Prairie Labyrinth
Tag Archives: First Nations
Sioux Death Song
overlay on prairie image by hosynth from Pixabay
When someone passes away, many Native people say that they do not die, but instead “walk on.” This implies a continuation of a journey rather than an endpoint on a linear path.
Dakota (Sioux) Memorial – 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota …
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2340627/dakota-(sioux)-memorial—1862 After listening to the bishop and personally reviewing the trial records, Lincoln commuted the death sentence for all but thirty-eight prisoners. At 10 am on December 26, 1862, the condemned men, chanting the Dakota deathsong, marched in single file to a scaffold guarded by 1,400 troops in full battle dress.
Black Hills of Dakota
Eagle on the Moon
Black Hills of Dakota
Circles
QU’APPELLE AND ESL
QU’APPELLE AND ESL
(Cree – Kah-tep-was “The river that calls”)
They come today
from countries far away
to learn this country’s
names for river, lake, and tree
There was a time
the natives of this land
sat in these same desks
in de-braided fear
learning to forget them
DISSECTING THE FROG OF WAR
DISSECTING THE FROG OF WAR
And when did the buffalo
driven over the cliff
become the lemming leaping
as if the decision was his own
WISDOM TEETH
WISDOM TEETH
Eskimo candy
is what we called
the marrow in the bones
If we had learned from them
instead of them from us
we’d all still have our teeth
ALAS POOR…
ALAS POOR…
And we in this new old land turning up
with our plow
hammer heads, and arrowheads, and sometimes
a bone or two
and if one would be an uncrushed skull it would
be no Yorick that we knew
This noun, once verb, would mock us
in its grinning
all those with whom we might converse
are laid neath Hamlet’s soil
His redder kin scattered
like his bones