“ᐊᐢᑮᕀ askîy Land”

by Angela Hibbs

The past is not quiet. The Ghost Dance ceremony is still reuniting the spirits of the dead with those of the living. A bus load of tourists 

feet sound the Ghost Dance. Clattering cameras. 

Buy a dreamcatcher, the pocket, the leg, Lincoln, the end of slavery. 

A zealous cavalry.  

The screaming still audible. 

Discussions for a National Park at Wounded Knee. 

Men were hired to clear the dead at $2 a body.

Fortunes were made. 

South Dakota: expect ground to be stood.

Guns make great housewarming gifts. 

Castle Law metastasized from Florida to 

Alberta. Feudalism’s 

renaissance. Bring out your 

lawyer: fanfare 

and Red Pheasant. 

The innocence of Gerald Stanley.

Canadian juries are bound to secrecy.

Justice is blind and its jury mute. 

Paid a daily stipend, 110 dollars a day 

or 55 bodies in today’s money.

A dog is shooed away from eating

a dead bird on the sand.

What can you bring to Colten Boushie?

Five days after the Massacre at Wounded Knee an editorial in The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer read, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."