Re-Awakening the Stories - 24" x 24" , Acrylic on Fir, $1,850

Re-Awakening the Stories

They’re from the time before, but they’ve risen again

Stories told of a winter’s din and fire stolen, stoked off a shadowless sun

Out of mouths, and off of tongues, carrying visions to everyone

About Creation, about floods and struggles on logs,

To stay a float and find the soil deep within

Earth torn from secrets, on a water’s floor,

Now live on Turtle’s shell

Lessons of tricksters from their blackness of their deity,

The true comedians of human weakness,

Spirits eaten by tricksters that were really Windigo’s

Visions become prayers and ceremony curls around ritual

It is a round dance of stories linking one generation to another

And a future becomes history from the Seven Fires prophesy

Stories change and cycle round again

They grow harder and harsher to retell

Journeys so far they wounded more than knees

Buffalos  hunted  to starve a nation, rot needlessly into extinction

Battles won and battles lost

Residential schools that cycled the great cost of future families

The painful journey of feet became the telling on the tongue

That a religion can teach precisely what it is not

That will be repeated again and again to the generations that with naught

Sickness wore death around the necks of reserves in beads of assimilation

Trades bartered lives for spotted blankets and bottles

All on the same spirit lands, with the two leggeds and the  four 

The standing ones and the stone, the water, the swimming, the creeping

And the Crawling, all bearing witness to the silent history

Kept silent in schools, in the recessed caverns, in the name of righteousness.

The stories are the tricksters, transformed into Windigo’s

Once magic, now cannibals  of words, swallowed in bottles and stolen in lives

The old stories survive in teachings and tongues,

Now beat in the hearts and lands of the Elder ones, 

It is a hope for children, lost for their finding

The spirit in tradition, ceremony, dance, song and drum

For the mouths that keep telling and living and remembering the tongue,

Re-awakening the stories in a sacred manner, remembering the circle

In the fullness and the life and the spirit and the truth of where we’ve come.

LauraLee K. Harris