Brooks, AB
Deline, Northwest Territories
Âge 17
I decided to write my poem “The Crucible” on the many issues that have affected our people. The poem exhibits the lesson that no matter what severe trial that our people go through; we will only come out stronger. Whether it be residential schools, missing and murdered indigenous woman, loss of language/culture, etc. First nations people have faced extreme challenges to our identity in the past that still affect us today, and we continue to see the face of racism and prejudice.
Most of the situations in which the speaker of the poem mentions are things that I have experienced, and come from my own life and background. My grandfather had to attend residential school. People very close to me experience prejudice and racism often. Ignorant words from people that I were supposed to call my friends have been said. I can see the injustice and unfair treatment that our people still receive to this day.
The end to the poem is meant to depict the blood of first nations identity, after racism has taken everything else. The blood still remains in tact, and it cannot be washed away. It is my own belief that identity is a grounding factor to everybody’s life. All of the trial that our people have been through has pulled and pried at our indigenous identity. Our identity involving our language and culture, which we have tried our very best to hold onto. These challenges to our identity are meant to take it away from us. If we continue to fight with peaceful protest the forces of racism and injustice that face our people, we can maintain our collective identity, and it will not be washed away.
Crucible
(noun.) A ceramic or metal bowl in which metals or other substances may be melted or subjected to very high temperatures.
Or
A situation of severe trial, or in which different elements interact, leading to the creation of something new.
Silver down my wrist
Dim light hangs above me
Knelt down before the crucifix
Drip, slow
Into the stone bowl
Simmering
Flame grasps the bottom
Smoke rises from the hot blood
A wreath of stone, flame, and blood
They want it to seperate
They ache to pour in the bleach
But the blood clots
The blood binds
Hotter, hotter
And it only turns darker
My blood
Filled with heritage and culture that you refer to as bacterial
Take it out, with a thorn-like needle
It is dirt, scrub it away
Scrub until the skin that holds it together stings raw
Hold a knife to the tongue; press down
Pressure against it
Rip it from the grasps of innocent children
The children, grasp them by the collar
Repay their parents by a dollar
Dress them in grey
Make sure they pray
Not to their maker
Pray on bibles
Books of bleach soaked words
Wash the mouths with bleach
In the name of god, sin
We are saving them; through sin
These are the pretending thoughts
Through sin, they pretend
Sinners pretend their actions are valid
The great, white priest’s game of play pretend
First prime minister of Kanata, of the village
The man on my money
Treaty money, the money that is supposed to make it better
John A. Macdonald
Put my mother’s father there
In the mission
The house of tainted walls and desperate calls
Calls to a god; masked in lies
Residential school
Johnny put my grandfather there with his words
Take the indian out of the child
A white man’s burden
The ignorance that led them to study skulls
To determine intelligence and civility by the shape and anatomy
By the colour of skin
And we left that house with nothing
Only taught the nature of sins
Sins of the body
Sins of the mind
Nothing more
Lost a piece of our identity to that house
Though it ended, its evil still stings from generation to generation
From a fire pit
To the inferno
Not only the children
Put us to sections of the village
Into reservations
Reserved for our people
Liquor rotted teeth
Sleeping between liquor stained sheets
Children have children soon
Raised under a loveless moon
There are no I love you’s
No touch of identity
Some tongues stray from the english way
Some remember the old way
But our children would struggle to follow the same
Now we barely hang onto to the barbed wire
As the only way to survive
In a world dominated by bleach
Is to be engulfed by its components
Not through force
But are we really left with a choice?
The silver coated fingers that pluck and pull at my people’s voice
The irony that the village that we inhabited
In order to feel like we are still apart of it
Must blend in with the men who stole it
Or not reap the benefits that they do from this tiny village
Gets under my skin and makes my red blood boil over
But it still remains my own
Today, I still see it
In their eyes
When waitresses avoid the eyes of my friends
Sales clerks trail my mother around a store
My mother dresses respectfully
Can afford what they are selling
But I am not buying it
Because I refuse to respect it
The evidence is in my white friend
Telling me that my people are only crack induced drunks on street corners
Coin whores and change beggars
He swears that I am an exception
As if I want his acceptance and approval
He is not a friend to me
Turning a powdered cheek to their own
As if they are there on their own choice
There is privilege to the colour of skin that one possesses
The celebrated men with badges and guns
Would sweat and search to find anyone
Not my sisters, just not my sisters
Red dress at the dinner table
Red dress on the desk where the girl with the long black hair once sat
Red dress in picture frames perched on the wall
The heat rises
Chars at my skin
Burns away my hair
Leaves blisters
Blood continues to flow through my scar covered veins
Though not searching for them
The appeal of my sisters still catch eyes at costume parties
For women in poca outfits
Barely covered by fake feathers
Red and white lines on their face only representative of the stupidity
The mere stupidity that allows society to believe
In lies that the history books tell
Make it seem as if we are myths and our people no longer exist
Or false illusions of tieing in two cultures
It is not out of respect
It is appropiations
Appropiations of a culture that has been shamed
Slammed and shunned for its own traditions
Respect is not found in a sexualised costume
Sexualised “hot cherokee princess” costumes
Not found in a cheap “chief’s” headdress
Culture treated as a kink or character
But they do it anyways, because from privilege
When the white man does it
It is deemed okay
It becomes a trend
In my social studies class
A student complains of one singular presentation slide that shows
The perspective of an indigenous man
Since it is “too much” to have to hear about again
Poor child, it is almost as if it is your own country’s first people
A people that have been mistreated
A people that deserve to be listened to
A people with a history that should be acknowledged
Heritage and culture does not only lie in clothing and tradition
It lays in history
History that is not made of the stereotyped medicine men
History of a mistreated people
Now the leaders mistreat the lands
Hit the earth’s marrow with drills
Screwing pipes into its bones
Pipes filled with toxins
That leak into the waters
Water that provides life
Life to plants and animals
Next time, you should listen better
The land is a part of the culture that we grasp onto
Like a baby wrapping it’s tiny fingers around a sturdy thumb
This is the story that I tell
Not one of stereotypical birds and wise men
A story coated in my indigenous truth
The truth that may not yet set us free
No doubt will fill us with anger
As heated as this fire gets
Must clump together
Holding onto our identity
Hand in hand
With pride we will stand for our blood
The tint to our skin
The different curvature to our tongues
The lives that we practice
In this crucible made to seperate our culture from our blood
Will only bring about a people stronger than before
Until the fire consumes flesh
Leaving behind a pool of brown blood
That with no amount of bleach
Can ever be washed away.