honeycombvisions:

the Indians are dead, they said

They took us on a field trip to the Everglades
Where we visited big cypress reservation
Most of them died out, teacher said
Precious few left on the rez

I remember marveling at the beadwork and artifacts in the museum
And the chickees amongst the cypress trees
wondering why these things were locked up behind glass,
Why this was “just history”, relics of the past
Reading the words on the museum plaques;
the Seminoles and Creeks
were once one people

Something in me lit up,
That’s me! That’s me,
Wayward Indian without a culture,
forced by the whiteness of public education to view colonizers as explorers,
My own people as savages
Well, the word creek was said
But still, “those Indians, they’re dead”

In fourth grade we had to pick a conquistador to do a project on
Picking a Native American was not an option

Pick your favorite Spaniard,
Who civilized this stinking swampland
And saved it’s savage people
So I picked desoto
That fabled hero who brutalized us
Hungry for the riches of our land

This is what my education taught me;
That my people no longer really exist,
savages swallowed up by European refinement
That our land is not ours, and never again will be
That an Indian is an Indian is an Indian,
Until the white man decides the Indian is white enough that their Indian blood is meaningless

That our culture can be summed up in a museum plaque,
That no one among us was ever great, when held up next to the blessed colonizers

I grew up thinking that my indigenous blood was meaningless,
that whiteness had even won the war within my own body

The Indians are dead, they said
Except for the few who run the museums
and hog our tax dollars

The Indians are dead, they said
And if that’s true,
I must be dead too

– kelsie marina (2017)