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.
