Another brilliantly clear day: cloudless skies a fierce blue, a graying earth now limned with golden light . . . and a world on lockdown once again.
It should have happened months ago, of course, or, more accurately, the first one should never have been lifted at all. In the months intervening, so much unnecessary illness, so much needless, heedless death.
And now, as we enter what should be the busy season, the holiday season, our world has once more ground mostly to a halt.
We are rapidly coming to the end of the year, and with it comes a distinctive feeling of having reached the end of the trail now.
It’s not, of course; we are facing a great many endings, but as always, they are also beginnings of one sort or another. But after this terrible year of such unutterable constant pain and loss, it’s hard to envision what beginning, what new, might look like now.
It will certainly not be what we’ve known.
At time such as these, the physical hardships are very often much more difficult (and deadly) for our peoples, but the ability to cope with them is perhaps a little less so: not because we are innately stronger or feel any less pain, but because our ancestors have given us the tools with which to do so.
One of the things that Wings and I learned very early on about each other is how very much we held in common on terms of lived experience: old ways of being and doing and making do that even our non-Native generational peers had never experienced, much less remember today. It’s a set of skills, and of memories, too, that have better-equipped us, perhaps, than most for coping with current circumstances even as we ready ourselves for the risks to come.
And they will be legion; we harbor no illusions to the contrary. So we redouble our efforts at self-isolation, at stocking up and buckling down and doing the work that is required of us to keep ourselves and our community safe. And we turn inward, to culture and tradition and the teachings that were given to us in the time before time, to history and memory and the blessings of elders and ancestors and spirits alike. We recall the hardships they faced, obstacles that dwarf our current circumstances by comparison; we remember their skill and persistence in adapting, evolving, refusing to lose our ways or to become lost to or by them, no matter how hard the road or how long the distance traveled.
We adopted the hats and made them our own, as always: beaded bands and painted horses, and we made the horses ours, too. We took the nothing that colonialism tried to leave us and forged and fashioned fuller cultures than ever, saving our communities and clans along the way. And we never lost sight of the fact that the path is not a line, but a hoop: no trail’s end here, but always a new beginning, if not for us, then for our children.
And we know that it is not time to hang up our hats just yet. There are prophecies to fulfill and new worlds to midwife into being.
We are called now, and though the days grow short and late, there is work to do.
~ Aji
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