Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller

Author:Alexandra Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Hé Sapa

According to the Oglala Lakota Oyate, and the standard theories of cosmology, there is no center to the universe. It is everywhere. So the Lakota are not wrong to say, “This here, where we are, is the center of our sacred lands.” Here, right here, where since 1941 there have been the outsized faces of four American presidents carved into the granite batholith.

Hé Sapa. Meaning, Black Hills.

The Length of a Siege

A siege makes a single day appear to last longer than the time it takes for the sun to break over the prairie hills, span the sky, then vanish behind the pine bluffs. When you’re doing it, a siege is more than a full-time job. It’s a full-time life.

Quite aside from the issue at hand, people cannot divorce themselves from hunger, or from the need to relieve their bowels, or from exhaustion. There is nothing romantic about being cold, weary, and frightened. It’s easy to forget this about social movements. People don’t cause chaos, foment rebellion, and use their own bodies as a form of stubborn protest because they have nothing else to do. People do these things because they have nothing else to lose.

Find wood, cut wood, tend fire. Melt snow, make food. Mud takes over and is in everything. It’s in the skin of the people, and in their clothing. It’s in the pressing, public ache of bowels shot through with fire.

Oh, All My Ancestors.

How much strength must one people have?

And for how long must they have it?

It’s excessively wearying, All My Relations, excessively wearying.

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