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631 Madeline Fielding Sayet (b. 1989) Madeline Sayet spent her childhood in Norwich and Uncasville, Connecticut. She was brought up on stories, dreams, and humor and learned the importance of never forsaking any of those things. She spent her early years listening to the stories of her great-aunt, Mohegan medicine woman Dr. Gladys Tantaquidgeon, and her mother, current medicine woman Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel. This is her first published story. Since writing it, she received her bfa in theater from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2010, the White House Champion of Change Award for Native American Youth in 2011, and her ma in arts politics from nyu in 2012. She now works as a director and performer based in New York, where she has directed the premieres of Miss Lead, by Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), William S. Yellow Robe Jr.’s (Assiniboine) stage adaptation of David Seals’s (Huron) novel The Powwow Highway, and her own Mohegan version of The Tempest. Her work as a director and educator explores the complexities of identity politics in contemporary performance. When the Whippoorwill Calls The clock beats faster than my heart. Tiny crows have stamped their impressions all over the corners of my eyes. My fingertips glide mysteriously along my seventeen-year-old skin. . . . “One, two, three, four, five. Ha. Ha. Ha. Five. Five wrinkles,” I mimic Sesame Street’s Count; “Today, children, we will learn to count to five, using old people’s faces. What fun!” People tell me not to fear time. That it is just an element, like anything else out of our control. Yet here I am, calculatedly observing each mark time has left on me. I am told not to fear the white man. That he is not a threat anymore. But I know better. Indian people. Native people. We will always be at war with the white man; but he has time on his side in the battle, forever spreading in numbers—as we hurdle toward extinction. So tell me, how I am supposed to stand strong, when every day I see more and more of the white man in the mirror? My skin, two shades lighter than I feel, weighs me down. No one would recognize me as a 632 mohegan Native at first glance. “Don’t act white,” my mother orders. Um, helloooooo, look at me! What do you think I look like? My friends joke that no one could ever hate me more than myself. Mom says that things change. They always change, and people always fear, but we shall remain. I do not know. The people and stories of the past are fading fast in my mind. Moshup the giant, Granny Squannit of the little people, and all the spirits I saw as a child were only a dream. Just another story now, drifting through time and space as it leaves reality , sifting below the earth. Mom disagrees. The elders always think they know better. But what does anyone know anymore? Earlier today I met with the language specialist and my Medicine Woman Mama to look over some language-revival documents. As we were sorting through some of the newer discoveries, we came across an error in the translation of my Mohegan Indian name. I was named Blackbird, for the dozens of black birds flying in and out of the house when I was born. Yeah, I know it’s weird, but I was named Sugayo Jeets, for the dark one who flies apart. But guess what? Sugayo is the word for an inanimate black object—not for a black bird. So what’s my name, Mom, since I have apparently been living a lie? It’s actually Suks-u-kok. She named me Suks-u-kok! Great. With a name like that I am guaranteed work in the porn industry. (Let’s keep this private, shall we?) Luckily there is an alternative word for blackbird: Achu-ka-yihs. Yes, it sounds like a sneeze, but it is better than Suks-u-kok. As I stare out my window, sparkling flakes of wonder drift eerily down to the cold earth, forming forgotten heaps beneath the whitewashed sky. Covering the earth in corpses of nature’s tiny miracles. Soon the sun will come and burn up all the icy dead left lying, but for now those snowflakes rest huddled together in silent winter stealth. I hear the call of the whippoorwill and ignore it. I know better. It is...

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