Going to Water 1

     People think it’s an impossible mission, but I regard it my duty. They don’t understand how time works, is the problem, how it is a vast sea, a swimming thing, and that every moment is touching every moment there ever was or ever will be. As for us, the indigenous, they say it’s all over and done, that we’ve been effectively destroyed, eradicated. The last of our elders are dying off now, reaching toward a hundred years of life lived hanging on by a thread, no young ones stepping up to take over. There’s no time, is how the young ones see it, so busy making a living, driving here and there, paying this bill or that trying to feed the kids, or if they’re kids themselves, trying to figure out what it all means, what their place in the big scheme is. But it isn’t over, not by a long way, because we’re still here fighting. If it were over, why would this persistent enemy in the shiny blue Italian suit keep dogging me so, no matter where I go? He still knows our power, that’s why, and it makes him tremble. He fairly shakes in fear, hatred, and frustration because he cannot root us out from what he thinks should be his world.

     When I go to George Armstrong Custer as he lies dying on that smoky blood-stained hilltop, and when I talk to him and he sees me, sees what he’s done, something happens.  When his eyes find life just before they cloud over yellow on that purple evening, the whole world shifts. Truth comes alive then and fires out into the sky like a flock of escaping bush wrens, sudden and fierce yet delicate too. I don’t know where that truth goes, but I know it goes somewhere, and that it reaches someone, something. I see it in the faces of those tired warriors watching, waiting for me to finish with Custer. They know. They haven’t forgotten where power lies because they’re still living in the time when it was everywhere, known by everyone. They stop and let their carbines and bows and knives hang at their sides. One kneels, his palm touching the ground to take part in something he doesn’t exactly follow, but he knows that something necessary is happening. Dying horses whimper in pain, close and far, steam rises from the pools of blood, eyes stare aghast into the purpling light, but beauty grows over the field like spring flowers. 

     Is it about forgiveness? Who can forgive Custer or John Chivington, or any of us for our own depredations, or any of them, for the world they brought from another continent, the world backing them up that pushed them forward to get what was wanted, the world that followed in prairie schooners, on horseback, walking? No, it’s not about forgiveness, but something else. It’s about seeing, because the blinding has been so effective it’s turned history itself into billowing clouds of impossibility. It’s impossible that we survive and move healthy into the supposedly modern age. Impossible that we still see the world the way we have for millennia. Impossible that we still be at all. What’s true is that those clouds of forgetfulness and impossibility are white canvas blowing in the breeze above steady churning wagon wheels you cannot hear, but that grind your present world, in your imagination, like stones in a flour mill called inevitable progress. You can only see the drifting quality of the long trains and women with bright gingham dresses wafting in the breeze. You can only see the forward inevitable motion of it all, the progress, the destiny, the loveliness next to tragic inevitability made oh so small by all that goodness and promise, the tragic inevitable and natural disappearance of us, the old ones, the anachronisms. You cannot hear us, our voices, our crying, but can only see the drifting white canvas like thick fog on civilization’s early morning. 

     So no, it’s not about forgiveness but something else. You see, if Custer sees, then it makes it possible for everyone between him and me to see. Everyone doesn’t have to see everything. I mean, it’s not necessary, but now they can see, because Custer himself has opened a door for them through his own vision of himself and his life, his own knowing.  Damn the historians anyway, who work for the miners of yesterday and today. Damn them all. They’re the mental miners perpetuating only what they want to remember, not what actually was. No. I can’t care about them now; only eventually when everyone collects into being the same under the same sun and then I truly care for them too, victims of their own imaginations. It’s really about the people, like it’s always been. It’s about their seeing, because they’re the ones who can turn this wagon train aside before it goes like lemmings into the seas of Norway. The masses are the people who drove it. That’s where it started after all, with the millions of people, and it has not altered its course in four hundred years. It’s only collected more wagons, from all around the world, wagons full of gold, gingham, silver, uranium, women, coal, children, and minds, minds of all colors from all places.

