By Jenny
L. Davis
I didn’t
carry my ancestors’ bones with me
to this Midwestern place.
I could not hear their voices.
I asked
Rabbit to carry a note to them
but he baked it into cookies
and ate them with rosehip tea.
I asked Woodpecker
to pound a song for them in cedar,
but the songs
could not cross the Mississippi.
I
scratched a song in four lines for our ancestors
I wove a lullaby of yarn for our descendants, and
I stomped for all of us moving counter-clockwise in between.
Finally
in the still of night
Cicada buzzed answers
in a tree beside my ear
“We left
our bones
because we do not need them
to dance along the white dog's way.
You do
not need them
to dance along
beneath us.”
Tethered
To the youth of Attawapiskat
and our Native & Two-Spirit youth everywhere,
hold tight to the things that tether
you.
Half a
lifetime ago
I sat on
the edge of a bed
holding cold gun metal until it turned warm
I sat there for hours.
Days.
Years.
I am sitting there still.
I could
not move past the beings that tether me here.
You
are the beings that tether me here,
caught in a patch of briar so thick
I can’t break away without tearing a hole.
You are the beings that tether me here
And I hate you for it.
I can’t
move past the beings that tether me here.
You
Are the beings that tether me here.
A sapling in the forest
Sharing water and gossip across our rooted toes.
You are the beings that tether me here
And I love you for it.
The girl who loves turtles
Summer is
her favorite season
with its
heavy shawl of water in the air
and sun
that can scorch the skin in minutes.
But most of all
She loves
summer for the turtles
answering
the call to
come out
from under shell arbors,
from
behind winter aprons
and
spring cotton ruffles.
Loksi’!
Loski’! Loksi’!
Such
strength in the way their legs move,
hips and
shells rolling with each step
to
rhythms old as the ground itself.
No sharp
edges, just
the
curves of muscle and bone and
light
bouncing across browns, reds, and yellows
in the
heat of summer when
turtles
are called to each other to dance.
Let Us Rest
My people
were no
strangers to disasters—
the fires,
tornados, floods, and droughts
that
scorch, bury, and reshape the earth
where
they laid our ancestors to rest.
So dig up
the bundles.
Test
samples from bones,
cloth,
and clay—
for the
good of science,
toward
that next publication,
or a new
grant.
But don’t
pretend that
it’s what my ancestors would have wanted.
We
interred our loved ones
under our homes or within the great
mounded
houses of earth
knowing,
when the time came,
they’d be
returned
to the
water, mud,
and to the stars.
© Jenny L. Davis. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the
Chickasaw Nation and originally from Oklahoma. She is an assistant professor at
the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she lives with her partner and spends most of her time
tending her cats (and cat-sized Chihuahua), plants, and the students in her
American Indian Studies and Anthropology classes. Both her research and
activism center contemporary indigenous identity, indigenous language
revitalization, and the Two-Spirit community.
WWW.AIS.ILLINOIS.EDU/PEOPLE/LOKSI
She is the author of Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance.
