Tag Archives: Marjane Ambler

September 26, 2026 · 2:55 pm

Listening

6/2/04

Carrie Billy just sent me a lost poem from the past, which is below. She is moving to Navajo Tech to take up a job that I absolutely loved, Provost. I am so looking forward to when she arrives on campus. In the meantime, she has been packing and trying to decide what to do with tons of stuff accumulated over decades of living in DC.

Al Kuslikis is something of a packrat, she tells me, and the two of them found the following poem in my scrawled handwriting in the stuff he had at the DC house. Al is a wonderful friend, and I think I scrawled this out at a bar while Al had one of his usual beers that is next to Union Station in DC, although my memory can’t be trusted fully.

For years I wrote poems on napkins, or scratch paper, and on anything handy while I was with people from the early years of the tribal college movement and then handed one of the people with me what I had just written. In my book, Meditations on Ceremonies of Beginnings, published by Tribal College Press https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GD88R99R?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback, I describe how Marjane Ambler, the former Editor of the Tribal College Journal, found out what I was doing, yelled at me in a crowded Irish DC restaurant, and then made me promise to make sure I told everyone I gave a poem to that they were to send her a copy. The copies she collected over the years became Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings.

Of course, several of the poems (who knows how many) were not saved, and I kept on writing the poems over the years and giving them away.

This is one of those poems that happened that has long been lost, though Carrie and Al have now rescued it:

When you throw a stone into a pond

And see concentric circles flowing outward in the water,

You see the conversation that has occurred

Between the stone and water.

I listen,

The voices of humans in the evening waft into air,

Eventually being absorbed by the earth’s great silence.

I listen

And hear how human voices are absorbed into sounds

Made by crickets, stones, water, sky.

I listen

And try to find the center of the universe, meaning.

In the deep woods a frog croaks.

I see an elder, an Indian man, dancing,

Alone in the early spring,

A full moon broken by the dark trunks of white pine,

Dancing,

Trying to bring balance back into the world.

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June 14, 2019 · 4:33 pm

Meditation on the Ceremonies of Beginnings

I just signed a contract with Tribal College Press (TCP) for the publication of a book of poetry titled, Meditation on the Ceremonies of Beginnings.  In 1972 I graduated from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and found a teaching position at an alternative school, Menominee County Community School, which was one of the first seven school of the Indian controlled schools movement in this country.  It was through my association with Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, the greatest American Indian leader in Indian education during my lifetime, that I found out about the tribal colleges.

When Dr. Verna Fowler asked me to help her found what became College of the Menominee Nation in 1993, I started writing poems about the tribal college movement and its founding.  I have written a substantial number of poems over the decades, celebrating, mourning, living the tribal college dream of creating a new form of higher education driven by American Indian cultures and languages throughout the United States.

Most of the early poems were written during American Indian Higher Education conferences, or later, World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium conferences, in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia.  I usually wrote them on scrap paper or napkins and then promptly gave them to whomever I was with at the time.  Luckily for me, Marjane Ambler, then Editor of the Tribal College Journal, prevailed upon person after person to save them and send them to her.  Later on, once a handful of the poems appeared in print, I stated saving them myself.

The poems tell a different kind of history about the tribal college and university and World Indigenous controlled institutions of higher education movements in the United States and worldwide.  I am grateful that Bradley Shreve and Rachael Marchbanks at TCP unexpectedly offered to publish the book.

This has been quite a year!  In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, my Washington Island historical novel about the black fisherman community that settled on the island before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act that led to the Civil War, should be coming out in the near future.  Now Meditation on the Ceremonies of Beginnings.  I’m really going to have to do some marketing work.  I hope some of you might consider buying either one or both works.  I’ve certainly worked hard enough on both of them.

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