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January 18 - January 22, 2024
“But we lost a lot. Mostly because we got sick with new germs. And then when we were on our knees with fever and pukes, they decided they liked us there, on our knees. And that’s when they opened the first schools.
“Then the wars for the water came. America reached up and started sipping on our lakes with a great metal straw. And where were the freshest lakes and the cleanest rivers? On our lands, of course.
His teeth were crooked so that the front ones looked like they were holding hands.”
And here we were now opening the lid of a sealed jar, and all the anticipation of a tomorrow planned a thousand yesterdays ago came skittering to our feet like slick-shelled beetles.
“The Earth was broken. Too much taking for too damn long, so she finally broke. But she went out like a wild horse, bucking off as much as she could before lying down.
So much laid to waste from the miscalculation of infallibility in the face of a planet’s revolt.
And how quickly people would forget the art in the Indian and instead see only the commodity.
Isaac didn’t have memories in his family of the original schools, the ones that pulled themselves up like wooden monsters coming to attention across the land back in the 1800s — monsters who stayed there, ingesting our children like sweet berries, one after the other, for over a hundred years. Isaac didn’t have grandparents who’d told residential school stories like campfire tales to scare you into acting right, stories about men and women who promised themselves to God only and then took whatever they wanted from the children, especially at night. Stories about a book that was like a vacuum,
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“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.”
We were faster without our youngest and oldest, but now we were without deep roots, without the acute need to protect and make better.
