Washichu

I'm not as white as I look. You may look at my snowy skin and see Europe in my hair and the North Wind in my gray eyes, but there's more below my flesh that you don't see. I've lived a thousand lives under many different suns, collecting culture badges on some unseen part of my soul - stamped there as indelibly as the tribal tattoo I wore 400 years ago. My dreams are in four directions, you see. red, yellow, black, and white,* and they move beyond the pale visage of my physical form - the skin I'm bound by. Would you believe me if I told you my hair used to be a lot darker? A lot longer? A lot...thicker? That I braided feathers into it with a prayer to the wind and tobacco at my hip? That I tied goat hooves to my ankles and danced with my cousins the grasshoppers through the smoke of sage and sweetgrass on the plains? That I fell asleep each night to the Lakota lullabye of loons crying out on the lake and my pack-sisters' song while my brothers and sisters snored softly around me? I'm not as white as I look. You don't see that there's a part of me that carries my history, circulating it through my body with each heartbeat that sounds like a drum. And each pulse carries with it all the summers of brown skin spent in the Badlands of South Dakota - in the dirt roads and dry grass of the Reservation, in the shaded trees of the sacred Black Hills. You can't see that I've walked among my brothers, the buffalo, tatanka, that I've slept under the open skies at Custer trying to find familiarity in the stars. You may see that I am white, a washichu. You can't see the memories I keep stored in my veins and how I bleed from the pain of the Oglala-Lakota on Pine Ridge. I have walked among the graves at Wounded Knee Cemetery, and I have climbed to the top of Bear Butte to leave tobacco on that holy ground. I have pressed my palms to the ground to say "shhh lei la washde** there is life here." These experiences I carry inside me, just below the surface. I want to carve it into my skin, seven times over - Mitayuke Oyasin - We Are All Related - So on the outside, I'd show at least a hint of what lies inside me. Because I'm not as white as I look. You may look at my snowy skin and see Europe in my hair and the North Wind in my gray eyes, but there's more below my flesh that you don't see. My blood is red.