*Winner of the 2018 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
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Shaylena, age seven, of Hot Pink Coat and Perfect Scrambled Eggs,
presses her velcroed boot against wire of ice and barbs, opens the fence that keeps us from the river. She tells me what she heard about the Sacred Objects, returned by the country after the raid, hand-fringed hide of the chanupa bags, deer-given skin of the drums, stained yellow with the piss of police. I crawl through the passage, past the cottonwood choking with leafless vine, the abandoned nest of the snow bunting, preserved in its sheath of ice. She speaks of these handmade objects and I think of what we are trying to build, this idea we call a school. I think of a friend who said: Native tradition created beauty in every object—a reminder to care for what you have. I’ve spent years with the disposable test booklets, the tiny eyes of each multiple choice, classrooms with four reliable walls. Years believing I could know what was best. Shaylena of Six Sisters, Tantrums in the Porta-Potty, of Telling Adults to Stop Screaming about Cops and Scaring the Kids, leads me down a sandy slope, away from the road that spins with pick-up trucks packed with lumber, ladders, tent poles: these fragments that will rebuild the homes that were taken last week, rebuild homes we all know may be taken again. We dip to a slim cuticle of bank, frozen, freckled today with trash. Months ago, the kids built a ramshackle bridge here, the driftwood glittering jade with algae, the splintering damp in the sun. They climbed to the edge, unbothered that the bridge reached no certain bank, scrambled on scraped hands and knees and trusted the rotting of the wood, or maybe trusted, even, the fall. The first time somebody mentioned staying the winter, among the horse games and giveaways of August, I laughed—the story of my skin made me believe we’d win history quickly, go home. How will I know how to name this, for the kids, for myself, if we fail? Shaylena digs in the cold sand, unearths a Skittles wrapper, the rainbow mud-fossiled into brittle bird. I am about to warn her to stay away from the water’s cold edge, when she slips the trash gently into my hand, says sa, next, hands me a crinkled Lay’s bag, zi, a ramen wrapper, sazi, a water-logged flyer, ska. She hands me each Lakota color, picks up each piece one-by-one, as if we’d never heard the ambulances screech from the road, as if the helicopters didn’t sing their mosquito song against our skin. She names each item as if there was no other sound in the world for what we held in our hands.
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VOLUME 52.2 |
