memories carried by the wind
reflections on a land that was never really home - part one
Dear Beloved,
I write to you today from a rainy Seattle in Coast Salish land, filled with unusual gusts of wind. I love these days. The rain is part of the reason why I moved to the Pacific Northwest but it is a small rain, trickling on windows and perfuming the air with petrichor. There is hardly any thunder.
That is what I miss about the Great Plains where I grew up - the summer thunderstorms. You always knew when they were coming. Humidity would charge the air, so pregnant with moisture and promise, you could smell the change. A bodily crescendo. The wide skies would expand, clouds gathering, and we would wait on front porches. Sometimes, the clouds would splinter and spill out a line of sunlight. Other times, they darkened - glowering in their majesty.
Like a strike to a tight, deer leather drum, thunder would boom throughout miles, and then, rain: sudden and all at once, pouring. And the prairies would drink it up.
Thunderstorms in the Great Plains are like God waking up.
There are other things I did not expect to miss about the Great Plains: Long grasses silhouetted against the purple dusk. Open dirt roads. Sweeping my hand across the tall grasses on walks. The rolling green of the Flint Hills. Cicadas’ summer song. The kingdom of stars every night, far away from city lights. Curiosities of small towns hidden in prairies, each with its oddities and small claims to fame. Golden wheat, whispering in the breeze. Apple cider that tastes like summer labor and autumn harvest on the tongue. Lightning bugs like lanterns in the twilight. The wind.
Yes, the wind is omnipresent but nowhere is it like the Great Plains.
Perhaps it’s the wind today that made me nostalgic, a little sick for a place that was never quite home. Perhaps it’s because, for the first time in years, my feet will touch the Great Plains when I visit my sister this weekend.
Each time I am in the Great Plains, I think it will be for the last time. But I suppose we never know when the last time for anything is in our lives.
Kaw Nation
The state of Kansas traces its name to one of the land’s original peoples, the Kanza tribe. Kanza means people of the south wind. My adolescence was spent in their homeland among the Flint Hills. Over 180 miles south of where I grew up, the Kaw Nation is located where the Kaw people’s ancestors were - again - forcefully removed by European-American colonizers in 1872.
This was after the United States signed a treaty with the Kanza in 1815. By 1825, the Kanza had already ceded 20 million acres of their land, and shortly after the Indian Removal Act, another 2 million acres in 1846. They were already forced to live on a reservation in what is today called Council Grove, KS in 1847 on just 256,000 acres; many died there from smallpox. In 1851, the US federal government began to plan for the Kanza people’s - and neighboring tribes’ - permanent removal. Thus the Kansas Territory was established in 1854. Five years later, another treaty and Council Grove was taken from the Kanza. The tribe was left with just 80,000 acres and 866 people.
Two years later, on January 31, 1861, Kansas was formalized as a state and annexed into the United States.
In 1863, the United States attempted another treaty with the Kanza people and - already having lost millions of acres and still actively losing more of their people - Kanza leaders refused. The United States had to buy the land outright from the Kanza. The money from this transaction later bought land in the Oklahoma Indian Territory from the Osage Nation.
In the Kanza’s place in Council Grove today, you can find a monument to Manifest Destiny in the form of the “Madonna of the Trail,” a statue of a white pioneer woman erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution with federal funding from Congress.
“You treat my people like a flock of turkeys. You come into our dwelling place and scare us out. We fly over and alight on another stream, but no sooner do we get settled then again you come along and drive us farther and farther. In time we shall find ourselves across the great mountains and landing in the bottomless ocean.”
- Chief Allegawaho, 1867 while refusing removal to Indian Territory in Oklahoma
From Council Grove, KS, Chief Washunga led the remaining 516 Kanza people to Oklahoma. The purchased 100,000 acres were divided into allotments, split between individual families.
“The allotments were of no benefit to the Kanza people,” states the Kaw Nation’s website, “this was a tactic devised to break up the tribe into smaller and more easily manageable units, thus silencing the unified voice of the tribe.”
Since its inception, the United States has never known a limit to its own brutality: Nearly 60 years after the allotments, the US Army Corps of Engineers flooded part of the Kaw Nation’s Oklahoma territory to create a reservoir. Today the US Army Corps of Engineers cheerfully invites you to visit Kaw Lake and advertises recreational activities. It even recommends picnicking at what used to be the Kaw Tribal Council House, the old town of Washunga, and a tribal cemetery.
While you’re there, you can also visit nearby Ponca City, OK (named after the nearby Ponca Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma) and see a local monument to Manifest Destiny: yet another Pioneer Woman statue, this one commissioned by an oilman “philanthropist.”
When former US Congressman and Governor of Oklahoma E.W. Marland first commissioned the Pioneer Woman statue, he was asked by John Joseph Matthews, an Osage Nation spokesman and writer, "Why don't you have sculptor Jo Davidson make a statue to the vanishing American, a Ponca, Otoe, or an Osage – a monument of great size?"
Marland’s response: "The Indian is not the vanishing American – it's the pioneer woman."
Fort Riley
129 years after the Kanza people’s removal, the same military that forced their removal moved my family from the homelands of the Athabascan people (so-called Fairbanks, Alaska) to the very military base installed in 1853 for the explicit purpose of “manifest destiny.” The US Department of Defense sanitizes the history of Fort Riley, proclaiming its founding as a means of protecting “arteries of immigration and commerce,” the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails which “extended American domination and interests into far reaches of a largely unsettled territory.” It further outlines US imperialist history in the following:
Other choice phrases, as detailed by the US Department of Defense, describe Ft. Riley as instrumental in “policing the troubled territory” amidst pre-Civil War tensions (more on Bleeding Kansas in part 2) when “slavery was a fact of life” and guarding railroad construction “from hostile Plains Indians.” There was no mention of the railroad’s violent disruption of Plains people’s lives or how the resulting US-provoked war, sparked by a US regiment’s indiscriminate attack against more than 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho elders, women, and children in the Sand Creek Massacre.
