Carter McKenzie
The numerically lessened Kalapuyans were by 1840 a trivial annoyance to settlers who took their lands and employed them as laborers but did not preserve for them any of their traditional homelands for their villages or for their resources needs. By 1851 there was no land in the Willamette Valley unclaimed by American settlers, who also called for the removal or genocide of all Indian peoples.
—David G. Lewis PhD, from Quartux: Journal of Critical Indigenous Anthropology
from beneath the ground
roots and quartz
fragments
glinting
water carrying
all it knows
from the mountains
*
the world
has ended before
what first people
ever here
among them
Kalapuyans
know
over fourteen thousand years
over a million acres
their making
a fecund valley
*
I had not known
of the Trail of Tears here
I had not known
of the people
forced to cede their lands
263 miles over rough terrain
a journey of 33 days
untold deaths
in the cold early year of 1856
“dimensions of suffering and tragedy”
I had not known
*
and this neighboring
valley
and foothills,
where I live, original place
of the Molalla Mountain tribe
I had not known
the valley settler-named, Lost
after settler catastrophe
the wagon train
subject to myth
of a shortcut
over the mountains
*
to think of what it is not to know
you are lost
the ignorance of that
*
negative spaces
*
my own history of whiteness
how I know I can’t see
what I will keep trying to see
*
slope and trees
against the eastern sky
through the window
each and every
morning
singing back
a kind of prayer
*
who lived here
*
for twenty-eight years
over half my life
the well has filled
with water
from these mountains
generous
*
and last night’s
sudden
presence
a Great Horned Owl
calling from high branches
as I opened the door
a resonance
alive
within
*
the owl
a depth
from the chamber
of the owl
echoing
the whole night sky
I felt
lifting up
*
the heave of wings
the owl veering off
to a further branch
bulky
shadow
swaying the bough
and from the woods
a kindred owl
calling back
*
through darkness
traveling
*
this
listening
instinct
in late October
after rains
long waited for
*
a recognition
repeating
*
waves
of sound
met
being
owned by no one
*
I don’t know
how much time
we have left
the water
filling the well
despite
*
parched
ground
fissured
until
these autumn rains
*
despite
the plagues
of abuses
*
Beloved
you can’t know
*
what you are surviving
*
what we have done
or not
*
how much time
for gathering
we don’t know
we might have
*
vessels of sound
a kind of prayer
out of the negative spaces
being
*
here
for as long as it takes
*
for as long as it takes
*
being
unexpected
body of remembering
curving the sphere
still
singing back
*