Indian Mascot, 1959

Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall,

the weird debauch and daring debacle

of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock

processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead,

defeated Indians cut from trees, where,

in the twilight, they had earlier been hung.

"Just dummies," laughs our dad, "Red Indians hung

or burned—it's only in jest." Every fall

brings the Big Game against Stanford, where

young scholars let off steam before the debacle

they may face of failed exams. "You're dead

wrong," he says to Mom. "They don't mock

real, live Indians." Around UC campus, mock

lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung

the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead

from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen

indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle

that happened three generations ago in California's hills, where

Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where

did they go, those Indian ghosts?) "Their kids perform mock

war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle

white folks let loose," chides Mom. "Meanwhile we hang

portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall

the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead

because he fought in a White man's war. How many dead

Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears

on my soul." In the dark car we go silent, and the fall

night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock

the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs

over the tule fogs. I've never heard the word "debacle”

before and wonder what it means. "What's a debacle,

Mom? " I ask. "Oh, honey, it's a terrible and deadly

collapse. Complete ruin." I've noticed how the hung

Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear

old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moc-

casins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall,

living Indians at Feather Falls

leave tobacco to mark that, indeed,

we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.