Walls

Kids. Little kids. They grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different. And I'm the monster? I don't know what's scarier. The fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to run a sword through my heart... or that sometimes, I just wanna let 'em.

~ from “Nimona”

Photo by Sarah RK on Unsplash

There’s this shirt that keeps popping up on my social media feeds, emblazoned with a beautiful, stylized thunderbird and the words: “No one is illegal on stolen land, we walk on native land.” It’s sold by WelcomeNativeSpirit.com (I am not being paid to promote this, and haven’t purchased from this site yet, I just really like the shirt). These words have replayed in my mind so often recently as I’ve watched the unbelievable play out in the national news—ICE officers arresting representatives of the government they’re supposed to work for, people being ripped from the lives they’ve built and thrust back into chaos, children separated from their parents, rampant abuses of power the like of which we haven’t seen for, oh, about four years—so often that it’s become a mantra. So, when my daughter asked me to read a book she had found at the library titled “Blackfoot,” when that children’s book glossed over years of targeted dehumanizing and a campaign to wipe this proud nation off the face of the land our government wanted by stating that (paraphrased), “the people were dying of smallpox contracted from the white settlers they traded with, so the government set aside land especially for them,” I stopped reading and got really quiet.

“That’s not what happened,” I told my girls. I told them. I told them about blankets laced with the deadly virus. I told them the bison were killed on purpose so The People couldn’t live the way they always had. I told them that the land the government “gave” them was always the land nobody else wanted, and then it was somehow The People’s fault when they couldn’t farm successfully and starved. I told them about schools where the children were taken by force, punished if they spoke the language that was their birthright, held captive by so-called “men of God.” I told them that for 100 years the practice of their sacred traditions and rituals was outlawed, punishable even by death.

I told them, and I watched their innocent eyes grow round and damp as I felt my own voice tremble, felt the tears in my throat and behind my eyes, knew I had no right to let the tears fall. I told them, because they are growing up in a world where this land is still considered ours by divine right, where we are still allowed to herd people off the land we have claimed and build fences to keep them out. I told them, because it’s important to understand young that wherever division is created, violence will follow. “Us” and “them” are roles invented by people who want power, and if we fall into the role laid out for “us” we become nothing but puppets in the hands of a cruel master. But even a puppet has some power, because narratives are inherently powerful, and that means we cannot absolve “us” of guilt.

Today I read that Trump is trying to procure funding to continue building the wall he started during his first reign of terror. Because, of course he is. Today I watched Nimona for the first time on Netflix. It’s the story of a knight trained to protect the realm he was raised in, a city enclosed in a high wall “to keep the people safe from monsters.” Except, of course, that the “monsters” are anyone different, and not nearly as scary as the people in charge, who will destroy anyone and anything in the name of “protection.”