👉I am reading this book WORDS TO LOVE BY to heal (TL Hentz)
Source: Poetry (June 2018)
Love Lessons in a Time of Settler Colonialism
I am not murdered, and I am not missing, but parts of me have been disappeared.
— Leanne Simpson
From Industrial Schools to forced assimilation, genocide means removal of those who birth nations — our living threatens. Colonization has been choking
us for generations. I tell my girls they are vessels of spirit, air to lungs expanding; this world cannot breathe without us. There are days I wish
I didn’t have to teach these lessons, but as an Indigenous womxn silence is deadening. There is danger in being seen, our bodies are targets
marked for violence. We carry the Earth’s me too inside us, a howling wind, our mothers & their mothers swallowed these bullets long ago.
The voices ricochet I wish I were invisible I wish I were invisible I wish echoes in my eardrums — we know what it’s like to live in fear. Colonialism’s bullet sits cocked,
waiting behind a finger on trigger. We breathe and speak and sing for survival. We carve out in lines; we write — I know joy I know pain I know love
I know love I know — lessons we’ve carried throughout time. Should I go missing: don’t stop searching; drag every river until it turns red and the waters of our names
stretch a flood so wide it catches everything. And we find each other whole and sacred, alive and breathing and breathing and breathing.
Uncharted Territory of Grief
About Tanaya Winder
Poet, writer, and educator Tanaya Winder is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and has ancestors from the Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Navajo, and Black tribes.
In an interview with Zingara Poetry Review, Winder notes, “I am a person who hopes my own writing and poetry reflects the times and the needs of society; without interacting with the community the poetry cannot attempt to reflect communities and so I believe poetry must intersect with community. Poetry has the potential to create community for people who are searching for it by providing a space to interact and share experiences on the page.”
Winder cofounded As/Us, an online journal devoted to writers of color; cofounded the traveling exhibit Sing Our Rivers Red to raise awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women; and founded Dream Warriors Management, a company that manages indigenous artists. The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development named her one of “40 Under 40” emerging American Indian leaders, and she was a 2017 First Peoples Fund Artists in Business Leadership fellow.
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