Missing More Than a Word

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.