Pubblicato online: 11 mar 2021
Pagine: 185 - 188
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2020-015
© 2020 Tanaya Winder published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
‘Extracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest’—Leanne Simpson
My grandmother says, ‘boarding school is where people go to die’.
My hands fumble over needles, as she teaches me to embroider and knit,
Grandmother, when did you first learn how to sing
the songs you carry? Before I was born they tried to silence us,
pierced our tongues with needles
then taught our then-girls-grandmothers how to sew like machines.
Even then, they saw our bodies as land full of resources
waiting to be extracted and exploited.
We stitch together phrases; my grandmother patiently teaches me words,
‘in Indian’ as she says. Mugua-vi means heart—I want to learn how to unbury this,
bury, sogho’mi I want words to un-drink the drugs we loved into our veins
because for some of us this was the only way we knew how to keep breathing.
I want to say—alcoholism is the symptom and not the disease.
Can we un-suicide, un-pipeline, un-disapppear our dear ones? There is no word for undo but many ways to say return. We never get to go back to before
our fathers began evaporating and our mothers started flooding themselves into unglobable rivers because their mothers were taken long ago.
We are still searching dragging rivers red until we find every body
that ever went missing. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been stolen:
from reservation to Industrial boarding schools and today
our girls, women, and two-spirit still go missing and murdered.
I could find no word for this.
But yáakwi is to sink or disappear.
Where is it we fall? When did we first start vanishing? Who taught us to sew new memories into old scars, fingers threading needle
so precise in its recorded pain? Grandmother, when it comes to letting go my hands have always failed me, but my mouth wants to tell the story
about the songs you still sing softly.
* * *
As an Indigenous writer, I see us continually emerging and growing together.
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