Tanaya Winder

Someone once asked me, what are the words I do not yet have — .... .... .... verbs that will story our bodies into something more than missing, more than squaw or lost, beyond statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime. Daily ritual: my hands search and sift through layers of tiny earthquakes, shifted verdicts not guilty not enough evidence not prosecutable not our jurisdiction I dig. Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted compared to all other races. I dig. We are vanishing lines in history books, treaties; laws do not protect us. I dig until mud and earth find home underneath my fingernails. I’ll plant something new in the absence burn vanish underreport Invisible, our ghosts starve, while the rest of the world keeps on eating. A recent government study found that there were14federal human trafficking investigations in Indian Country between2013and 2016. During that same period theFBIinvestigated 6,100 elsewhere. Let us poem a place where you cannot erase us into white space. .... .... .... Let us dig to remind ourselves our roots are ancestral and there is nothing deeper than these sacred, dirt-covered hands.

I am not murdered, and I am not missing, but parts of me have been disappeared. — Leanne Simpson They too know all too well that some cracks were built just for us to fall through.
 We live in a world that tries to steal spirits each day; they steal ours by taking us away. From Industrial Schools to forced assimilation, genocide means removal 
of those who birth nations — our living threatens. Colonization has been choking us for generations. I tell my girls they are vessels of spirit, air to lungs expanding; this world cannot breathe without us. There are days 
I wish I didn’t have to teach these lessons, but as an Indigenous womxn 
silence is deadening. There is danger in being seen, our bodies are targets marked for violence. We carry the Earth’s me too inside us, 
a howling wind, our mothers & their mothers swallowed these bullets long ago. The voices ricochet I wish I were invisible I wish I were invisible 
I wish echoes
 in my eardrums — we know what it’s like to live in fear. Colonialism’s bullet sits cocked, waiting behind a finger on trigger. We breathe and speak and sing
 for survival. We carve out in lines; we write —I know joy I know pain I know love I know love I know— lessons we’ve carried throughout time. Should I go missing: don’t stop searching; drag every river until it turns red and the waters of our names stretch a flood so wide it catches everything. And we find each other whole and sacred, alive and breathing and breathing and breathing.