Wandering Stars

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

... See more

I called my horse Church, and thought of her as my second wind. I got the idea from Pratt, who talked about how our time at the prison-castle was our second chance, and that once we got through the hard part, the discipline, and learning how to walk for the first time with English, taking the Lord’s hand, learning to live by a red-blooded Christian

... See more

And the dream was only remarkable to Pratt because his dream life was essentially unlived, because he never remembered his dreams, became uncomfortable when people wanted to relay their dreams to him or to anyone else, felt the world over there, on the other side of sleep, was not to be trusted, or was made for children alone, but he got it then, t

... See more

My mother once told me a story about a woman with a bird for a heart, who ran everywhere she went. She couldn’t stop moving. Said she was restless. Our people once lived near lakes in the north. We farmed and harvested wild rice, fished. Stayed put. My mother said that woman put the bird in our people’s hearts, and that’s what made us go wandering

... See more

Freedom from prison and then documentation to keep track of us was what brought me to the name Jude. Some of the other Indians took famous American presidents as their names, one man took Richard Henry Pratt, the whole thing like that, and Bear Shield took Victor because of a book he’d read called Frankenstein, about a man-made monster. Bear Shield

... See more

When it came to my own name, I went looking through a Bible. I couldn’t decide until I got to the book before the last book, after coming across the verse, They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. Getting these new names felt like dying again. And I felt like a cloud without rain. A

... See more

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

... See more

After that when he heard people talking about getting high he thought about flying and not about people getting fucked up but trying to get above things, to feel and see from higher up or at least to not have to feel so heavy; before he started getting high, when he heard it mentioned he tried not to think about his mom but birds or feathers, not w

... See more

On the train ride back to Oklahoma, I saw the bones of buffalo piled up as high as a man for miles. I’d heard that this was happening. The Buffalo Wars, they called it. I’d heard about why they were doing it. Every buffalo dead was an Indian gone. But seeing all those buffalo bodies piled up like that, and the swarms of vultures and other such scav

... See more