An Open Letter to Illegal Aliens

Drawing and poem by Roxy Gordon (Tu Gah Juk Juk Ka Na Hok Sheena / First Coyote Boy), Choctaw / Assiniboine, 1988

It wasn’t that those old Indians
had such bad immigration laws.
It’s just that you
European wetbacks came
in such vast numbers,
the Sioux and Comanche border patrol
couldn’t keep up.

And even after you’ve overrun them
and taken their jobs and stolen everything
you could steal,
still, they’ll let you stay.
It ain’t you, you see, illegal aliens,
that the American continents don’t want.
It’s that baggage you slipped through customs—
send it back; you can stay.

Send back your capitalism.
Capitalism kills and steals.
Ask virtually every imperialized human being
in the whole suffering world about that.
Send back your communism.
Communism kills and steals.
Ask the Kirghiz of Afghanistan.
Ask the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua.
Send back all your green-frog-skin materialism.
Money kills and steals.
Your green dollars have worked the working class
to death for generations and stolen from them
the possibility of life lived like human beings
are supposed to live.

Ask the water and the air what
grief your green dollars have wrought.
Ask the cut, bleeding, poisoned earth.

Send back your Christianity.
Christianity kills and steals.
Ask every Indian who ever
ran into a Spanish priest.
Ask the uncounted dead of your own
holy wars.

Send back your Judaism.
Judaism kills and steals.
Ask the Palestinians;
ask the Lebanese.
Why did you smuggle all that stuff
in, anyway? 

Things had been going along pretty well
here for thirty- or forty-thousand years.
Why didn’t you try to earn American
ways and American realities? 
If you liked your European isms and anitys
so much, why didn’t you stay in Europe with them?
You want to be an American,
then be an American.
Love it or leave it.
Any gringo born in America
is as native American
as Crazy Horse.
Why the hell don’t 
you act like it? 

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Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We’re honored to share much more from the great poet, artist, activist, and musician Roxy Gordon with you soon.