     But this week, to bring it home, the Apache flew his arms and eyes around in the parking lot of the movie theater on Thursday in a rage, saying he didn’t “give a shit” these days. “They don’t care,” he snarled. “They just don’t care, or they’d learn about us.  And maybe then, themselves.” He’s right, of course, but who started that uncaring, and how does it continue? Now they’re born anesthetized, big white syringes pumping “numb juice” into unknowing brains and fresh hearts. The beautiful living spirits who walked through their houses to smile into their babies’ following eyes got quickly replaced by cartoon dinosaurs and furry monster puppets. Even now the trees try to speak to them by the time they can walk, but the glowing minds can only reach so far because of everything constricted around them. The children climb up into the low branches and feel the wonder, but they cannot hear the trees’ calling voices or look across an oak-dotted canyon to see the old women who still chatter under the giant tree at their mortars, chiding, smiling, and beckoning. The constriction begins so early it gets in the way of seeing what must be seen, and this is where I work, where my mission lies, in the invisible realms of the mind, not only of children, but of all people who walk across these island nations in their hard boots, their insulating rubber soles, their Guccis and cowboy boots. You see, I know all these many minds work under the power of the “mind inside of nature,” as the Tairona call it, and I know that anything is possible. Even if it does not happen, if my mission fails, I must still attempt it, because I know what is real under all this fantasy. I do know, despite what some of my people claim is impossible. It’s a matter of dignity, I tell them, and this they fully understand since dignity is where they are born and where they live, and hopefully, where they will die. It’s the dignity I work for, no matter how they might laugh at me and call me a crazed fool, on an excited evening under bright stars, the invisible new moon, and a blazing fire.

We point past each other with our words, arguing as though we are looking at the same facts and experiences.

Going to Water 2

My name is Agana, Beginning Rain, and no one knows when I was born. That’s because I’m like the Cloud People, who evolved from nowhere. We have always existed, and when conditions were right, we came into being. The truth is I’ve been around a long time, and I’m no one to mess with. I am a tall, strong, smart woman, and on good days, fearless enough to get the job done. I will match wits with anyone, and I can back up the tongue they say is smart with fists, feet, knives or guns. I can slice someone apart with a gaze or bring a person down onto the soft earth in peace and gentleness, whatever needs to happen. Someone called me beautiful the other day, and it surprised me because I don’t often think of human things that way, although stars are undoubtedly beautiful, and the sunrise, and each precious breath. But just before I washed my hair, I gazed into the still pond anyway, and my open black hair hung its tips into the cool water as I kneeled over its surface, and the eyes that sparkled back up at me had a brief moment of looking like stars, so I thought about what that woman said and took its meaning into consideration. Beauty is a powerful thing in this world, after all. It can hide people, keep others from seeing what’s beneath, intentions, darkness lying in there ready to pounce. It seduces too, promising things, drawing another person or being into a sphere of influence, like the flash of a lure to a hungry trout. Like Custer. They say he was beautiful too, but me, I only remember the crimson of his blood and the blood of those he touched, like a scythe he was across our lands.

     Because of that memory, I had to go there, you see, just before he died. I stepped between all those steel-tipped arrows and dying creatures to where he lay dying, close-cropped golden hair matted with sweat and horse blood and human blood and fear.  Everything was getting quiet like it does after a battle, the surreal quiet and drone of death stepping away in the mind, from the mind. The warriors’ hands were shaking, quivering as the fighting power fell from them, all of it over now, another reality slipping into place, the kind of knowing that each warrior will learn to live with, learn to carry, whether it’s in his nightmares, dreams of glory, or knowledge of being part of a history that will last forever. It’s in the smell of urine and blood, in his fear, in his having won the battle, in the strength he lets slide off as another way of living enters him and changes him forever.

     The warriors saw me approach Custer, and they backed away. My flint knife was not for killing, and they could see its medicine, centuries old. One man dropped to his knees, placed his palm on the earth and sang softly, watching, helping us all. A pale blue mist rose from the ground, and silence encompassed the general and me. He was afraid when he saw the knife, fear peeling his eyes back so the whites shone brightly up at me.

