What Being Ponca Means To Me by Cliff Taylor

Almost 40, I stand as still as a cigar store Indian and think about my life. What does it mean to me to be Ponca?

There was a time, a long time, where I couldn’t really answer that; at least not sufficiently. But now I feel like I can.

I was born in 1981, grew up in the ‘80s, a time of action figures, Predator, and Nintendo. During that decade our tribe, The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, was in a bit of a limbo, having been eliminated as a federally recognized tribe in 1966 with 442 Poncas listed on the enrollment sheets. Where did we go when the government dissolved our federal recognition? Nowhere. We continued living, organically growing and pushing forward with our narrative of our lives, struggling and rejoicing, skidding out and overcoming, being Indians and surviving no matter what.

In 1990, when I was 9 and about to enter Middle School in my hometown of Columbus, Nebraska, after much concerted effort and odds-defying work, our tribe was reinstated as a federally recognized tribe, with President Bush Senior himself signing the Ponca Restoration Act. In my twenties, surfing the net on my night off, I remember coming across this article with my uncle Ronnie Picotte in it. Asking him about this period when we’d lost our recognition, he said, “Other kids and other Indians in school would ask me, ‘What kind of Indian are you?’ And I would say, ‘Ponca.’ And they would say, ‘I never heard of that kind of Indian.’ It would hurt when they said that. They were trying to get rid of us and it was like they were succeeding.” (This is not the direct quote as I couldn’t find the article again but it’s what I remember.)

In the ‘90s I grew up and experienced a whole memoir’s worth of stuff (see my unpublished memoir, Special Dogs), getting into art, reading like a madman, negotiating the tough-and-go realities of abuse, falling in love for the first couple times, having legit visions, and developing the character of myself that remains relatively unchanged to this day. I went to a few of our tribe’s rebooted Annual Powwows, some funerals up in Niobrara, went back to Norfolk all the time to hang with my grandpa and grandma and aunts and uncles, but I didn’t know much about myself as a Ponca, beyond the fact that I was one. I think this was and is the case for a lot of Poncas and other Indians today: we know we are one but that’s about it. We’re like this garden bed in stasis, packed full of a million unique cultural and spiritual seeds, more underground than flowering, more potential than brilliant, ravishing ecosystem. Like the action figure still in the package, gathering dust in a drawer in the attic. That’s how it was for me, at least. I was still waiting to come out of storage.

In the 2000s, freshly dropped out of college to go exploring and follow the material of all these visions I was continuing to have, I began to learn a little something about my Ponca self and identity. It was not easy and yet I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else. I was painfully insecure about how little I knew, even how to interact with other Indians, other Poncas outside of my family. I was shy like a freakshow oddity, tongue-tied, a shivering mouse. But in my heart I wanted to know, I wanted to answer the questions that were racing inside me. As fate would have it, at age 21, I went to my first sweat. It was like I ducked through a portal and found myself surrounded by a special eternity where my ancestral seeds could all rattle to life, my body could with great relief fill up with the essence of my people, and all my questions could become answers I never dreamed possible. At a sweat with the Indian doctor I first Sundanced with, this man, Joe Badmoccasin, said, “My teacher, Joe Eagle Elk, said that when you crawl into a sweat it should feel like you’ve come home. That’s how it feels when I come in here.” That was how it felt for me too. I had come home. (Home. The greatest thing I could hope to find as a Ponca. And now I carry it with me wherever I go.)

