Wandering Stars

If only he could have convinced the Indian boy that there was no better way for it to have gone, Pratt’s attempted deliverance of the Indians from themselves to themselves, no better plan for America, no better plan for the Indians, no better plan, there was no better plan than that, he said to no one, and faced the wall, and died. Pratt would late

I never did find out what happened to him the night before the morning he went out and blew his trumpet instead of his bugle, blew and blew a song that grew out of him in extended notes that called for the rising of us not out of our beds but out of our bodies. I can’t explain it well, you never can with music. I can say the notes were long and bui

We will wrap him in bright colors. I do not know the ways of our people. I was too young when they took me, and then the school meant to make what I knew a sin. Everything I have left to share, to pass down to you will have to be good enough. All I have to tell you about being Cheyenne came from my mother, before she died, and because she was dying

This line is from a letter your father sent to your mother: We belong to what we are the way a song belongs to the singer, my heart is a runner and my soul is a winter. In the letter he talks about belonging. What we belong to. And for the most part you believe he means the two of them belonging together. But in another part of the letter he is say

Maybe we’ll be running our whole lives. Just keep moving. That would be okay. We’ll have strong legs, keen awareness, and big hearts, keeping ourselves and each other going like we belong to that one-day distant future, when we can look back and say this is how we made it, despite everything.

It has been said that you know the life you’re being born into, that you heard the story told to you before you came, and that as your life happens to you, as all the many people and dreams and events unfold before you, you will feel a certain kind of way about all of it that you won’t necessarily recognize as remembering the story.

You are from a people who survived by making their surviving mean more than surviving, who did their best to stay together. But you will not know if the people ahead of you will be capable of the same. And they will not know if they will be capable of the kind of love that survives surviving, that holds bullet shards in a body, doesn’t let it poiso

Be sure your daughter knows about this box, these pages. Pass them on to her, tell her to pass them on to her children, so that in understanding who they are, they will understand that it has to include who it is that made them, this is what you will come to know about your relatives and ancestors, not that they be thanked or acknowledged because t

Sean had always felt uncomfortable being referred to as a boy, or as a young man. But, and he knew this was the biggest but, feeling nonbinary did not mean he wasn’t a man who directly benefited from being a man. Men were a secret cult. To be a boy being groomed to be a man was to be joining a secret cult against women, and against anything not squ