The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

“When Helen died, it took me four years before I could bear to let her sister empty her closet,” he said. “She kept saying she knew someone who could make a quilt out of Helen’s old clothes, like that was an exciting substitute for my wife.”

It’s such an outdated, dangerous idea, you know? Indians were here, but now they’re gone. There’s this Australian historian, Patrick Wolfe, who says settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It’s ongoing, and part of what keeps it that way is the idea that Indigenous people aren’t here anymore. When they’re very much here. If you want to fight colonization, you can start by telling the stories of the people we’ve been taught to believe went extinct long ago.

An hour south of Bar Harbor, they passed a pickup truck flying an enormous Confederate flag off the back. Jane wondered what the bozo behind the wheel thought he meant by it. “Why,” she said, “do you suppose that in past life regression, people always see themselves as being royalty or a hero who fought the Nazis or something like that? I bet no one ever does one of those meditations and finds out, hey, I was one of the millions of unremarkable people who lived through the Holocaust and just went about my business. When statistically, the heroic and the evil combined throughout humankind must be a fraction of the do-nothings.” “Maybe do-nothings don’t get reincarnated as often because they’re boring?” Allison said.

Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.

Those men never meant to go to Sawadapskw’i. They were looking for someplace else. But after they arrived and saw how plentiful the land was, they came to believe their god led them to discover it, and must want them to stay. They did not understand that the land was not place alone. That the land was kin.