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Radioshark cary1/30/2024 A star quilt marks the birth of a new baby soon to get her Mandan name. A young man jumps off the bridge connecting one side of what used to be a river to the other. It’s a long and complicated dream with no wakings, only turnings. Memories return like a note in a bottle, or a bull boat, or in the spring, when wildflowers capture the sunlight in a hue of pastel pinks, prairie roses peeking through grass. The Turtle Priest goes when he can, talks to them, feeds them, prays for the life-giving river. ![]() The bottle keeps sailing down the Mnisose. He is the hereditary Chief of the Sahnish people. (Swift Hawk) walked with one leg shorter than the other. Sound waves of recipes, stories, music, language, community, all our relations. No computer can bring the old chiefs back to life. Like ships in a bottle they claw at the inside and sail themselves over the edge. Some with memories too vivid try to erase them. Registered in a museum database for all time, still bearing the imprints of a little girl’s hand. Now I hear it’s in the Smithsonian museum,” an elder, Caroline, said about her younger self. “My father made me give it to that white lady doctor, but I didn’t want to. The task of putting it back together again becomes the journey of making and mapping, like a thread of sinew stretched across time and space.Ī quilled ball in the hands of a girl. With age comes the potent urgency of re-membering. Pieces of knowledge remain sewn inside the skins of grandchildren too young to know their secret gifts. New ones coming of age replace the old ones, ever standing for the ones who have gone before. Across the prairie the drum sounds at a distance while an old woman sews a shawl fringe to the blare of a television. Tipis and tents rise against the velvet green horizon as the sun rests like orange jello taking shape to hang on the day. Muscled men burst with the life beat of the drum, feather bustles, beaded moccasins, dancing in their own time. All that glitters is…jingles of dancers’ dresses swaying and clinking in the sun as girls and women enter the rhythmic dance circle. Today, restless cowboys and oil workers saddle up to be mesmerized by spinning wheels getting hopeful on their luck while well-pressed Indians clean up the cans, change the bills and walk the floor in black and white fancy dance, stow their name tags until the whole dream evaporates. “Casinos will be the end of sovereignty!” declared Russell Parshall (Left Hand Eagle), Mandan-Hidatsa artist and rock-n-roller, a generation ago. Fifty years of electricity to Chicago, hundreds of miles away. River shut off trickles up through grazing land fifty years after the fact. Sugar is proffered as food, while women plant and harvest their gardens, keepers of the corn. ![]() Word lists substitute for language, then become language. A new generation retrieves words – Dosha magu. Underneath the frozen ground lies one thousand years of history as water from the monster dam wears away at the image leaving only its traces in the memories of elders. Inside a weather-worn trailer a newborn kicks its way into the world as a bottle rolls to the floor and out the door to reappear under melted snow in a spring thaw. Life moves along the prairie edges – some don’t make the wide turns, hug too close to the ground, their bodies pulled out from the ditch. The “voice of the people” silenced in the middle of some sad country song.
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