In less than one full circle of the moon cycle Cholena Griscrow's father had died of the lung disease and her older brother was arrested and locked up in state juvie for stealing money for rent. Her mother had starting talking only to those from the past and lost her job at the paint factory, so she and Cholena left Chicago in the beginning of Cholena's 6th grade year to go back to the reservation, back to her grandmother's rusty trailer on that lonely village on the prairie, though her grandmother had gone to the spirits herself four years ago. Her absence created a space that was ominous and colossal but there was nowhere else for them to go.
Now, almost eight months after their return, the brutal winter had finally softened into a very late spring and she and her mother were back to the roots, but those roots had been severely clipped. She thought about how change arrived in such instantaneous moments. Like the creation of a sudden storm, dark clouds gathering and blocking the sun, the temperature dropping thirty degrees within hours. Her father getting the masonry job in the city and the four of them leaving the Northern Cheyenne River Reservation, saying a tearful ‘Toksa' to their neighbors, most who were now early gone, or befuddled by firewater, or worse, the bottomless, shapeless poverty. The relations that were left, including the elders that had blessed her in the Cheyenne and Lakota languages, were gone, too. The few mining jobs were many counties away, and the modern world didn't seem to want their well practiced, ancient skills. There had not been a tribal dance here for many years, but this where her people has been for eons, within a three hundred mile radius of this very place. No one born here seemed to feel at peace in the alternative world of concrete jungles, of man made everything, of rushed, detached strangers.
Today, the last day of May, as mother slept unaware through yet another morning, Cholena had found something precious in a drawer. Her great-great grandfather's crow-hawk-grouse-pheasant feather-regalia, wrapped in beads and suede ties, back from the era when those messenger birds numbered millions, during the time of Sitting Bull, before the exodus, the one which was supposed to roll up the white man's built upon wreckage, and expose underneath the clean, pure land of the first nations. The feathers waited there in a pine drawer, wrapped in fragile fabric, along with ancient, crumbling sage. For the first time in so long, as she smelled the soothing fragrance, saw the beauty, and gently touched the feathers, she felt a rush of joy and magical memory.
She walked out the back door, past the stack of old truck tires that would never be used again, past the piles of pallets that might be sold if the weather didn't rot them first. Past the line of tired, sagging, faded cotton laundry that she had finished hanging yesterday, down the dusty alley way. She waited behind a half collapsed tin shed until a group older boys- sneering and cackling, lightening up their cigarettes, or more likely, blunts- passed by. They had all become strangers since her absence. She knew from the city world to avoid older kids if possible unless they had food to share or spoke the same language. This new generation did not speak hers.
She walked past the other decaying trailers until there was only empty land and the barbed wire fences dividing, always separating, the haves- the farmland owners- from the have nots- the rest of them. A mile or so more, over the ridge, south of the slough, she came upon brave wildflowers that peeked out among the tallgrass stalks. She saw the yarrow, the wild blue flax, old friends. After a while, she sat down in the jade saffron colored grasses, nature's bounty at its peak on this late spring afternoon. They were high enough to completely hide her if she lay down. As she stared straight up into the azure, the sun continued its journey west, a moment arrived where the wind held its breath, all the long gone birds and animals and insects seemed to be there again, surrounding her.
Her fingers moved again to the lumps at her collarbone. First one had appeared, then two, now she felt the faint traces a third joining it's friends, giving them more power. She automatically felt for them many times a day now. They seemed to be growing larger, harder, more sure of themselves. But there were no longer medicine men, nor even a nurse to visit, on the reservation, Nor any money to pay if there were. She would not tell anyone. Her mother had made it clear that they would now leave their lives up to the fates.
She stretched out onto her side on the firm, cool ground, hidden from everything by the grasses under the enormous endless sky. She could be laying on the bones of her ancestors. Right below her could be a hundred thousand bones from the past thousand years, at first times of peace and connection, then of fighting and invaders, then of separations and modern chaos.
She closed her eyes and heard the first echo of the past. Forgotten words and drum beats starting flooding her, the past moving into this moment. She was five years old again, standing at the outside of the fire circle at sunset, listening. Her grandmother, and great grandmother and all the knowledge keepers that fanned out from them were singing from each of the four directions, red, yellow, white and black, and from above and from below, to all her relations. Cholena's hand opened and the eager feathers took to life and floated away, high into the pale air and into the precious space of the invisible divide between life and afterlife.
‘Nothing lives long
But the earth and the mountains
What remains in the fire, in the flames
Becomes the final song'
-'One Who Stands With Eagles'- Cherokee/ Quapaw poet