Grim discovery in western Canada is yet another shocking reminder of how Indian schools were instruments of genocide. Lois Red Elk offers two poems that speak to their legacy
EDITOR'S NOTE: The power and poignance of Lois Red Elk's poetry resides in her perspective as an elder with many decades of accrued lived experience. She inhabits two different worlds simultaneously—the first involving an ancestral identity stretching back across time and geographic space, predating the arrival of the first Europeans on the continent. The second—which most Mountain Journal readers also inhabit— is one she navigates both by choice and necessity. Red Elk's words always move us to contemplate an earth-centered orientation to living.
She wants all of us to consider an uncomfortable question: How might one define evil? What examples would you use to make your point? Into the early 20th century, generations of indigenous children in North America were forcibly taken from their parents, sent off to boarding schools like Carlisle in Pennsylvania for "assimilation training" or coerced into the alleged care of religious organizations which, in the name of Christian education, sought to exorcise students of their culture and spirituality. Only recently, with the US government being forced to acknowledge its own home-grown genocide, have the horrors of some of those schools been brought to larger public consciousness. Among the inhumanity: torture, multiple forms of physical, sexual and psychological abuse that, in turn, resulted in murder, suicide and despair, destruction of language, culture and ancient sophisticated lifeways and, of course, traumatic separation of children from their families. In her MoJo column, Words From Open Earth, Red Elk, in her artful way, offers us a note from Fort Peck and a pair of poems.
By Lois Red Elk
Hello My Friends at MoJo,
The conversation about race relations took a sharp and horrific turn this week
as the graves of 215 children were discovered in the community of Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.
I have been hearing of these atrocities for many years and knew so much sadnessand answers were needed but never knew the resolve. I knew that family after family and community after community tried to heal the best they could. But I keep hearing of more and more death and abuse over the years.
How did this happen without some kind of intervention by the government, the law, or world organizations? Obviously there has been a mass cover up. I know from family and friends experience with the Catholic church, all the crimes committed against Native Americans and I write about the experiences in my poetry. I also know of many lawsuits filed against the churches.
I offer two poems of family and friends experiences. "The Girl With Two Brains" is new and will be published in an upcoming book of poetry. "A Force They Could Control" is printed in my book "Our Blood Remembers" (Many Voices Press).
Badger, photo courtesy Nick Myatt/Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
The Girl with Two Brains
She
insisted she had two brains. The Nuns
said she
was
crazy. Only the snarling badger understood.
She
said she thought in Lakota most days but only
with
the first brain. Nuns scolded and kept repeating
threats
that matched their beads. This bead stood
for
hard looks, this one for harsh words, and one,
one
stood for the belt. She watched badger
raising
dust
with sharp claws as he encouraged her to think
with
her first brain. But it was the dreaded second
brain
that clouded her first brain. She needs a cold bath,
one
to bring her out of that hopeless daydreaming said
the
Nuns. Ice in her ears, ice slipping down her neck
down
her spine woke her to the beads again, to thinking
in
the second brain. That night she looked for dreams,
requested
badger to come close. Clawing his way
into
her
world, he hid his thick fur with earth, brought sage.
In
the morning she was back to the first brain, eating
breakfast
with the other girls who lost their tongues.
Secretly
she spoke with them in Lakota and slowly
they
too came back to light. Badger, merging from his
burrow,
nose smeared with soil and roots, kept his place
hidden
deep, moved quickly, low to the ground.
In the
afternoon
the Nuns made them wash all the sheets and
blankets,
they did that happily. Outside in the refreshing
breeze
they spoke Lakota and practiced the beads so no
one
would suspect how they spent their time – that they
did
not forget their first brain, first tongue. Again badger
came
snarling from under the bush bringing * sage, said it
was
to protect the first brain. She woke
with a start and
wondered
what it all meant. She would keep the
dream
in
her first brain and wait for an answer. A Nun watching
her
smile, came storming with a belt and made her scrub
and
scrub. Again the second brain took over
and did what
it
was told – scrub and keep scrubbing to survive.
All night
she
prayed for the dream and asked her first brain to help
her
find answers. During the early morning hours
badger
gave
her directions to find a trail of sage to protect her first
brain
and to help her find her way. The next day, she and
her
friends followed the sage away from the beads, away
NOTE: We are pleased that Lois is working away on a new collection of poems and will let you know when it is published. In the meantime, ask for her other volumes at your favorite local bookseller: Our Blood Remembers, winner of the best non-fiction award from Woodcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers; Dragonfly Weather; and Why I Return to Makoce with a foreword from Montana's recent state poet laureate Lowell Jaeger and nominated for a High Plains Book Award in poetry.
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Watch the video below in which an indigenous muralist Steven Grounds has turned the abandoned Concho Indian School in Oklahoma into an art gallery. Concho has been called "the most haunted school in Oklahoma."
About Lois Red Elk-Reed
Lois Red Elk-Reed is a poet who calls the high plains home. She is Mountain Journal's poet in residence.