Moving into the 20th century, Fort Riley was a training center “where Soldiers learned skills that would be tested in the trenches of World War I and far-flung battlefields of World War II; the cold of Korea; the jungles of Vietnam; and the sands of Southwest Asia” to further US imperialism. Unrelated but ironically fitting, Fort Riley was also the military base that reported the first case of influenza in 1918. During World War II, 32,000 acres of stolen Indigenous land were added to the military post. Afterward, Fort Riley held the short-lived General Ground School for newly commissioned officers, and all through the Korean War, recruits nationwide underwent basic training there. Then the “Big Red One” - the 1st Infantry Division - came to base after the Cold War. Another 50,000 acres of stolen Indigenous land were taken to expand Fort Riley and train even more soldiers during the Vietnam War.
Decades passed, and war after war went, acre after stolen acre. Ultimately, the only thing Fort Riley was ever good for was confining pro-slavery Confederate soldiers.
The Big Red One left again, stationed in Germany at the end of the Cold War, and returned to Fort Riley when the US launched its “war on terror.” After 9/11, the military base was revitalized as a staging and mobilization center for reserve and active-duty soldiers. Units from the 1st Infantry Division were deployed from Fort Riley to western Asia, my father included.
I grew up seeing the large red number one on a shield-shaped patch on my father’s Army uniform. I can still smell the black shoe polish of his military boots, which he cleaned at least once a week. Untying the long black laces was a game for me as a child. My siblings and I used to race to see who could untie them the fastest.
Military culture was our culture, subsuming everything gifted by ancestors, and informed daily rituals while we lived on base. Everything would come to a standstill during the ceremonial lowering of the American flag at sunset. A bugle playing the national anthem could be heard all over the military base. Even if we were driving home, cars would stop mid-traffic and every soldier would step out to salute.
It was not until I was 19 years old that I paused a moment to consider: Waiting in traffic on my way to school because of tanks crossing isn’t normal.
Uproot
Today I received a kind message from a new friend in Ireland. They’ve signed up to join the Abolitionist Book Club I’m starting where together we’re reading Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. My dear Irish friend highlighted this section:
“To understand the past, we must investigate the stories we were not told, because those stories were withheld for a reason. We must search out all the pieces we weren’t meant to find, the things that disrupt the narratives we’ve been given. How did people survive desolate times? How did they find the joy and humor that sustained them in long stretches of siege and survival? How did they build relationships that allowed people who disagreed to collaborate and achieve convergence? What did those uneasy alliances look like? What helped them succeed, and what caused them to fail?”
This message came shortly after I read
’ Liberation Education Newsletter where she wrote, “To dismantle supremacy culture is to question a worldview that has been embedded in us for centuries.”Growing up in Kansas, whether on a military base or a small town, I was never taught about the Kaw Nation. I grew up going to calvary parades during an annual autumn event but never learned what those calvaries did to Native people. When we learned about the Santa Fe Trail, there was nothing about massacres. We learned about General Custer but never heard Chief Washunga’s name. During lessons about Custer, they framed his death as a tragedy but never spoke of how it is still celebrated as Victory Day by the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people.
Every year, “Kansas Day” was celebrated with retellings of Manifest Destiny, pioneer dresses, and cornbread.
My miseducation is nothing unique. I am one of thousands of products of imperial propaganda and lies. It is deeply embedded in the lives of our family, the places we call home, and branches out across the world everywhere US imperialism touches.
The first step to uprooting imperialism is by cutting the branches. We must know our history and reclaim the truth kept from us. We must question the stories sold told to us. Only once we uproot this bitter plant can we plant the seeds for a better world.
Seeds for Change
November is Native American History Month but every day, we stand on Native land held by empire.
Learn more about Land Back and share stories of rematriation with your communities to inspire incredible change.
Just last year, Kanza land was rematriated back to the Kaw Nation near Topeka, KS by a CORPORATION and a Sacred Red Rock was returned to Kanza land in Council Grove, KS.
Plant seeds from the Alliance of Native Seedkeepers.
If you are in the US, sign this petition to pass S1723: Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act.
If you are in Canada, sign this petition to abolish the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who have yet again murdered a First Nations person.
Boycott Thanksgiving. Instead, join Indigenous People in the National Day of Mourning.
Divest from American corporations that continue to wreck people and planet. Withhold your hard-earned money on Black Friday and instead join the global protest at your local Apple Store for Apple’s complicity in the genocides in Congo and Palestine.
Join the Abolitionist Book Club virtually! Our first meeting is Tuesday, December 10th at 6-7:30pm PST
Land Back
The Thečhíȟila Collective is an Indigenous-led collective in Detroit that supports communities in need through mutual aid. Recognizing LandBack, decolonization, abolition, and collective liberation as antidotes to societal violence, they help relatives in need with accessing medical supplies, shelter, and basic human needs we deserve.
They are currently fundraising for a landback initiative in Detroit. The funding from this campaign will rematriate Indigenous land in Waawiyaatanong and create a place for the Detroit urban Indigenous population to thrive. The Detroit Indigenous community currently has no safe space to hold ceremony or take part in traditional ways.
With your help, we can return land back to Indigenous hands and build a space of healing and community in Detroit. Donate today and share this campaign!
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