Kannon was wrong. Jane Opa Gibson named herself “Orenda” after an Iroquois word for the magical power in all life—sort of an indigenous version of the Force. So, she’d actually changed her name to sound more native, not less. Iroquois was a long way from Choctaw, though, and I’d never known tribal folk to appropriate terms that way, so Jenna already came off strange to me. That sensation wouldn’t lessen over time, just grow more endearing. From a stack of journals, letters, and world-building notes I would acquire from her nephew, I gained a deep insight into the author’s motivations and the timing of various events.
Jenna left the reservation of the Jena Band of Choctaw—from whom she would take her first name—in 1975, to work in New Orleans as an exotic dancer. Well, she didn’t leave the res to work as an exotic dancer; she left to leave, and danced to stay gone. The motivation for most of her actions in her teens, it seemed, was leaving and never returning to the res, though she would spend her last years there, fighting for it to the last.
Working in strip clubs in the late 70s would have been rough, as you might imagine. I couldn’t find a lot on her time in the clubs, but having known a few dancers in my twenties when I worked and lived in the Quarter, I assumed sexual assault at minimum. Given the 70s, it was a safe assumption. She would have been 16 at the time.
Jenna may have stuck out from an early age on the res, but the Louisiana band of Choctaw stuck out from other indigenous tribes. Odd, at least, for the narrative of what “noble Indians" should be: sided with the Confederates, but hid runaway slaves; freely mixed with African, Italian, and Irish immigrants and let them become full members; unrecognized by the States as a real tribe. The Jena branch in New Orleans, if one looked at the first photos, might look black to you. If you met any now, you wouldn’t be racist to mistake many of them for Italian-American. They had surnames like Gibson, Jackson, Allen.
Jenna came from an era where the Louisiana Choctaw youth had taken over from the old guard and begun activism for federal recognition and incorporation into the Alabama and Mississippi tribes: an era of change. She was nearly expelled several times from the old Jena Elementary for lack of attendance. She had a 147 IQ, tested as part of the new attempts to legitimize the Louisiana tribal branch. She got into high school only on scholarship from her test scores, but failed out there. My only guess is that it was due to boredom. She excelled at anthropology, at linguistics, at fiction and drama courses. She couldn’t be bothered with maths and sciences, and rebuked the idea that they be requirements for a degree in an unrelated field.
“What the fuck do I need trig or advanced biology for? I’m an archaeologist and a poet. All that shit was just another white man hoop to jump through. They like dogs. They like trainability. Cats won’t be trained, so they must be dumb. Well you keep thinking that. One day they’ll be in my claws."1
In a journal entry I found for May 25, 1977, “Today I went to Peaches in Gentilly and I heard a song that changed my life.”
Speaking to the owners (their current location is Uptown, a far cry from their Gentilly roots) most of the music they played and kept in house back then would have been standard Soul and Motown, Elvis, some Beatles or Beach Boys on occasion. I remember in the ‘80s Peaches used to not just allow, but hire different grafitti artists to decorate their outer walls. The neighborhood was mostly black and Creole, so there wouldn’t have been much in the way of “white music.” There was, however, a reformed hippie-turned-Ramones fan who worked the counter named Steve. “Steve came in to work that day, he’d gotten hold of a new import from a friend at CBGB’s. I don’t know why it grabbed me so, but it did from the first note. You ever hear a song that makes you feel like you’ve never heard real music before? Like the first time you hear ‘Reflections’2? The whole record went that way. One set of lyrics stuck out. I had to read the liner notes because his accent is so heavy:3
White riot, I wanna riot White riot, a riot of my own White riot, I wanna riot White riot, a riot of my own Black man gotta lot a problems But they don't mind throwing a brick White people go to school Where they teach you how to be thick "
That week, she shaved her hair into what we would call a Mohawk, but she would call a Pawnee. Mohawks don’t wear that haircut, she’d have happily told you—they wear a square of hair in a tail coming from the crown of their head—it’s the Pawnee that have the spiked center stripe. This and her name change, to Orenda, seemed to me a quest via appropriation for the tribal identity she lacked, but also a defiant hybridization of all tribes as one into her own personal one-tribe/tribe-of-one brew.
In every photo I found of her, I found in her style echoes of differing tribal iconography and practice blended into a punk rock/New Romantic mashup. She wore that aesthetic in her band, The Ghost Dance. Her lyrics and her fiction paint a picture of a woman without a home desperately trying to build one from scratch. Eventually, she either gave up and went back to the res, realized the res was her home, or decided the res was where she’d build it. Her activism continued under the Jenna Orenda identity until the day she vanished, leaving behind a smattering of recovered manuscript pages.4
In a letter to a close friend, Wenona Allen5 she would reveal her inspiration for a new genre she called “punklore.” As much a manifesto as a request for critique, it outlines not just manner for writing fiction, but an anthropological philosophy about a new indigenous critique. For Orenda, “fascism” was simply an end product of colonialism—the “colonizing of the colonizers,” reminiscent of a Frankenstein’s monster that destroys its creator. All evil was a form of it, and all forms sprung forth from a psychological disorder called the nation-state, whose endgame was the postmodern Fascist monster. She hypothesizes, at the ripe old age of 19, that people were meant to be in small groups, sometimes roving, sometimes still—but remaining mobile if necessary, diverse and yet grouped by friendship and kinship. Attempts to pin everyone to the same pasture were all the same. The border was just a fence to keep the sheep from escaping, and every shepherd was a fascist at heart.
These ideas ultimately emerged as recurring themes in what fictional materials remain. Armed with anthropology and linguistics and a flare for starting fights, she would form her new take on the fantasy genre, birthing The Dreamenders Labyrinth. She finished the manuscript sometime in 1980, though she wrote several times as saying she’d been writing it all her life—it was only that she’d thought she’d been doing other things. We have precious little of her actual content, but a massive find from my visit to the res allows me to talk so openly of her biographical moments and inner life.
Jenna by all accounts was an abrasive, razor-sharp, loud girl. One who couldn’t stay in her seat, apologize, or stop asking questions. But she was an easy laugh, a creative force, and a fierce defender of her tribe, both the ones she left back on the res and the punks she found on the streets of the French Quarter. While the addictions and street life would take down most of her band mates, in the end it would be the questions that took Jenna from us. Questions I had a fire in me to follow into hell.
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