Abena Songbird |

Beloved Win, Dawn Little Sky – Lakota Living Treasure

(Dakota Lakota Journal, 2006 – reprinted in Native Legacy Magazine – Vol. 2 Issue 4 – Fall 2009) Photo: Traditional & contemporary Lakota artist and renowned Northern traditional dancer, Dawn Little Sky, outside her home in Yellow Bear Canyon,...

“Still Dreaming” Cheyenne River Sioux contemporary ceramic artist Keri Fischer

“I want to teach some of the Native youth, the students, that you can be a nurse and an artist at the same time – an accountant or a painter….” “Right now I believe my pottery defines who I am.” By Abena Songbird Native Legacy Magaine (Vol. 3 Issue 3 Summer...

RoundDance

Poet Abena Songbird, webmaster Derek Wilson *collaborated with the Native American Cultural Center of San Francisco to produce “Round Dance,” a group poem instigated on the Web among Native American poets, visual artists and writers. Abena, as lead poet, crafted the...

"My voice is theirs comes in whispers One Wail Rising"

-excerpt from "Bitterroot"

This land
unlike a map
is not stagnant unmoving
not fixed flat on a page
a frozen terrain
new rivers may be
carved daily
by logs fallen to lightning
deep channels
from the scat of deer, moose, wolf and bear
may grow the rarest blooms
tendrils, furls of green fern…

Songbird’s work in Bitterroot…

… is stark and tender, has wisdom and real information for modern human beings. It rises out of and continues the Native tradition of Mary TallMountain. Poems like One Wail Rising invent and carry forward what it means to be Indian in urban America. There is an authentic and valuable voice here.
–Duane BigEagle

These poems offer…

… surprising images that are stunning and fresh… new songs to our ears. It’s like being in a circle, hearing the diversity of metaphors, from the street to the forest, from a fresh water river to the sewers of a city. . . Abena Songbird’s voice is daring and real.
–Janice Mirikitani
San Francisco Poet Laureate 2000