Dear Miss Karana by Eric Elliott

Author:Eric Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597143318
Publisher: Heyday

pú'u'chey

right on her belly button, on the belly button of Mother Day Earth, your island

túk'a'

her skin, your island looking up into the sky hoping to find Father Night Sky

Tóykwa

to Heaven, where you want to go

Until tomorrow, my dear Karana.

Your little sister,

another orphaned little mockingbird,

Tíshmal

KARANA NISUUN,

See, Karana? I now know how to tell you in your own language, I mean in OUR language, that you are special to me. That’s why I added the word nişúun, which is like noşúun in my language. We use our word noşúun when we want to tell someone we care about them. It’s like “beloved” or “my dear” in English. That was one of the words I learned from your song. I’ll never forget what your song says: you say a man has to come to Yáamay, to Mother Day Earth. That’s another word for your island. You say our home is Mother Day Earth, and a man has to come to your island, where your soul has been waiting. I hope you don’t have to wait much longer, Karana.

Today, Mr. Qáalaq told us that we will get to go on our field trip up north, to Santa Barbara. We’ve been pen pals with fourth-grade Chumash Indian kids all year long, and they invited us to come visit their reservation and see them dance. They do something called the Swordfish Dance. We don’t have anything like that down here in the south. Maybe you and your people, out on Mother Day Earth’s belly button, used to do dances like that long ago. We had a bake sale to raise money for the trip, and we printed up a whole lot of flyers and stapled them up everywhere to let people know. And boy did we ever make a whole bunch of money selling goodies—enough to pay for the trip! We are going to spend the night up there, and we will see the Santa Barbara mission too.

You probably don’t know it, Karana, but priests built missions all along California. They said they built the missions to teach Indians about God and Heaven. But we knew all about God and Heaven before the priests ever got here. Mom always says that if the priests had just bothered to learn our language and our songs, then they would have understood that we all pretty much believe the same thing. Like our word for God, Karana—it’s Chamyúungawish, and that means “the-one-above-our-heads.” We believe that there is one God above us in Heaven. And Dad says that WE could have taught those priests a thing or two about what it really means to love your neighbors and to live by the golden rule.

But anyway, Karana, I am looking forward to walking down the same streets that you walked down in Santa Barbara, and maybe seeing the house that you once slept in, even if the Santa Barbara mission is a place that hurt so many of us, a place that maybe hurt you too.

I’m at home now, Karana, and I’m packing things for the field trip.

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