Finding Out About the Deaths of Some of My, Well,

Ron Riekki

I call them ancestors but my brother calls them relatives, saying that he does not feel indigenous, and I tell him I don’t care about his feelings, when I should have told him to feel the presence of those who have come before us, and I think of the last Anishinaabe pow wow I was blessed with, me, an outsider, watching, afraid to enter, because I’m not Anishinaabe, but I am Sámi, Karelian, native, but Arctic native, reindeer native, snow native, ice native, guovttá native a Sámi word meaning two people alone and I am two people alone and the loons nearby were quiet, and I went out on the lake, alone, and I looked up at the stars, and I know that the stars are our ancestors turned into reindeer, bright reindeer, 54 Riekki and I tell my brother this, but he is lost to his accounting, to his numbers, when I want to tell him about how many of us have been assimilated, have lost just about everything for so little just drum-less death