Postcolonial Tale
by Joy Harjo 

Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of
dreaming stuff.

This is the first world, and the last.

Once we abandoned ourselves for television, the box that separates the dreamer from the dreaming. It was as if we were stolen, put into a bag carried on the back of a whiteman who pretends to own the earth and the sky. In the sack were all the people of the world. We fought until there was a hole in the bag.

When we fell we were not aware of falling. We were driving to work, or to the mall. The children were in school learning subtraction with guns, although they appeared to be in classes.

We found ourselves somewhere near the diminishing point of civilization, not far from the trickster's bag of tricks.

Everything was as we imagined it. The earth and stars, every creature and leaf imagined with us.

The imagining needs praise as does any living thing. Stories and songs are evidence of this praise.

The imagination conversely illumines us, speaks with us, sings with us.

Stories and songs are like humans who when they laugh are indestructible.

No story or song will translate the full impact of falling, or the inverse power of rising up.

Of rising up.

 The landscape of the late twentieth century is littered with bodies of our relatives. Native peoples in this country were 100 percent of the population a few hundred years ago. We are now one half of 1 percent. Violence is a prevalent theme in the history of this land.

I think of the death of the brother of a Dakota friend of mine who was killed recently in Oakland. When a program to inspire the creativity of Indian children lost funding and couldn't pay him for his services he kept working out of commitment and love for these children. His killing was a reckless act by other Indian men who were just over the legal definition of the age of childhood, who did not even know him.

As 1 write this I am interrupted by an Apache man who is passing by my table in a restaurant owned by his tribe. He asks me first about my portable computer, then tells me he has come home to bury his son, who was shot and killed because he intercepted some young men who were partying on the street in front of his home in a place not far from Oakland. He, his wife and daughter-in-law have brought him home to bury him.

Their grief is slick with tears that will be soaked up by this beautiful land.

If 1 am a poet who is charged with speaking the truth (and I believe the word poet is synonymous with truth-teller), what do I have to say about all of this?

 

 

 

 

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