… making landscapes… places that don’t exist anymore… long trips in the car across flood plains…
… when I speak on trauma… don’t devour me like a commodity… as if raw unprocessed grief has value…
… don’t say this to me… ‘I am reading books from the authentic perspective until my eyes bleed… and my heart bleeds and by the time the book is done I feel I’ve run a marathon… my souls bleed…’
… don’t say this to me… because I am here to bead the sunrise and the birth and rebirth of places long dead…
… and when I am done… it is a soft story of grief… not trauma…
… only… I spoke with you who said white washed stories are not as valid… you meant… my unprocessed life… graphic and raw…
… soft stories are white washed you said… and I want to remind you this is an idea that needs to pass… healing is the most melanin story of them all…
… ignoring softness and ease in a story about trauma, is erasure…
… and erasure is trauma…
… do not seek the graphic nature… seek out stories of the land gouged and plundered… where the trees growing back in the rift… and things long thought dead regrow… and build families and where trauma once happened… life begins again…
… healing is the most melanin story I can tell you…
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I sat by the fire with someone who said they only want to hear raw and heart wrenching stories about my child hood, how the residential schools f*cked up the lives in my community… and when I said that is commoditizing trauma…
This person i sat with said that when people speak softly about trauma so that it is palatable, it is not authentic… it felt as if this person was saying… healed indigenous folk, are less authentically indigenous…
I have encountered this idea more than once, please let this idea pass… healing is the most indigenous thing I have ever encountered in the wild…