Breakdancer Bri Mcmillen performed at the Governor’s Awards. Photo by Seanna O’Sullivan
Left to right: Gov. Walker, Rob Sparks, Charlotte Fox, Ernestine Hayes, Bob Banghart, Lance Petersen, Frank Soos, Lani Hotch, Heather Lende, Shirley Mae Springer Staten, Marilyn Davidson. Not shown: Kathleen Carlo Kendall. Photo by Seanna O’Sullivan
Now and Then I Take the Midnight Public Transit I’ve paid my dues, so I always ride for free. People in front seats compare Perseverance and Sheep Creek. Colonize with their words. Take ownership. We’re placed in predetermined seats, some more comfortable than others. First class and MVPs board before the rest. The system thanks us for our patience as we wait. Through sooty, beveled windows (there are no other views) we watch the neighborhoods roll by. Pint-sized houses line narrow dirt streets. Street signs detour us through bottles and handguns, bodies and barbecues, music and moaning. Dogshit. Mud puddles. Abandoned cars. Next a two-lane street, this one paved. Houses with patches of halfhearted green, cars propped on blocks, gaping hoods, broken furniture, scattered wrenches. Playthings for snot-nosed children racing against traffic, diapers full, futures empty, families raucous with unmodeled love. First stop a circled turn-around-and-goback—unless we’re here to visit incarcerated hopes housed behind locked gates and barbed fences guarded by holstered
white men who won’t look us in the eye. With luck we can graduate from wishing our sons were not in prison to hoping they won’t go back. Next stop as far as most of us might go. Clean streets, lawns lined with smiling purple flowers, happy windows hiding twentieth-century satisfactions. We’ve earned our place in this colony. We speak the colonizer’s language, parrot his judgments, mirror his values, follow his rules. We pray to his god. The public route does not go through the privileged part of town. We can only guess the cost of a ticket to that neighborhood. We can only be glad we were never given the chance to sell out our dirt street neighbors, to make ourselves money-rich, to sponsor white scholars who colonize us with their words. The language choked out of us they now own. Our smothered history they now record. Our beaten ceremonies they now conduct. Our bonfired art they now teach. Our clans are now corporations. Our leaders are now purchased. Our past is not yet resurrected. Our future has not yet arrived.
Waiting Room When finally I am a ghost I will cross this street I will walk toward that door I will not be seen I will not be noticed I will be invisible no less invisible no less noticed no less seen than those days those weeks those years I was the fatherless daughter of a cannery working city café dish washing fish sliming floor mopping learning to type so she can rise up to be a clerk at a desk in a white man’s office in a white man’s world Tlingit Kaagwaantaan woman living in a colonized territory where mothers speak a language their children are forbidden to know. * How can I be of any help now when I was no help at all during those years when they were children when I thought I was keeping them warm when I thought I was feeding them when every time I found a nickel on the ground I thought I ran to the store to spend it on them: my broken, colonized generations. Waiting in this transient room waiting waiting to live out a few thin years continued on next page
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