Wandering Stars

The song he played was not a song and not even a lament and not an alarm but like a call from a broken bird, whose throat and beak had become elongated through some trial of pain meant to break him, but only ended up transforming him into something longer stretched, and into his song with these notes that kept stretching after he stopped playing them, that and about everything we’d been feeling all along stuck in our suits and dresses, in that school and without our language, he was making music find it for him, his lost tongue and all of ours.

I’d always had dreams about all of the stars in the sky falling down to earth, collapsing on us. I hated those dreams but they taught me something. As the stars were coming down, about to land right on top of me, each time I dreamed it, I said a little prayer, to say thank you that I got to be here, if I had to go, it was the last thing I wanted to be able to say before I went. Thank you. Beneath a willow tree whose branches almost touched the water, my mother said, “The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.”

In 1924 the American Indian Wars will be declared over after a hundred and thirteen years […] In the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.

Surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person […]

Jude Star would have been my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather survived the Sand Creek Massacre, and his son survived boarding schools, and his daughter, my mother, survived losing her mother and being raised by white people. And still brought us up knowing who we are. Who we are. Somehow. So why had I been sheltering the boys from their culture? Something made so strong it survived more than it should have survived. It was more than survival. The culture sings. The culture dances. The culture keeps telling stories that bring you into them, take you away from your life and bring you back better made.

The song he played was not a song and not even a lament and not an alarm but like a call from a broken bird, whose throat and beak had become elongated through some trial of pain meant to break him, but only ended up transforming him into something longer stretched, and into his song with these notes that kept stretching after he stopped playing them, that and about everything we’d been feeling all along stuck in our suits and dresses, in that school and without our language, he was making music find it for him, his lost tongue and all of ours.

I’d always had dreams about all of the stars in the sky falling down to earth, collapsing on us. I hated those dreams but they taught me something. As the stars were coming down, about to land right on top of me, each time I dreamed it, I said a little prayer, to say thank you that I got to be here, if I had to go, it was the last thing I wanted to be able to say before I went. Thank you. Beneath a willow tree whose branches almost touched the water, my mother said, “The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.”

In 1924 the American Indian Wars will be declared over after a hundred and thirteen years […] In the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.

Surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person […]

Jude Star would have been my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather survived the Sand Creek Massacre, and his son survived boarding schools, and his daughter, my mother, survived losing her mother and being raised by white people. And still brought us up knowing who we are. Who we are. Somehow. So why had I been sheltering the boys from their culture? Something made so strong it survived more than it should have survived. It was more than survival. The culture sings. The culture dances. The culture keeps telling stories that bring you into them, take you away from your life and bring you back better made.