I gratefully spent my twenties traveling backwards into my people’s cosmos, Sundancing, visiting regularly and extensively with old people, consciously if unobtrusively filling a personal internal filing cabinet with as many stories as possible, attending that annual powwow near-religiously and allowing myself to be saturated by it, connecting with and talking to my larger, extended family there; I attempted to wrap my head around as much of my tribe’s contemporary being as I could, to follow developments via conversations, the newspaper, and events at my local Ponca center and elsewhere; I aspired to know the spiritual contours and dimensions of our tribe, stacked up all the literal dreams I had which piecemeal and powerfully illuminated an undying superstructure that carried and contained and upheld the more visible landscape of our tribe’s doings and renovations; I listened intently to all of my regular and inspiring relatives as they talked and shared about anything and everything, experiencing the healing beauty of how one can become a real, humble repository of the profound story of the tribe’s life. In this way I found myself full of meat, substance, soul, my inner life overflowing with the very things I felt myself tragically lacking and missing at the outset, my consciousness now Ponca because I lived for my people and the work of seeing how I individually could be of help and of service. Reflecting upon it in this moment, I feel like this was a miracle. A miracle the ancestors orchestrated for not just me but many of us, so that we could embody what is possible for every Ponca, for every Native that’s out there. And I believe this is what’s waiting for everyone, when all those seeds get the right sunlight and water and love, when all those millions of seeds get to blast to life.

What does it mean to me to be Ponca then?

Being Ponca means going home to learn some from the abundant cultural wealth that is actually the opposite of the bullshit, wrongheaded picture that tries to portray us as a tribe of just remnants and ruins -such a myth completely misperceives the awesome genius guiding the life of our tribe. There is more to learn than could ever be accomplished in a single or even several lifetimes; hearteningly, beautifully so. That was the way it was way back when and that’s the way it still is.

Being Ponca means practicing our lifeways every day and watching with tears in my eyes how doing so shapes my life such that it begins to match the geometry, poetry, textures, feeling-spaces, and psyche of my inexpressibly potent and robust, beautiful and human, essentially Ponca ancestors. My face becoming theirs. My prayers becoming theirs. My story becoming theirs.

Being Ponca means being a permanent, passionately interested student of everything that’s going on with my tribe, of our history, our traditions, our ongoing cultural-resurrection project, our language, customs, foods, and even of the things that’re in the air but not back fully in circulation yet. Studying away with my human faculties because everything integrated into my person enriches the stream of such as it flows amongst the tribe in the flesh and in the present, as well as backwards to the ancestors and forwards to the future generations. Feeding this wellspring of joy in myself feeds this wellspring of joy in the whole and I love it, fiercely and deeply.

Being Ponca means living with the land and geography of Niobrara, our people’s ancestral homeland, our tribe’s vibrant stronghold, in my heart every day, my memories of what I’ve seen and experienced there swimming about constantly like the most ancient and wonderful fish in the river of me, definitively present, always splashing around and getting the floor of my apartment wet, flavoring my thoughts, appearing in my feelings like the shimmering influences of all my sweet and beloved ancestors themselves, ready to jump out of me and stop time at any moment.

Being Ponca means truly enjoying and embracing the dreams and responsibilities I’ve been given in this life, applying all towards the helping of the people, in whatever concrete or mystical, direct or indirect, immediate or long-view, small or not so small, form that may take. It means using what I’ve been given to help my people and loving the grand design of how that all shakes out.

Being Ponca means following in the footsteps of my great-great-great grandpa Chief Standing Bear, by discovering and intuiting the ways that I can honor the values of his life in the flesh of my own, small and humble as it is, to perpetuate the spirit that expresses in those values when they are truly and seriously lived.

Being Ponca means always remembering the gospel my grandpa Cliff Senior shared with me at the powwow when I was a teenager. It was dark and it was just the two of us sitting at a picnic table by our tents. My grandpa was not a man of many words. Kind of out of nowhere, he broke the silence, saying, “You love your family no matter what. Whether they’re an alcoholic or on drugs, you love them no matter what.”

Being Ponca means always remembering my family and always loving them no matter what.

This is some, but not all, of what being Ponca means to me. I love being Ponca, getting to carry my people’s story through the strange land of this age, of these times.

I love talking about my people and sharing about our lives, the spirit that we live with.

I love that we are still here and that we have so much to say.

Almost 40, thinking about all this, this Ponca is happy.

By Cliff Taylor

Cliff Taylor is a writer, a poet, a speaker, and an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He has written a non-fiction book about the little people and recently completed a memoir, Special Dogs, about coming-of-age in Nebraska. Contact Cliff @ tayloc00@hotmail.com