The Land Remembers

We were never lost.

We were made to vanish.

Buried beneath maps that spelled profit in blood,

beneath treaties folded like broken promises

and fed to fire.

But the land..

she never forgot us.

Not when they stole the children,

not when they silenced the tongues,

not when they paved over the trails our grandmothers walked barefoot,

praying under breath so soft even the wind had to lean in to hear.

We are not myths.

We are not bones tucked beneath museum glass.

We are breath.

We are spit and memory and mourning turned to flint.

Our hands remember how to split bark,

how to call fish from the river with just a hum,

how to speak to the roots without asking permission.

We didn’t just love the land..

we were made from it.

Clawed from clay,

salted with smoke,

suckled on wind and berry

and the sorrow of deer.

We didn’t carve names in stone.

We carved them in sacrifice.

In the cradleboards passed down

with beadwork stained from years of silence.

In the sweat that fed the corn,

in the footprints long erased

but never undone.

You cannot unroot us.

Even when they tried to rewrite the blood,

to Christian the names,

to sew us shut at the seams..

we spilled out anyway.

Through daughters who dream in two tongues,

through sons who carry both anger and mercy

in the same hand.

We are not just what was taken.

We are what endured.

We are what rose

not like the sun,

but like smoke after burning.

Slow. Bitter. Holy.

And the land..

oh, she knows us still.

When the pines lean at dusk,

it is to whisper what our elders said without voice.

When the coyotes call out at night,

it is not noise.

It is naming.

You think we are few.

But we are in every gust that lifts the eagle higher.

In every cracked palm that holds the medicine still.

In every child born with grief in their bones

and resistance in their breath.

We are not waiting for approval.

We do not beg to be seen.

Our existence

is our rebellion.

We carry the names of our grandfathers in our marrow.

We carry the names of our grandmothers in our walk.

And even if we speak with borrowed words..

know this:

our truth was never yours to edit.

We are the fire beneath the ash.

We are the ones who stayed.

Even when staying meant

watching everything we loved

be renamed,

resold,

and buried again.

But still..

We drum.

We plant.

We remember.

And we wait for the day

when the earth shakes not in sorrow,

but in joy,

because her children

finally stood

where they belong.