I have tried and tried and goddammit, I can't figure it out <br />Because who I am is hidden to even myself <br />I wear the pale, pink skin of my French mother <br />And the black hair and eyes of my Navajo father <br />So I look like a badly-sewn doll <br />With an Irish name that no one knows how I managed to get <br />From a French mother and a Navajo father <br /> <br />I once drove eight hundred miles to an anonymous reservation <br />Anonymous to me because it wasn't my own <br />Anonymous to you because you don't really care, do you? <br />And on that land they stared at me <br />Some little suyapi on the rez with her dyed-blue hair <br />Coming to save the poor, drunk browns <br />Where's her youth group? She forgot them? <br />And I looked like a badly-sewn doll <br /> <br />And walking down an anonymous path on the anonymous rez <br />With an anonymous woman pregnant with an anonymous child <br />I wept anonymous tears for anonymous deaths <br />Of anonymous men and woman I never knew existed <br />Because, really, aren't all Indians anonymous? <br />On reservations with names we can't pronounce <br />On lands they didn't really want <br />And I say 'they' because it's not me <br />Because I'm some badly-sewn doll <br /> <br />Thirty-nine percent of Native women have been abused <br />And are two or three times more likely to be raped <br />But you didn't know that <br />Because they're all anonymous <br />I can't include myself in those statistics <br />Because I don't really exist <br />I don't belong in the white world with my blue hair <br />And I don't belong in the Native world with my white skin <br />So I'm a badly-sewn doll <br />Who fell from her shelf <br />And got kicked under a hope chest <br />And is waiting for someone to find her <br />And put her back on the shelf where she belongs <br />And who wishes they'd invent a 'Half-and-half' box for her to check when she fills out health insurance forms <br />Because goddammit, I can't figure it out <br />So who the hell am I?<br /><br />Laura Kiernan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/badly-sewn-doll/
