According to Ernestine: I am a Tlingit woman from Alaska. This is a piece about my experience of being a Native woman in contemporary society.
Life in the forest is not all carefree pleasure.
occasionally someone disappears into the woods
now and then a body is recovered
sometimes without a head ...
... one wonders
My grandmother didn’t tell stories to entertain me; she didn’t time her stories to coincide
with sleepy bedtime. Grandma Ruth taught me lessons as we went about our daily
business: washing clothes, running to the grocery store for dog scraps, getting ready to
go berrypicking. She warned me about the forest and the night; she told me what to do if
I saw or heard something I knew to be out of the ordinary. She warned me what would
happen if I didn’t pay attention to her words, the price I would pay if I didn’t listen.
Having disappeared into the forest,
you might never come back
the wild call from inside you
might capture you ...
... you might become crazy
Grandma described the world to me. Bears are our cousins, spiders are our friends, the wind is my own grandfather. People live in the forest that we might never see.
There is a man who lives in the forest.
now and then, you see signs of him
in chips of wood around a tree
(usually a sapling)
he moves fast and he’s crazy
... he carries a hatchet
* * *
My grandmother says:
I never heard anyone say that wild man will hurt you
but it’s good to stay away from him anyway.
The lesson I draw from this
is to avoid wild men in the forest ...
... especially if they carry hatchets
But no lesson is provided
to teach me to stay away from wild men in general
who carry as their weapons knowing eyes
and easy natures
instead of hatchets ...
After my grandmother died, I lived in another country, where I saw all the things that she had warned me of: dogshapes on the road that disappeared as I drove toward them, shadows at the door that made no greeting, quick movements in dim mirrors. All these things I escaped. All these things I avoided. All these things I overcame. But what she did not warn me of became her wisest choices, for in those I mended my own wounds.
I might have survived
the wild man in the forest: I might have run
I might have charmed him slowly from his blade
But the one who brushed my shoulder on the street
touched my hand
caressed my brow
cut out my heart
and left me headless
[an error occurred while processing this directive]