A Council of Dolls

by Mona Susan Power

“That buffalo was like a brother to me, we grew up together, trusted each other. When he was full grown my father let our uncles take the buffalo away. People were too hungry for us to keep him, and a being like that was never meant to be a pet. He was so smart, he knew what was happening, and he looked me right in the eye to give me courage. We didn’t talk through words, but I heard him all the same. He said this is the way of life. We live, we love, we give our bodies to the earth as food. We never really die. But he walked away slowly to let me know he was sad to be parted.”

What finally gives me the energy to push myself forward, into the new school year, is the steady voice of the Missouri River, which runs beneath this hill. Its powerful flow continues as it did before this place was built, before our teachers were born, before English words ever traveled across its waves. This water is my relative, and it’s so much stronger than anyone inside these buildings.

He writes that he is “delighted” we are of “independent minds, unassailed, unconverted, and not unduly influenced by the likes of such a limited mind as yours, totally lacking in imagination.” He says we are members of a sovereign nation far older than hers, and who is she to decide our worth? Jack enjoys the joust, reading his words several times over and chuckling each time. We don’t have an envelope, but he folds the paper neatly and seals it with candle wax. “Problem solved,” he says with a wink.

“They like you to perform because to them, it’s a trick. They think when we learn from them and their books it’s like we’re a puppy you can make bow or dance on its back legs. They look at us like fractions. We’re fractions, not whole as them.”

“No one can see me now, only you.” I want to ask her how that’s possible, how she even knows for sure. But something stops me. In all the stories I’ve read and heard about magic, people do best when they just believe. It’s when they start poking at it, asking too many questions, that everything unravels. So all I say is: “Good.” And I kiss the doll’s forehead.

We’re used to white folks telling us how lucky we are that they are in our lives, telling us that we didn’t know how to live until they came along. We’re used to being made to feel dirty, backward, feeble-minded, lax in our conduct, nasty in our manners—just one tiny hair from being a beast in the zoo.

My father says that we should welcome all stories to see if they are worth remembering. “You can put ideas on and off just like moccasins. You can wear them and set them aside, hold on to those you find meaningful. Don’t be afraid of learning something beyond what we’re able to teach you. Even the wisest person doesn’t know everything. But it’s also important to preserve the ideas that make sense to you, even in the face of resistance—someone telling you that you’re wrong and only they know the truth. Such boasting is evidence of a fool, perhaps a dangerous one.”

The season mocked us, bringing an early chill on a morning already shivery with leave-taking. Still, my mother remained calm and organized food for me—a packet of bread and jerked beef for the journey. We said our farewells at home to avoid crying in public, but I noted the glimmer of tears my parents fought back as they watched me as carefully as I watched them. The moment was so painful I told myself it was a bad dream that wouldn’t last forever.

We looked like a village in mourning. So now we are all cut-hairs, against our will. One girl tried to rescue her long braids from the ground, wound them around her fist. But a stern woman rapped her hand with a wooden brush. I could hear the crack against her knuckles, and her braids fell to the floor like dead snakes.

I quickly learned that the utterance of a single Dakhóta word, even offered to be helpful, is a serious offense. They treat our language like a sickness so contagious it must be cut from our tongues and minds.

whole as it was before. There is no true healing without remembering, she tells me in her silent way, and she guides my finger inside a bullet hole that has ripped through her heart.

“Are we relatives?” I ask the figure. Not sure if the words are spoken or transferred through thought. She tips her head, which feels like an affirmation, opens her mouth to show me her tongue is gone. She cannot speak as she once did. Someone did more than kill her, he destroyed her. Yet here I am, she conveys to me with her mind. We only think we’re destroyed.

She crawls through the night with others who are shocked and injured, the doll tucked into her belt. Later, she adopts Winona and feeds her spirit, offers her the compassion she can’t give herself for outliving an entire branch of loved ones. Winona is too much for any child—her indigo eyes have witnessed the end of one world, how it burned for days, how mourners had to change direction and walk a broken path filled with dead earth and stones.

Creativity that comes from our most courageous, authentic heart opens us to the Flow, an unseen river of images, insights, and visions where we connect across time with all that has ever lived.

“Your mama backed away from her own sickness and for a moment she had enough balance to catch herself from tipping over the edge. She chose not to. She let herself fall. She didn’t ever want to take you with her.” She almost did, a voice says in my head. Ethel hears. “That’s right. She almost did. But ‘almost’ doesn’t make it so.”

Izzy does what few do well—she listens, without judgment or interruption, without rejecting anything as impossible.

Sometimes I wonder if I make too much of these family stories, these mysteries I desperately want to solve. I castigate myself for living too much in the past, worrying at it with my mind.

But at the risk of sounding like a trite meme from social media, when you’re not yet capable of loving yourself, what you offer someone else is messy: complicated and exhausting, and ultimately not good for anyone involved.

“Don’t let Time fool you, it’s not dead in the ground. Don’t ever think it’s too late.”

We want nothing more than to rescue our girls and change your stories. You’re the writer, so you’ll understand this better than me, but I learned that we can’t heal the story by changing the plot, pretending the awful stuff didn’t happen. Tragedy just breaks out somewhere else along the line. The story won’t heal until the players do.