steve deger | Fine Art
lakota woman
Author/Model: Cheyenne Hope, rider in the Dakota 38+2 honorary horse ride. Daughter of Chief Arvol Looking Horse, spiritual leader of the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Oyate.
I grew up knowing exactly who I was, born from a nation that survived genocide and discrimination. I grew up listening to AIM stories from my strong-willed mother, and watching my father speak to thousands of people about the crossroads of our choices that entwine with Mother Earth’s being.
I grew up facing the common struggles of living on a reservation. Where one will find a child lost in chokecherry trees hiding from the known fact of sexual abuse that damaged us since the beginning of this war against what is and what isn't freedom. Where it was normal to find three disfigured faces from alcoholism in a community gathering and young women pushing strollers down a gravel road. Where suicide spoke louder and louder from within the ages of teenagers that had to face the healing stages of boarding schools.
But we had something some people never truly have within their lives. We had community, a base that amassed from the very structures of our spirit and religion. We who lost everything never lost our voices that cried to the heavens and it responded with thunder storms.
I am a Lakota woman. I was born to be as strong as my ancestors, and so were you.
THE contortionist’s wife
Model: Cheryl Birch, alumna of St. Paul’s Circus Juventas.
Poet: Loft/McKnight Award Winner Bill Meissner, Professor Emeritus, St. Cloud State University.
She knows him, yet she doesn’t always recognize him——
some mornings she finds him in the kitchen cupboard
flattened among the cereal boxes;
some evenings, he’s folded beneath her chair
when she sits down for dinner.
Once he surprised her when he rose from the washing machine tub
like a genie, gave her three wishes
and a box of Cheer.
Some days she doesn’t know if he’s shaping himself
or if she’s shaping him. All she knows is the way
he twists her emotions: he makes her laugh, he makes her cry.
She’s not sure if it’s funny that he
could be lying between the sheets of her bed without her
noticing him.
Sometimes he’s closer to her than she ever imagined, like the
tub of warm bath water she slides herself into.
Sometimes he’s distant, pinpricks of stars in the night sky.
But most often he’s both near and far, lifting himself
from the vase in the corner, his smile full of flowers.
Ah, she wishes she could be a contortionist, too.
She wishes she could be the one to surprise him
some morning, disguising herself as the wheat bread
popping from the toaster
or the coat rack as he reaches for his jacket.
She gazes at her stiff flesh with the brittle bones inside,
thinking if only she could slip herself around his finger
like a ring he didn’t know he was wearing
for the rest of his life.
[Meissner, Bill. “The Contortionist’s Wife.” American Compass. University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, p. 5.]
THE ECHOES OF OUR STORIES
Model: Rachel Nowa (Lipan Apache/Jenna Choctaw)
Skirt: Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Wailaki/Shoshone-Bannock)
Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi)
On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all.
On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in Heaven.
And then they met——the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve——and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.
[Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.” Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.]