What It Comes To Mean

There are mornings here when the quiet comes to fill you. You walk the line of lake cautiously not wanting to break the spell of it. There's mist on the water and it drifts upwards off the rock enveloping you and the feeling is not of disappearing from this view but of sinking into it.

Within this stillness you swear you can hear the sounds of drums on distant hills. You close your eyes and in the push of breeze there's the wail and chant of singers and this fusty shoreline holds in it the smell of something ancient, something timeless, eternal, articulate, significant and vast. You only need to breathe it into you to become it.

There's nothing in your experience to match this deliberate taking in. You who have fought so hard to find a place here, for a definition beyond what the skin implies have never encountered such frank acceptance of being. Against the push of land, the sweep of it, you fit easily like another shoot of grass and there's the sense in you that this is what it means to be Indian.

They've called you many things in your time here. You've been savage, redman, First Person, aboriginal, native, indigenous and an original inhabitant. You've been labeled, tagged, defined, categorized, filed and absorbed. Many times you've been analyzed, probed, studied, examined, inspected and researched. Never have they called you by your name.

When you were young they called you Itchybum. In those long purple summer evenings the game was Cowboys and Indians except for them, you were an Itchybum. An Itchybum was a joke, a cartoon in their minds because that was all they knew of you. And so you ran, hightailed it really, through the backyards of your boyhood pursued by miniature heroes intent on bagging you.

In the schools they sent you to they called you Special Needs. They treated you as though you assembled the world in fog and clarity was something forged in the strap and paddle and a rigid discipline meant to bring you into line. They called you slow, awkward, and remedial because the shyness born of displacement wouldn't let you speak. So they called you Indian.

Later, in the home they placed you in they called you adopted. No one ever translated that for you, never explained the intent of it, the meaning, never let you know that it means plainly, to be accepted. Instead, all you came to know of it was that it meant being reassembled, rearranged, remade in an image your skin made impossible.

And once

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