Badly-Sewn Doll Poem by Laura Kiernan

I have tried and tried and goddammit, I can't figure it out
Because who I am is hidden to even myself
I wear the pale, pink skin of my French mother
And the black hair and eyes of my Navajo father
So I look like a badly-sewn doll
With an Irish name that no one knows how I managed to get
From a French mother and a Navajo father

I once drove eight hundred miles to an anonymous reservation
Anonymous to me because it wasn't my own
Anonymous to you because you don't really care, do you?
And on that land they stared at me
Some little suyapi on the rez with her dyed-blue hair
Coming to save the poor, drunk browns
Where's her youth group? She forgot them?
And I looked like a badly-sewn doll

And walking down an anonymous path on the anonymous rez
With an anonymous woman pregnant with an anonymous child
I wept anonymous tears for anonymous deaths
Of anonymous men and woman I never knew existed
Because, really, aren't all Indians anonymous?
On reservations with names we can't pronounce
On lands they didn't really want
And I say 'they' because it's not me
Because I'm some badly-sewn doll

Thirty-nine percent of Native women have been abused
And are two or three times more likely to be raped
But you didn't know that
Because they're all anonymous
I can't include myself in those statistics
Because I don't really exist
I don't belong in the white world with my blue hair
And I don't belong in the Native world with my white skin
So I'm a badly-sewn doll
Who fell from her shelf
And got kicked under a hope chest
And is waiting for someone to find her
And put her back on the shelf where she belongs
And who wishes they'd invent a 'Half-and-half' box for her to check when she fills out health insurance forms
Because goddammit, I can't figure it out
So who the hell am I?