Article voiceover
I see you, Indian girls and boys, my classmates, my peers, my cousins, friends, and mirrors. We're only in our fifties now but almost half of us are dead. Some of us never made it out of our twenties. That's what happens to reservation kids. If we make it past thirty then odds are good that we'll make it past sixty. I don't talk to you as much as I should but I write poems for you all the time. Our parents and grandparents also went to school together and are buried in the same cemeteries. We are a tribe. We know the same songs and stories. We know the same rivers and streams. We know the same stones and trees. We know the same game trails and the same small town streets. Dear classmates, we are more than just the Indians who shared a childhood. We are tragedy, velocity, and gravity. We are, we are, we are geography.
We are
tragedy, velocity, and gravity.
We are, we are, we are geography.
...and mirrors.
Thank you for the expression of a feeling deep deep inside of me.
My family had to leave all and everything, because of war, and I´m the first kid born in the new. I carry all the things that they shared and from whom they come from inside of me, without ever have seen it. There´s a break and although there is a unvisible bridge. It´s a lonely thing, you can´t share it in the daily reality in which I was born here.
I hope a little could be unterstood, although my english is rudimentär.
My thinking sometimes goes back to the days growing up on the rez. Moved to phx when I was 21,I'm 76 now, sober 38 years, still trudging along. Thank you for keeping my Spirit living.