You Smell Bad

“Coyote, Coyote, Please Tell Me –  What is a shaman?
A shaman I don’t know anything about. I’m a doctor, myself. When I use medicine, it’s between me, my patient, and the Creation.
Coyote, Coyote, please tell me – what is power?
It is said that power is the ability to start your chainsaw with one pull.
Coyote, Coyote, please tell me – what is magic?
Magic is the first taste of ripe strawberries, and magic is a child dancing in a summer’s rain.
Coyote, Coyote, please tell me – why is Creation?
Creation is because I went to sleep last night with a full stomach, and when I woke up this morning, everything was here.
Coyote, Coyote, please tell me who you belong to?
According to the latest survey, there are certain persons who, in poetic or scholarly guise, have claimed me like a conqueror’s prize. Let me just say once and for all, just to be done: Coyote, he belongs to none…

"There are many different kinds of bugs in this world," Coyote was telling his grandchildren. "Creation must be partial to bugs because it made so many more than other creatures. "Of course, bugs do have a lot in common with us: some are very good-looking, some sort of good-looking, and there's even some that smell kind of bad." Coyote was so busy talking that he didn't notice a stinkbug right close to his foot. "Just a minute," said the stinkbug. "Just because you don't think you smell bad doesn't mean that other creatures agree.

Matter of fact, you, Coyote, smell kind of rank to me! "And for another matter of fact, we stinkbugs kind of enjoy our own smell." Coyote couldn't argue with that and felt bad for what he'd said. He wanted to get out of this story quickly. Just then he heard the circular whisperings of Coyote Old Woman stirring a basket of acorn mush. "Hear that?" he asked. "Now there's something everyone understands. Why don't we all go have some mush?" Stinkbug liked the idea. Heloved mush and gladly set aside Coyote's recent insult. "Yes", he said, "I'd really like to do that. We stinkbugs love acorn mush, but it's very hard for us to grind the meal, you know. We have to tie pebbles to our feet and stomp these acorns for a long time."

Just then an acorn lying close by said bitterly and a bit acidly, "And I suppose you creatures think us accorns enjoy being ground up and stomped on? All we really want to do is to grow into saplings, you know." Coyote thought that this story had gone on long enough and was even getting a bit confusing. So he ended it, right here!”

~ Peter Blue Cloud (Aroniawenrate) (1935 – 2011), was a highly respected Native American poet of Mohawk and English/Welsh heritage. Born in the Turtle Clan of the Mohawk Nation on the Caughnawaga Reserve in Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada, Blue Cloud was raised speaking Mohawk and only later learned French and English. While his early experiences living with the tribe and a grandfather, who taught him the art of storytelling. He travelled to the west coast of the USA where he spent years as an iron-worker, logger and ranch-hand. He participated in the craziness of Beat and Hippy cultures in the California of the early 1960s through the mid- ‘70s – learning from those amorphous “movements” yet distancing himself from their excessive self-absorption.  Spending time with Maidu Elders in California, he was strengthened by their wisdom and their stories. In 1972 his history of the 1969 Native “Occupation” of the former Alcatraz Prison/Island – “Alcatraz is not an Island” – was published.  In 1975-76 – and again from 1983-85 – he wrote for and edited Akwesasne Notes, a Native journal published out of Akwesasne, New York. He was a recipient of the American Book Award in 1981 – chosen by other writers.