Muffy and Rabbit Go to the Pow Wow by Emily Pearson

Trouble was that everyone forgets Rabbit is not an Indian; he’s an Indian myth, and that makes all the difference.

Once upon a time, in the buckle of the Bible Belt, where half the Cherokee are Baptists and want to Make America Great Again (though in what way this greatness would relate to them exactly was not always clear), the Oklahoma Grand River Dam Authority (“GRDA” or “the Authority”) decided to divert the Arkansas River. No one had Rabbit on the brain. Hardly anyone even remembered how Deer tricked Rabbit into jumping over a river, whereupon Deer conjured the river to rise and trapped Rabbit on the other side for good. Nobody even knew which river it was.

If asked, most of the Authority would probably have assumed Rabbit was somewhere back in Tennessee or West Virginia or wherever the Cherokee left him. It didn’t occur to anyone that he might have hitched a ride to Indian Country circa 1830 to 1850. So when the works were complete and the waters rose near Tulsa and all but dried up north of the Port of Catoosa, no one was on the lookout for a Rabbit about the size of a full-grown man striding down Route-66, past the old trading post and the Catoosa Blue Whale.

The first anyone heard of Rabbit’s return was when Muffy LeClaire announced to the world that Rabbit was real and he was back and he’d asked her to perform at his intertribal pow wow in Western Oklahoma. Naturally, he wanted her to sing her most famous songs.

Not everyone was thrilled at Muffy’s proposal. For one, the Rabbit-Man-Thing who stood with Muffy on the YouTube video was singularly unconvincing. Some commenters thought she would’ve been better off using AI-generated animation, if that funny mascot suit was the best she could do. Furthermore, Muffy’s protest songs weren’t in as high demand as they were back in the 60s and 70s, before people started questioning whether she was in fact a Cherokee girl adopted out to a white family. Muffy asked everyone who they were going to believe, her with her five decades of activism, or some white girl with The Cut, and that shut up the loudest voices for a while.

The day of the pow wow came, with the usual attendees almost outnumbered by journalists and tourists. Muffy bounded up the wooden platform, hair freshly braided and skin freshly tanned. Hardly anyone noticed her, since they couldn’t look away from Rabbit, who seemed more realistic in person than he’d seemed on the video. No matter how they checked him over, no one could find a zipper, a slit of Velcro, or a join between suit pieces anywhere in his shining fur.

“Osiyo! I sure am glad to see you all come out in support of me and my friend Muffy here,” Rabbit said. “It’s been a long trip back home for both of us.”

Some of the journalists squirmed a bit at his voice. It was nasally and had a twang they associated with good ol’ boys who drove dirty pickups and went deer hunting (they weren’t even thinking how much Rabbit still wanted to get back at one Deer in particular).

“I reached out to Muffy here because it seems there’s been some questions about her belonging. And I’m here to tell you, no matter what anybody says, as far as I’m concerned, Muffy and I are one and the same. One blood, bound by ties greater than circumstance.”

Someone whooped and held up a sign that read, “Believe All Indians.” The locals gave him a wide berth.

“It’s not where you’re born,” Rabbit said, “whether you was raised in a gated community by white folks or whether you grew up on a farm down in Tahlequah. It’s what you do. And I can tell you all, what Muffy does is fine by me. Just fine.”

Muffy took her cue and flicked her hair and feathers like she was shaking off four decades. She strummed the opening chords of “Bleeding Hearts in the Blue Ridge.”

Her voice was as strong and clear as ever—stronger than it had been in many records, for many years—but the audience listened in stony silence.

Muffy had forgotten the words to her own song.

She wasn’t singing about the mountains back east or the Trail.  She was singing about a white girl who ran away from home with dreams of being a star. A girl who trailed Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, eager for scraps from their table. Who was threatened with exposure by a brother she silenced with threats to tell them what he did—or rather what he didn’t do to her, outside her own mind.

And her eyes bugged wide like she didn’t know how to stop.

Rabbit leapt with a yelp of joy. “You’re just like me, alright, Miss Buffy LeClaire! You a liar and a cheat and a master of disguise!”

Over the horizon a twister that no weatherman had predicted came down out of the sky like the dental drill of God.

The food trucks and vendors were slamming their vans together for the escape and Muffy was crying—not like the crying Indian in the commercial, but like she’d lost the difference between a laugh and a cry and she didn’t much care which was which.

Pete Adair scooped up his regalia with a sigh—this was supposed to be the year he took first place in the regional dance competition. So much for that. Then his phone played the tractor revving ringtone he’d assigned to his colleague at the GRDA, John Deere, named after the tractor—or so they said.

“Pete,” said Deere, “we got to get that son of a bitch back over the Arkansas.”