Love Letters To Divided Nations;

There are no Truths, Coyote. Only Stories.

Tom told us, and then Coyote.

That old trickster, he’s not one to listen.

So Coyote went around trying to Fix The World anyways.

Well.

Tom told that Trickster

This world is pretty good all on its own.

Best to leave it alone, stop messing around with it.

Perhaps what he meant was that sometimes you gotta stop saving

To start Seeing.

Purported decolonization and watered-down cultural restoration processes that accept the premises and realities of our colonized existences as their starting point are inherently flawed and doomed to fail. They attempt to reconstitute strong nations on the foundations of enervated, dispirited and decultured people. That is the honest and brutal reality; and that is the fundamental illogic of our contemporary struggle

.

If you would just read more post-colonial theory, you’d understand that your anger is a part of the binary of colonialism and therefore colonial and if you just take some of the things from settlers and some of the things from your ancestors, you’ll find you can weave them into a really nice tapestry which will make the colonizers feel ambivalent and then you’ve altered the power structure.

These women so strong, so soft,

Full of the voices of their mothers.

Leanne leans in and whispers

‘Sometimes what renders you strong

is what makes you soft’

five year old ogichidaakwe

you are not a vessel for white settler shame

even if i am the housing that failed you.

I read this holding my daughter,

and her mother, and her mother’s mother,

and her grandmother before her.

All these women and more

woven in the weft of her long,

brown,

curling,

hair.

Do not forget: we once were The Next Generation.

Now Lee dances circles around me,

All fire and flame, 

singing

Without colonization, there would not have been the need for

“re-constructing” the passion and compassion we should naturally feel for one another.

We, my children and I, should not have had to suffer to experience familial love.

Hot tear on my cheek 

She slows her dance and whispers 

I would be cynical but for the tenacity of the late autumn rose

Which stubbornly clings to life in a season when all flora is laid to rest.

Story is medicine, both for the self, and collective soul. Our healing is held within the telling, shaping, and retelling of these stories, and it is in this process that we give birth to our own selves.

Whether we know it or not, I believe, that it is in the stories we tell ourselves, and that we tell each other, that shapes who we are and who we are to become. The literary works birthed from the Indigenous Sovereignty movements around the world are, in my opinion, akin to lovingly-crafted, love letters between distant, and possibly conflicted, relations; messages of hope, pain, war, and resilience. What better way to reconnect generations lost to forced separation than to send out public proclamations of rebellion and solidarity? And what better way to reimagine ourselves, our future, and the many futures for all of our children.

This poem is influenced by, and included the work of (italisized, and in order of appearance) Thomas King, Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Lee Maracle.