveway,
the same brother I write about now, who taught me
that there is nothing easy in our desert, who blocked
every shot I ever took against him until I
was about 12 years old.
By then, his addictions had stolen his game.
I learned the game with my brothers and cousins,
with my friends and enemies.
We had jacked up shoes and mismatched socks.
Our knees were scabbed.
And we licked our lips chapped.
We were small, but we learned to play big.
Big enough to beat the bigger, older white kids at the rec
center on the hill, which to get to,
we crossed underneath the I-40 freeway,
across the train tracks, and through a big, sandy wash.
We played bigger and bigger until we began winning.
And we won by doing what all Indians before us
had done against their bigger, wider opponents--
we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster
than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court,
game after game.
We became the weather.
We blew by them.
We rained buckets.
We lit up the gym with our moves.
We learned something that was more important than fist.
At least at that age, we learned to make guns of our hands,
and we pulled the trigger on jumpers all damn day.
And when they talked about the way
we played, they called it run and gun,
and it made them tired before they ever stepped on the court.
Just thinking about a pickup game against us
made the white boys from the junior high and high school
teams go to sleep.
And while they slept, we played like dreams."