2 minute read

DAWES ROLL

DAWES ROLL, 1898

POETRY Melissa Wabnitz Pumayugra

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Everyone wants to be Indian red, stoic, somehow innately mystical, free dental care, casino checks, wisdom, or so says a rumor in the wind.

White ladies wait with bated breath to identify spittles of saliva, genetics. But it won’t change a singular headline, or rewrite reservation statistics.

Where are all these people? Stolen, lost, murdered? Ancestry is a box on a college application, an HR afterthought.

Will you wake up one morning and greet the day with a rain dance, or knowledge of the setting sun?

Though the Earth grew on the turtle’s back, my spine grows crooked, worn with single parenthood, our family claims fractions of Indian blood. Thick with superstition, maybe we should just burn some imported white sage and call it a ceremony.

Let me tell you about loss. Let me share the names of the children, sprinkled tombs, dug too shallow, I am weeping.

My needle punches the fabric of colonization, it continues and it belongs to you too, your 23-and-me results, a new identity. My rage boils into smoke.

I don’t have enough beads left Of my Indian DNA, RNA, my altruistic soul, to memorialize the tears, hearts, bodies that were shed here, there, ever.

Let me remind you why. Where all the missing indigenous live, die, dream. Too many to list, Wikipedia can’t keep up, each one vanished, forgotten.

Why isn’t violence a single horrific story? Here, this world, it’s more. Cycles of this tradition, familiarity like a Father’s handprint on the face, I am ashamed and alone. Because cities still own our land piled on the backs of ancestors and elders, because Yale still won’t return Geronimo’s head, femur, dignity, because the history of this place is tampering with my elders, each nailhead solidly hammered on the backs of my people. Yours too if you dig back far enough,

Dawes and all these people recording our lines, Embedded generational trauma

drop by exhumed drop of Indian blood.

So what is the sacred circle? Death, Disease, America, treaties burned, lands harvested, displaced, government lies and inherited scars, this is what Indian blood means to me.

It isn’t wrong to try to find the link between she and me, and he and they when it means the difference between appropriation and birthright.

No matter what the lines reveal, Pow-wows, red earth, mirrors for whiskey, feather dances and smoke signals, I still won’t see your soul.

The Dawes Roll of 1898 established lists of people with Native American ancestry and who were eligible to claim membership in one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” that were relegated to what is now known as the State of Oklahoma. Prior to the Dawes Commission and subsequent cumulative recordkeeping, there were few widespread means of tracking direct descent from these particular tribes other than birth records, which were sometimes falsified or revised to reflect the norms of the time– caucasian superiority.