First: Prelude first.

"You think too much" is a charge oft leveled at me,

almost as often as "You're too sensitive."

Maybe.

Or maybe that's looking through the large end of the telescope.

Chronically insensitive clods

who refuse to think through the consequences of their actions

dislike having their own lack pointed out.

Perhaps they need to re-examine their own issues,

preferably before pointing at mine.

God knows I didn't choose to be a barometer of surrounding emotions.

Feeling everyone else's pain like it's my own

necessitates a little forethought towards consequences.

No doubt it's one of those dubious gifts

from the Okemos side of the family tree.



Sometimes I wonder how much he realized when he signed that wretched treaty.

Likely more than most histories give him credit for.

But white settlers were coming whether they wanted them or not

and enough Eastern tribes had been made examples of by then.



I wonder what John Riley told him and if it affected his choices.

Was Riley’s intervention part of why

our tribe wasn't forced farther west

unlike too many others?

Or was it simple luck of the draw?

There's too many landmarks around here honoring Okemos,

not to mention a town named for him shortly after he died.

Maybe just enough settlers respected him to make a difference?

Niggling questions, they itch like chicken pox

when I try to reconcile the branches on my family tree.



Not every tribe's story reads identically in the details.*

...

Ma liked to tell people we descend from a long line of chiefs and shaman,

a bigger deal when one realizes those posts weren't necessarily hereditary. (And we won't get into why shaman and medicine man are not equivalent.)

Not sure if it's her bias against women showing again,

interloper revisioning of history just erased their contributions,

or that women’s work was also understated in Anishinaabe culture

but my Native grandmothers never came up.

Except Chief Okemos' daughter,

she married John Riley, a Dutch trapper.

Nothing said about her personality - pretty typical.

But lack of a name can probably be chalked up to Ma's inability

to pronounce English renditions of Anishinaabe names,

it must be on the lineage paperwork after all.



Somebody probably knows the answers

from stories their mothers passed down

but I don't know those somebodies

and questions based on total ignorance have a tendency to offend,

particularly when the subject is still sore

despite the passing of more than a sesquicentennial.

I don't know how much I don't know,

just that there's a bloody lot of it,

I'm leery of stepping on toes.


...


The Geobiology class incident still bothers me.

I’d love to chalk that one up to imagination

but close to twenty people were there to see it.

We went out to find particular earth energies

known to negatively impact human health

so we’d recognize the signs on clients exposed.



Of course, being the extra sensitive speshul snowflake,

I hit the mother lode without half trying.

That’s exactly why I don’t open my perceptions more often.

Standing out like a sore thumb is an issue

for somebody who prefers watching from the safety of shadows,

no need to give out more ammo.



The waves of depression radiating off that damned boulder

hit me from a good thirty feet away as soon as I let myself “look”.

After I identified the boulder as the source,

a classmate pointed out the fossilized shell layer I hadn't noticed.

Even in a class primarily consisting of sensitives,

that display earned some long, thoughtful looks

and the teacher herded us back to our cars in a hurry,

saying there was nothing to be done.



That doesn’t jive with my own intuition tho,

there was something I was supposed to do.

A decade later, it still itches like smeared poison ivy,

I just don’t know what it was.

It obviously wasn’t a standard class fix

and without a clear plan of action

I’ll just spend the day sobbing in its company

while accomplishing jack squat.



That the class rushed off doesn’t surprise me, not in the least.

American culture copes poorly with Death.

Why should they stick around to comfort

a sad boulder experiencing an existential crisis?

Walking away is much easier.

Well, that may be a little unfair.

This is probably my test,

which might be why it still niggles

like an easy algebra problem failed.



This is exactly the sort of thing

I suspect my Native relatives could help with,

If only I knew who/how/where to ask

without sounding like a crackpot

buying into the mystical Indian mythos.

Mystical? Ha, just more headache than it's worth.

Too much empathy in this heart-hardened day and age is a curse,

it's just as well most don't spend their life

coping with the consequences of seeing too much.



It's probably not just the Chippewa side.

Simple as it’d be to blame many greats grandfather Okemos for this,

like calls to like.

John Riley was a fur trapper and that raises red flags.

An “adventurous” spirit is easy code for

‘I can’t stand the miasma of misery where I live, people suck.’

He probably had reason to prefer wilderness to “civilization”

and people with these sort of “knacks” weren't exactly popular.



The possibilities are intriguing.

It’s not like I have someone to ask about it tho.

Given humanity’s penchant for going on witch hunts

sensitives understandably dislike documenting these kind of “gifts”,

even more so in a people that has already been targeted for decimation.

I wouldn’t willingly slap a bulls-eye on my forehead either.

But it’s still problematic for me personally,

it’s difficult to ask dead people about their motivations

and a half dozen or so generations between muddies the picture

especially when one isn’t sure

where to find someone who actually knows family history,

let alone is willing to talk to outsiders.


...

Having already been pre-judged unworthy

thanks to a mere 1/16th Indian blood quantum

mostly Chippewa diluted with one Odawa ancestor

(I wonder if it would bother him to know his descendants

are being denied recognition thanks to casino money obsession

or if he willingly played favorites with his kids himself),

on top of Grandpa “abandoning” The Res,

there’s reason a-plenty to step warily anyway.



I’ve spent my life as the outsider who didn’t fit anywhere,

stiff-necked enough to make a badge of honor out of necessity.

But it would be nice to actually belong somewhere.

The welcomed return of a lost daughter is an addictive fantasy

when factoring the possibility I /might/ find an answer

to this unwelcome knack for seeing more than I can stand.



I can’t be the only one, right?

But that same problematic knack chuckles knowingly.

... ‘Please explain exactly why you should trust a people

so systematically abused and culturally raped to the point

where their conquerors no longer even need to abuse them –

they beat each other down over the crumbs the U.S. gov throws them.

What exactly do you expect to find but a whole ‘nother world of hurt

- literally.

//SIGH//

Ain’t you the glutton for punishment.

Haven’t you learned enough about how abuse trickles down

from the fallout in your own fam?’


I wish I could say it’s the logic involved

prodding me to keep my distance, wondering,

but I simply don’t want to lose the comforting delusion

of imagining a happy ending.

The possibility remains viable as long as I

don’t take too many steps towards shattering it.

09/28/2014

Author's Note: Third in Series: Custer's Last Stand Well, it's been a few years and a few more things discovered. Like that MI natives received a stipend from the British for fighting for them. A stipend they'd travel to Canada to get and then would bring back to MI to spend. This stipend was considered important to the local economy and benefitted MI settlers enough that enough of them didn't like the idea of Indians relocating to OK that they helped them fight relocation. Like a lot of history, that wasn't the only reason, but it was a significant chunk of it. Still LMAO.

Posted on 09/28/2014
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