White Buffalo Calf Woman heads East.
East, to meet the drums
that greet the sun
the voices that rise in unison.
Manifest Destiny walks backward:
No silent spring, no Berkely Pit, no mine wars at Matewan.
No lead in Michigan children’s water,
No radiation in Utah,
No tribe of one-breasted women.
No flames licking the current of the Cuyahoga,
No poison at Love Canal.
No extinction of wolves or whales, or languages—
No need for stands at Pine Ridge or Alcatraz.
No forced slaughter of Navajo sheep,
No draining of the Great Black Swamp.
No Dust Bowl (where prairie grass once thrived), strangling cows’ bellies with dirt,
plumes landing 2,000 miles away on shocked city folk in New York.
No railroad sparks, no drought, no Big Burn of 1910.
No hides left to rot in heaps high as train cars,
No egrets on the precipice of wealthy women’s hats.
No blood in the snow at Wounded Knee.
No corn raid at Ganondagen— a million bushels up in flames,
No warfare of smallpox, measles and flu.
No erasure of the Tainos to sweeten our tea with sugar.
Instead:
Stories weave strange shoulders close.
Strife becomes laughter,
Greed gives way to gifts,
Fear blooms courage.
Fire is sacred,
Water runs clear,
Earth body, our body—
The bison, too,
heading East.
Author’s note: After the painting, “Reversing Manifest Destiny,” by Charles Hilliard, which was commissioned by the Indian Land and Tenure Foundation in response to the 1872 piece, “American Progress,” by John Gast.
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Jessica Jones is on full-time faculty at Kent State University where she teaches creative writing, Native American literature and place-based composition. She comes from a long line of makers and musicians in Northern Appalachia where trees and animals were among her first teachers. She holds a Masters from the University Montana, and regularly returns to see loved ones and teach/learn on the Flathead and Blackfeet Indian Reservations. Her chapbook, Bitterroot (2018), can be found at Finishing Line Press.