     “You’re safe,” I said. “Soon to be dead, but safe. And you will not die at my hand.”  He took a breath. The fear did not leave his eyes, but it wasn’t of me anymore. It was of himself, of what he would see of his life in the next moments, meeting his own heaven and hell because this was the world he knew and made for himself and everyone else.  Heaven and Hell, that simple scourge brought into our land. I saw his journey flit across his eyes, then I let four small drops of dark liquid from my pouch fall into his mouth, and slung it back across my chest. “I want you to live a little longer, so you have time to think. You must look at all the killing you have done, at the way you have seen us, at the cowardice you displayed in killing so many innocents.” He stared at me, wanting to be hard, but he could not. “Now your arrogance has finally killed you and your men, and your terrorizing my people is finished, and you have to listen.”

     He tried to speak, but his voice was cut short by the approach of three Cheyenne and Hunkpapa fighters. I looked at them quickly, and they stopped a respectful distance away.  They had never seen me before, but they knew me, knew who I was. Our people are like that. They could see what I was doing, so they watched, standing very still. The warrior with his palms on the ground continued singing very softly into the earth.

     “Do you see it now?” I asked, but Custer stared straight ahead, refusing in his stubbornness, though he was no longer afraid of the men. I reached down and sliced a small tuft of his hair with the flint knife. “Gold,” I thought. That’s what it’s all about, Custer leading the geologists into Sioux territory despite government promises, as usual the promise falling prey to the need of those who break it, predation justified by need. I held the hair in front of Custer’s eyes. “Here’s your gold,” I said, not to be cruel, but to be real with him, no pity and no mercy. I led his eyes to the ground, and he followed my hand forward and downward until my fingers touched the earth. I scooped a small hole in the soil, then covered it, and Custer’s eyes stayed on the tiny dark mound.

     “Maybe Earth will take you back to the truth now,” I said, very softly, for I wanted him to listen to his own voices. We all listened, the warriors and me, and Custer, and the sky began to change around us all, dreadful dark then light, light then dreadful dark, moving above the softly circling blue mist. “It is up to you now. This is your chance, so don’t be as stupid in your dying as you have been in your life. Take your chance.”

     Custer stared and breathed, and his eyes turned to the darkening purple sky, then back to the damp earth, while the herbs opened his heart to his mind, and he breathed on. The warriors watched, asking themselves if this man deserved the chance he was getting to see himself, maybe to make amends as he died, but they knew enough of life and death  to know this was not their decision. Each of them had fallen to the cruelty that had too long spread across their vast holy prairies a plague, and each had to make their own amends in whatever way they could. Few were spared the corruption within this great change come upon them. For them to deny this fighter, this man, this scourge, this hero of the enemy his own moment in the growing darkness, would be to deny themselves the same possibility.

     Then Custer looked directly at me where I remained kneeling above him, and his eyes finally, finally, fell open. There were no tears, but there was a moment of their glazing over when I knew he was seeing his wife’s eyes in mine, and I let this happen with a rueful smile, tender and hard at once, for I would never be fooled by such things. And though he was cruel and deranged, it may be that he loved too. I have been seen as many things, beautiful and kind and cruel and ugly, and as long as that vision serves Earth, I will let it be. I know any vision changes when I don’t hold to it, and change it did, quickly, and then I became all those Indian women who fell under his sword, and his eyes stayed on mine, straight into me unflinching, widening, his soul breaking open, and I stared back into him. It did not take long, for the medicine is quick in its purpose, and he was a child beneath me, lying against the contorted limbs of his dead comrades.

     “Why are you helping me?” he asked, struggling for an answer, trying to move, but he could not.

     “It has nothing to do with you,” I said. “This seeing is just what is possible for us all, and you are at the center of something horrible and large and strange, at this moment, and it must be done like this for everyone.”

     And then he turned and died, looking down at Earth, a strange smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, not a satisfied smile, but something of otherworldly irony and sadness. I stood slowly and walked down the hill to vanish among the people and the electric purple night.

     The warriors knew not to touch him, not to cut him, but to leave him lying where he was. It was done now, and the white newspapers would say the worst about our mutilations no matter what was done or not done, no matter what soldiers who knew better might see in the following days, as the populace was lost in their craziness and lust for war and gold at this point. What happened that day was a powerful center of a huge churning movement in history, a beginning to what would follow for the next hundred years, and what we accomplished together held a secret that would perhaps only fully come to fruit in still another hundred years. Who knows, maybe what we accomplished that day helped to prevent even more ravages than history has held before our dismayed eyes.