My Marrow Sings

(for those whose blood remembers what papers do not)

I was not born beneath the bark of a longhouse,

nor raised with my name called in ceremony.

No roll bears me. No enrollment defines me.

But my marrow sings in syllables older than borders,

older than the ink that tried to erase us.

I am no less.

I have dresses—

handed down, thrifted, gifted—

each thread humming a language

I am still learning to understand.

I wear them not to perform,

but to remember—

to remind my skin of its own echo.

I was not taught all the dances,

but I know how the rain drums the earth,

how thunder shakes a prayer loose from the ribs,

how the fire speaks when you're quiet long enough.

And that is dance enough for me.

I’ve seen sage not just as smoke

but as a teacher—

curling, cleansing, reminding me

that to belong is not always to be seen,

but to feel.

As Chief Dan George once said,

“The heart never knows the colour of the skin.”

And I say—

nor does the soil.

I walk this life with coneflowers tucked in memory,

with wild strawberries sewn into the lining of my silence.

I steep my teas like medicine bundles,

stirring stories into each sip,

my hands recalling what my tongue forgets.

My heritage does not rest in documents.

It lives in the hush before sunrise,

in the rustle of pine against sky,

in the long breath I take

before I speak into the wind

and call it kin.

When I pray,

it is not in the language of ceremony,

but it is not less sacred.

My prayers sound like whispers into a canyon—

the kind of sound that doesn’t echo back,

but sinks into stone

and makes its home.

I know I am mixed—

white, Indigenous, stories braided

with both grief and gladness.

But I do not need permission to belong.

I carry my grandfathers in my blood,

their wisdom woven into my resilience.

Their stories shaped the shadows I walk with.

Their silence became my compass.

“We are the land,”

said Oren Lyons.

And I believe him.

Not just poetically.

I feel it—

in the way I cry over uprooted trees,

in how I plant herbs like I’m planting memory,

in how firelight feels like being held.

You see,

I love the earth like it remembers me—

and perhaps it does.

I love the wind

because it is my language when I have none.

I love the rain

because it is proof that the sky still mourns with us.

And I love the fire

because it teaches that destruction can be a holy kind of renewal.

No, I am not enrolled.

No tribe claims me on paper.

But the land knows.

And I know.

And that is enough.

Because my story is a river still carving its name into the canyon,

still shaping stone,

still offering water to those who come after

with empty hands and full hearts.

And I will go on—

braiding my healing with cedar and clove,

writing my lineage into the wind,

loving without needing to be seen,

but seen nonetheless

by the ancestors who never left.