Many Memories in we
As performed on the Kennedy Center stage at the 2024 National Youth Poet Laureate Competition
Many Memories in we
By Aliyah American Horse
I’ll sit in your lap and listen to your tales
As you put my dark hair into braids
Unci, tell me the stories of your days
the lost generation
The wars in Wounded Knee
long nights on the reservation
Grandmother, tell me of your sisters and brothers
As you touch my skin with calloused hands
Tell me what it's like to be a Native woman
to grow old and tell stories
Teach me how to sew our families star quilts
And braid my own children’s hair
Unless my life is taken before I get there
That girl who tells me about her Cherokee lineage while pointing at my beaded earrings likes wearing a feather behind her ear, listening to Electric Pow Wow, sharing posts online about that rez life.
She says she likes the aesthetic of Pocahontas’s headband
lives in a land of oblivion.
She swims in stolen turquoise
Buys sage from some big box company too plastic to ignite
Buries us alive but wipes the dirt from our eyes.
I wonder if she found herself on the heavy end of her own shovel, would her eyes cry the same colored tears that are engraved in my nation's face?
I wonder if she understood that to be a native woman is to mourn.
Would she still morph from colonization to fetisization, describe herself as 1/16th?
It’s not romantic to be Indigenous
It is begging to go home with no ears to listen
It is watching the ghosts of girls, whose voices whisper in the wind
Whose tears flow in the creek and turn the water red
Knowing you can’t save them.
It’s telling your family you love them
Not out of spontaneous affection, but an inevitable goodbye
It is “no foul play involved”
It is “self inflicted”
It is his braids were chopped and he died the same way his sister did
Grandmother, what happens when you must sew the quilt I’m buried with
Don’t cry when my skin becomes game
when I’m hunted for these braids
Shed no tears Unci
When men find me
Easy to murder, easy to rape
The news channels won’t bother to say my last name
Afraid of His Horses, Long Soldier, Blue Bird, Brings Plenty
But in my name will justice lurk?
Justice for my sisters and brothers
Missing and murdered
When that girl walks through our woods with her Dollar Tree war paint,
Her sham of a headdress will be too heavy for her too look up
At the souls hanging from the branches
In the forest where their remains were found
My grandmother's calloused hands will find solace only when she traces the edges of a tear stained funeral program
I will be stuck in time.
My future will remain trapped inside a picture frame
And with it goes, an essence of life that isn’t lived
In a constant state of memory.
Many Memories In We was created in honor of Cole Brings Plenty, a native man who went missing and was eventually found dead. I wrote this poem specifically to be performed on a National stage, the Kennedy Center, to raise awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples everywhere. The title itself is an acronym for MMIW. This poem takes pieces from my debut poem, Shed No Tears Unci, while adding in portions about how the native culture is romanticized in media while there still is little recognition for the issues Indigenous people across the country face. In publishing this poem, I hope that anyone who reads it takes a second to not only think about the native people who have fallen victim to violence, but also takes a second to mourn; just as my people do everyday.