主题：一次印第安人诗会上的三首诗 -- 酥油茶

第一首

From intergenerational trauma to intergenerational healing *

Meet Lucy Sue, a half Tsa-la-gi (AKA Cherokee) Indian girl of 9

Just yesterday plucked out of her mother’s clutches due to “social depravation” and plunked into a white, middle class foster “home” “in the best interest of the child”;

She’s not card carrying-- The only ethnic group in world required to prove blood quantum levels--and like 80% of modern Indians is an urb—urbanite that is, so the court determined her “insufficiently Indian enough” to be protected by NICWA and ICWA and thereby the extended family and tribal preservation not considered in the placement equation.

This displacement just a another in a long string of intergenerational/historical trauma, the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations”*

The best empirically studied parallel is the Jewish Holocaust and Japanese American Internment camps

She heard her histories at bedtime, until that fateful day when Lucy Sue never saw elisi, her granny again.

Historical trauma, it picks up speed as it successively accumulates like a rolling stone gathers moss to affect the 7th generation to come

Started in 1492—the “discovery” of an inhabited continent by a lost sailor looking for India marking the beginning of 500 plus years of cultural, physical, emotional, linguistic, and customs GEN-Oh-CIDE as defined by the United Nations

The fruitful land where Susie Lou’s ancestors roamed freely as hunter-gatherers pushed onto sickly barren plots… the choice was theirs… between that…. or extermination

A trail of tears crossing a continent of broken treaties

The missionaries sicked upon the heathens, the infidels

The only good Indian was dead one or at least one that is so assimilated that he or she is called an apple back on the rez

The FBI, CIA, BIA all agents of taking care of the “Indian problem”

Lucy Sue’s grand parents met in boarding school where they learned that their ways of life, language, culture, and traditional customs were meaningless, mouths soaped for whispering “gv-ge-yu” (I love you) to each other

Her parents never learned Osiyo, Hello

Ever heard of the great In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat? NO? Because you, like me, was taught the derogatory European name, Chief Joseph, who said,

“it makes my heart sick when I think of all the good words and broken promises, good words will not bring my children back”

“let us be free, to travel, to work, to trade, choose our own teachers, follow the religions of our fathers, free to think and talk and act for ourselves.”

Spiritual and ceremonial practices outlawed until the latter part of last century when warriors of the American Indian Movement such as Dennis Banks, Russel Means, and John Beck fought for the passage of the American Indian Religious freedom act.

Alcohol and diabetes leaves the majority of Lucy Sue’s immediate family either dead or “unfit” to take her in

A commodity diet lethally packed with fats, salts, carbs and sugars, intentionally designed to have babies born with diabetes—a little more subtle but a lot more calculated than a gift of small pox blankets—leaves Indians 3 times more likely to have the deadly disease—amputating limbs so we can all fit in Procrustes’ beds,

Just like they want us all to fit neatly into American society

But alas, I’m not here to point fingers nor lengthen the list of grievances but rather to give hope to Lucy Sue

From termination to self determination

We are sovereign nations, we retain our customs, maintain our languages, we pick up the shards and broken vines and piece together the pottery and baskets of our ancestors

Though a constant battle against western superimposition, urbanization, consumerism, globalization, and materialism, red blood beats on like the distant sound of a drumbeat

We are not victims, we are and always will be survivors, preserving, persevering, flexible, honorable, at the forefront of science

We are taking back what is ours, our land, our customs, our artifacts, our names: we are not Cherokee, Navajo, Nez Perce, and Sioux: we are Tsalagi, Dine, Chute-pa-lu, and Lakota.

Through pan Indian movements—Alcatraz, the longest walk, peace and dignity journeys, the standoff at wounded knee, little big horn ride, pow wows, and sun dances, the ASU indigenous Writers exhibit—we are joining ranks, renewing mother earth, expansion of consciousness,

Our communities are not our weaknesses, they are our strengths, our resilience, our youth, our women, our elders, a modern day warrior must fight with pen not arrow, confront, accept, release, and transcend the trauma*

And little Lucy Sue will return to her people at age 27 in search of answers in her roots, to learn her language and the medicinal ways, to participate in her first sweat lodge ceremony as she moves from intergenerational trauma to intergenerational healing,

Ah ho, to all my relations.