I’ve been staring down a long hard historical fact for two years now
maybe my whole life
That putting the stories of my people in a bound leather dissertation
Will either pasteurize it
Or get me in trouble
Depending on how much truth I tell
The first ethnographers arranged indigenous people like dolls
In front of a narrative
That would snake around their throats
And choke the oral tradition from their lips
We called grandfather’s stories history
English translated them into myth
I came to snatch them back
Under the midnight glow of library fluorescent lighting
I relearned what the ancestors died discovering
That if you are too loud
Too brown
Insisting upon the right to your own breath
They might just take it from you
Or swallow you up in an institutional lie
But what will they say
Now that I have torn up every story about me or my people that isn’t true
Now that I have taken their blue passport and made a bridge with it
Now that I am delicately crafting self love into a quantifiable form of healing
Rediscovered grandfather’s stories
And how to tell them so loud
So brown
So insistent upon my own necessity
Most days the university will call me idealistic
Cause learning your own history will not make you millions
But detangling history with voices as coarse and
thick with struggling as your own
With the reverb of emiliano zapata marching to fela’s drum
Sure sounds like the end of capitalism
The beginning of reparations
And isn’t that the most expensive thing?
Holding the key to your own freedom
Collecting sovereignty back from the pioneers and conquistadors
that still live
All of you who have survived classes where historical atrocities are the only available histories about a people like yours
Can now rewrite the textbooks
Fill in lost syllables and accents
To tell a more complete narrative on survival
On revitalization
On the joy that exists and must be remembered
In every indigenous song and story
Joy like a rock through
neocolonialism
neo-imperialism
And every other ism
That fashions its mouth against me
I have always had a voice
But now this $60,000 piece of cardstock will amplify it
My feet, blackened on the road to revolution
Now have offices and neighborhoods to go to
But wherever I
Wherever we
End up
Let us rework the spaces we are in
Pull out the hard truths from our back pockets when necessary
And always
be unapologetically
Free