Our native land has died. We used to walk with our hands clasped around our pride as our families walked at our sides with long decisive strides. There was only us and mountainsides of the countryside, but that was before the homicide and the genocide and the ancestral suicide of our past that will divide us from our future of disney warbride tv called Pocahontas.  

Her real name was Matoaka. She was eleven years unjustified and twenty-one when ratified a death, by an illness her tribe would decide was the fault of those who took her. 

There was only us and the land we walked. No brick houses block by block, no smoke stacks or grocery stores with too much food in stock for your generation while people starve in countries far enough below you to hit bedrock. If we could turn back the clock, tick tock, we would find more than just your beanstock barricade of fairytale stories like Jack balk the thief of what wasn’t yours to abduct, tick tock.  

Fee-fi-fo-fum! 

I smell the blood of a native man: 

Be he alive, or be he dead, 

I’ll stain his land of hope with red. 

You’ve written enough Sherlock stories to solve the mystery of why we should care about your greenhouse gas tax trying to hack global warming in its tracks. We aren’t the ones that slacked on the packs of melting iceberg wax, turning our oceans to broken glass like mirror cracks. You want our help? We want our land back from your attacks of your parallax view of our history like torture racks.

We lived back when the golden land we lived on used to mean something more than just the swollen people that now occupy it. The coven of sloven words that swept from our token lips were woven through the trees, and the embolden skins upon our broken backs kept them warm as well sheltered from Caddo’s frozen rains of potent, power, and molten anger. 

Our home spanned far and wide, for our home was the soil that squished between our toes and the green that grows beneath, and the sky that sang prose above our heads. It’s the log that rows down the river’s flows. It’s the clay that slows our feet from sinking at its banks. Our home knows Ceyote who helps us throw our foes and dethrones the bad bones of an incomplete societal zone like America. Home of the free? Or home of the be freed.

The birds above provided us with eggs, the groundhogs below provided our children with places to play, and our grandparents with inconvenience places to fall and lay. The trees provided shade, the dirt could be made to a paint. The birds and the groundhogs and the trees were our weight, for they provide for us as we do for them on doomsday. We protect the archway guiding us away from what you might call Hell but we call simply gone away.

We’d been here long enough to know that things will not always be the same. The winds would change, the snow transformed the colors of our land into an endless tame of white blame. Every new solstice came, our shammens would bring us joy and peace through our Winter Guardian Spirit religious frame, where we could communicate with our spirits and teach their names, and dance for nights upon nights upon nights past days. We would heal our sick like an insurance claims, those who were worthy deserved to live past the pain. We would heal our broken hearts of any sorrow from the loss of our family name. When the moons changed every year, we did the same.

Our people huddled near fires of great and sang beautiful chords, we danced and played music with our rattles and striking boards, while our grandfathers floored the flute and our grandmothers record the moment to their minds. We crafted fine beads into necklace chords for our grandparents to wear around their necks as they restored stories down to the unexplored new future of our land.

Our stories that made sure our history would be addressed. Our stories that motivated the spirits of our ancestors to rest. Our stories that gave our children zest to continue our stories. 

Our stories which were butchered by those who took our land. 

Our stories that were changed by travalor’s hand. 

Our stories were ripped apart and glued offhand into a quixotic, unfeasible, unrealistic, inhumane, merciless, misanthropic new history.  

A history that was written by your version of man.

You may think you’ve changed our history with your high school textbooks, and apology checks, and an autocorrect that steal our religion from your history specs, but get some better glasses to see us ask what’s next? Have you reached your apex point where we gradually step from your vertex into the land of respect yet?

We have our own historic beads and secretive smiles and spiels you don’t believe while we all awhile pass along to our generation family style, like how you sit around the dinner table and tell stories style, but each new story is an experimental trial of whether or not you want to change that? Because we can wait, if you want to rip our words apart that’s fine by us just, don’t expect us to return the favor when your melting glacier breaks another giant Rose and Jack love story. Because that’s your story.

When you first came, we played our songs and warily stepped aside.  

We taught your children and grandparents the groundhog holes to abide. And you said you respected us but you lied. 

You taught us new ways to weave our beads, were our guide to spin new cloaks.  

But then you used those beads to take our necks in your hands while people died and pull us from our people and countryside. You used those cloaks to drape over our children and pried them from parents arms while mother cried for their babies not to go too far. Be alright little one, for always you lie in our spirit’s tribe.

Our land was filled with formulated crops, our trees were robbed from their roots. Our river banks were cultivated so that the clay wouldn’t stop your feet and ankles from sinking in. But we sank like an in-air raindrop, falling from the clouds like rocks drop while you took over our land like an all season catch-crop.

You sewed our lips shut from the language our grandparents spoke, as you bound our fingers around the pencils that snapped and broke in which you made us write our new names like proper English folk, cursing our pain like “hey you uptown tosser bloke who broke us like pauses between smoke signals like bro take a toke smoke.”

But a child never forgets the gentle hand that raises them, nor the spirit it sprouted from. You could take our land, our people, our language, but that does not mean we are done. You cannot take the spirits that reside within us, not a spirit like a nun, but the spirit that connects us to the trees and the sun, the spirits of the birds and the clay at the river when the waters come, and even the groundhog holes because that homespun, hun. 

You ran from nature, with your brick houses and gas ovens and fossil fuels. We embraced it, never scared of mother queen’s free standing rules. We made one with the land around us, the land you stole away in non-modern duels using us like tools you took us for fools, thinking it was cool to use us like mules, spinning our history on golden thread spools of lies that was distastefully cruel. 

You forced a new religion upon us, a god that argued with our own Great Spirits rules, our deities and our totems erased like stolen crown jewels.

Amotkan brings us life and you took it away. You did not allow us to bury our people we could not be the only ones to pay; we could not prevent them from becoming ghosts to haunt our mourning days and your land from the people you slayed. The blood that stains our past will bring the ghosts of our grandfathers to life where they cannot stay and play with your emotions as they do our past. You stole from their spirits, just to make it into horror movies slash past ghost stories, that wasn’t our fault.

Our future speaks the words of anew, residing in the brick houses and gas ovens and fossil fuels that were brought by you. But they are still our own, and we care as they do. 

You can change the language that they coo but not the language of the spirits in their blood that our grandparents brew. In their eyes is the soil beneath us like in the stories our prophecies drew, the brown of the logs you cut into the river with the garbage you threw, in their eyes is the green in our trees and the green of the grass that grew. In their eyes is the blue of our water, and the blue that our bead’s stories ensue. Our stories you forced our children to say goodbye to.

Our people are our land, our land is our home, our home is all around us still, and yet it is not ours.