gone to tribal reclamation

an attempt to balance harms.

No screen, no shelter, no door to open,

concrete—in memory.

That’s a good thing, I tell myself,

this house—gone

good for the tribe

and good for the harm held

in my own skin

white in the mirror—White—on the tribal roster.

The reparation of past harms

is not easily assimilated

like my father, carrying his minus one drop

from half-Indian blood.

He would leap off the back

of that boarding school truck

like a reservation dog.

Pay back is an entire landscape

a wilderness of reservations.

Some of us exhume our dead

to prove our bloodlines.  My father

might be exhumed and placed in ground

over which all his children could pass.

There are billions of us:

Indians enrolled in tribes, Indians

with the same blood quantum

as siblings—unenrolled, unwelcome,

those who hold not one drop

of Indian blood.

We all ask the same questions:

What do we count as?

What can we claim?

* In 1960, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation voted for an amendment that set the enrollment criterium, for membership in the tribe, as a one-quarter minimum blood quantum. Those born before 1960 with a lesser blood quantum were enrolled, and those with the same blood quantum born after 1960 were not, thus creating split families. Since that time, the tribe has slowly reclaimed land formerly owned by non-Indian farmers, ranchers, and property holders. The tribe has further ruled that those unenrolled, whether they hold Indian blood, and whether they live on the reservation, will no longer be allowed access to these former places of inhabitation and recreation.