Wandering Stars

I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.

But surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.

Some would call it spite, for women it will be called spite and being vindictive; while injured men receive their justice and pass out their vengeance, women will be called petty and catty, won't get to feel the honor a word like revenge endows upon men.

One thing I want you to understand is that your suffering does not make you special. There’s a voice inside everyone who suffers that says, no one else has it like this, and so much selfish action comes from listening to that voice.

You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. It lives behind you. It’s there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I’m not there. Back there when we thought the lights went out forever. At least this is not that.

A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you. In therapy this is called trauma.

All the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children, and went on to have not nits but Indian children, whose Indian children went on to have Indian children, whose Indian children became American Indians, whose American Indian children became Native Americans, whose Native American children would call themselves Natives, or Indigenous, or NDNS, or the names of their sovereign nations, or the names of their tribes, and all too often would be told they weren’t the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones by too many Americans taught in schools their whole lives that the only real kinds of Indians were those long-gone Thanksgiving Indians who loved the Pilgrims as if to death.

Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.

Wake up. It is morning. Have a cup of coffee. Watch the sun come up. Feel as if you are the only person in the whole world seeing it. Know that it was always true that you were the only one seeing the world the way you were seeing the world. Give thanks to the rising sun. Give thanks to the day that was every day, was the sun itself making everything seen and was called the day as a nickname for the big light the sun was sending the world before it took it away.

He'd always wanted better words for what it felt like to live, and to suffer, and to love it all so recklessly as to hate how it couldn't love you back the same.

Everything about your life will feel impossible. And you being or becoming an Indian will feel the same. Nevertheless you will be an Indian and an American and a woman and a human wanting to belong to what being human means.

but the dead are never far. They find us in dreams, and keep teaching us from the inside long after they go,

Maybe we'll be running our whole lives. Just keep moving. That would be okay. We'll have strong legs, keen awareness, and big hearts, keeping ourselves and each other going like we belong to that one-day distant future, when we can look back and say this is how we made it, despite everything.

I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being a part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.

The narrator said the word planet, which is the same word in German, comes from the Greek meaning wandering star. He said we don’t live on a planet, we are the planet, it made us.

Beware of the man who does not talk and the dog who does not bark. —Cheyenne proverb

And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.

The point was that maybe humans thought they were exceptional but they were maybe never anything more than animals, doing anything more than animaling.

All those years ago. They seemed so good. You could say that about years you couldn't get back, wish for normal when normal seemed to be taken away, even if normal was never all that good in the first place.

Your dying mother could not possibly have known how apt the name Victoria was for the year you were born. In 1924 the American Indian Wars will be declared over after a hundred and thirteen years. Any war that long becomes victorious by virtue of simply ending, has no winners or losers only what’s left, what could survive so much war is made more than war by virtue of surviving it.

and Sean had basically shit on white liberals celebrating diversity without really addressing the white supremacist, systemic problems that made diversity so necessary feeling as to be celebrated by white people who want so bad to be on the right side of history they forget they’re inevitably on the white side of history.

Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.

Christianity is so weird, but everyone pretends like it isn’t.

White boys thought the world of themselves, thought the world was themselves, and that anything otherwise was out of place, needed to be noticed or ignored.

Every day is a loop. Life tries the same as we try with music. Every day is the sun rising, and the sun going down, and the sleep we must sleep. I even like sleep and dreaming now. Every day is life convincing us it’s not a loop. Addiction is that way too.

Everything that happens to a tribe happens to everyone in the tribe. Good and bad. Their mom said that once. But then she said now that we’re so spread out, lost to each other, it’s not the same, except that it’s the same in our families, everything that happens to you once you make a family, it happens to all of you, because of love, and so love was a kind of curse.

Everyone thinks kids don't get what a world is, what this world is. But we feel it all. We want nothing more than to make-believe belief can be enough, and when we realize it isn't, when you make kids believe belief isn't enough, we take it all in under hooded eyes.

He would stay though. He told himself he would stay and not give up and just have patience. Life was long if you didn't get killed accidentally or get some disease. Things changed. He could wait and see what would happen. In his worst moments that's what he would tell himself. Just wait.

Something had deepened in me. An emptiness that blew me up like a balloon with its nothingness, and floated me off to that non-place in the gray.