The Shape of Land
Oil Pastel and photgraphy above are original to Rufina. Copyright 2022 Rufina C. Garay. All Rights Reserved.
The Shape of Land
Luminous yellow mounds,
Swelling with its own harvest,
Heaving forward
Past Great Plains and prairie camus,
Blowing history out of the way.
This earth breathes and remembers,
If we just watch.
I want to touch them
Through the window with a full sweep of my hand,
To know that they are as soft and welcoming as they look.
Different fields flow through them, wheat brushed neatly
Into corn-row braids,
With mellowed green grass
between crowded chaff.
I ache for further sight
Down and through them,
Looking for the promised amber
In these waves of grain.
Under smoke-filled skies, there is
Also a buffalo-blood-red truth,
A dirty color palate,
Shy a shade of genocide
Of beasts and people
Who were of and for the land,
Who were wise to, and worn by, the plot
To starve nations
By the isolation and separation
of reservations.
Scattered in the flats and valleys, grass turned to hay
Is spiraled evidence of a farmer’s alchemy--
Rolled to the inside
Like ancient symbols of the cosmos.
I love the farmers and the hay rolls too,
in a troubled way.
Their work is noble
even if these lands are stolen.
Did I just say that?
Even if these lands are stolen.
I don’t know if there will be a precious restoration
In the gracious reckoning I hope will come.
But what do I do with what I have witnessed?
At the warrior park,
Children without smiles played
Not far from the tin boxes
Where their parents
Stood in thresholds,
Withered brown and leaning in to speak
In 105 degree weather
With no air conditioning.
On the turning away,
We did not stop to rest there.
Life on the plains,
Turns with a pitchfork and plow,
Gold and red,
Not with sounds of the herd’s stampede.
Give us our daily bread
Is a prayer full of demand
Said by hearts of stone. **
Ancestors did not pray this way.
They prayed for the good hunt
Until they knew the great herd had been shattered.
And nothing could be the same again.
The birthright of daily bread
Makes no room for a slow peace
With the Sioux, Comanche, and Kiowa.*
Pray for rain
To douse the fires that halt my breath today.
Practice
trust in the wind
that the fire turns before and around you.
But I have somewhere to go.
I cannot take the withered with me.
Hope for a not-red sun at sunrise,
Though we’ve ravaged the land,
Laid waste to the trees,
And fouled the waters.
We are not the same stewards as
The ghosts of those
Standing in doorways with no relief
A mile from the
“Stop Meth!” sign.
We made the split-pea-smoke-fog sky,
The relentless heat
Suffocating this stillborn summer.
To understand how our government and people conspired to eliminate indigenous peoples by destroying a primary food resource and a way of life, read
*https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/
**See and listen to Pink Floyd’s “On The Turning Away” for the resonance of observing Warrior Park, the neighborhood around it, the signs of societal struggle in the “stop meth!” sign
To understand more about what started the Dixie fire of 2021 that tainted the skies and crossed the wind currents over the Pacific Northwest in 2021, see PG&E agrees to pay $55 million in penalties and costs over two wildfires. - The New York Times (nytimes.com).
To read more about the Oregon fires that in combination with the California fires start to transformed by PG & E made for foreboding skies and oppressive air quality, see 2021 Oregon wildfires - Wikipedia.
To understand what the significance of seeing the “Stop Meth!” was to me, read this summary of research from the National Institute of Health on
The “Stop Meth!” sign brought to mind for me the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe efforts on the Olympic Peninsula to help indigenous and non-indigenous peoples with opioid addictions, including black tar heroin addiction. The public outcry of NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard) arguments led to litigation against the tribe which has set its intention on healing people. That litigation only ended in 2021.
On that road trip with some time to think about the connections between how we turn away from people who are deeply hurting and addicted, and how the S’Klallam tribe has led with courage and conviction to turn toward people in the face of opposition, I sat in the discomfort of how I have had the ability, the privileged opportunities to turn and look away from so many things.
This spoken word piece is a tribute to land, landscapes, and indigenous people whom I’ve had the good fortune to meet including Jo of the Chinook tribe, Naoime of the Chemakum and Jamestown S’Klallam, Mackenzie and Loni of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, and Sabrina of the Makaw tribe. All of them have been doing the work of social justice. The images within the piece are ones I experienced across the Great Plains as we road cross-country in an RV during the pandemic to see my mom for a monumental birthday.
In seeing the land, I was struck by the beauty of these landscapes as if they were moving paintings rushing past the window, yet I knew there had been a different landscape and life there before the buffalo herd and indigenous peoples were decimated. In being struck by the current beauty, I could begin to imagine the depth of historic and ongoing loss.
In my imaginings of the past, I felt very deeply what the great cost of our daily bread has been.
© 2021 Rufina C. Garay. All rights reserved.
