Somebody asked me, what are you writing now?
And I said, I'm writing an epic.
I don't want to hear too many poets saying
I'm writing an epic, right?
Well, I am really.
And it's a composite of other poems
actually that I've done long poems.
I don't know how long epics are supposed to be.
I suppose as long as, well, when people
say, boy, this point is long.
It must be an epic, right?
Something like that.
I want to read the portion of it that is not an epic yet.
But this is going to appear within it.
It's from a long poem that I wrote in Canada
and was published in a Canadian periodical.
And in this present publication, it's
Called, Memory, History, and the Present.
This is a section.
We face the wars.
The American nation wages because they
devastate the world.
We have to because they threaten us as much as they threaten
the world and civilization.
From the day of its national birth, the USA said,
we were barriers to its plans, and goals, and loss
we have faced.
We were in the way, and we had to be moved aside,
or destroyed, or changed.
So yes, change has taken place and much of our culture
and ways changed.
So yes, land has been lost.
Most of it by outright theft and ties were broken.
So yes, community has been fractured
and its integrity has been weakened.
And yes, even today as we see the national policy has again
been driven awry and the Iraqi nation and people
have been attacked invaded, and destroyed.
We must claim memory and history to be in the living
present that is ours.
For we cannot assert our existence as land, culture,
and community.
Unless we accept and assume responsibility
for our land, culture, and community.
Although federal and state citizenship was denied
indigenous peoples that the US for many years as if they
weren't even human at all.
Indigenous women and men have insisted on serving nonetheless
in the US military services.
Ironic, isn't it?
And do so even now in Iraq with invading and occupying
US military forces.
Even more doubly ironic, isn't it?
This has become a concern for their people
back home whose concerns have never been addressed adequately
by a nation invading indigenous lands, cultures,
and communities.
A contradiction, is it?
In Iraq in 2003, one of the first casualties of the war
was a Native American, a young mother of two children.
Lori Piestewa of the Hopi Nation of Arizona, a soldier.
She was a member of the invading US Army.
Ironies and ironies upon ironies and contradictions
upon the contradictions.
We colonized people live.
This is the present then.
Memory and history have gathered us in the present.
We cannot and do not deny history and memory.
So we assert ourselves presently as Indigenous peoples
of the Americas we do stand in the way of headlong progress
when it is bent on destruction and more destruction.
Memory and history demand reciprocity.
It is really inexorable and irrevocable.
Dza dze ihska eh-eh dzeh shru.
No other way there is.
Dza dze ihska eh eh dzeh shru nu.
There's really no other way we live in the present.
There is no question about that.
It is the most difficult way.
It is the most challenging way.
Dza dze ihska guwah nudeh eh sku stah tyanuh.
There is no other way we can live,
except to face the reality of the present day odd.
And yes, ironic, ironic, and perhaps contradictory,
isn't it?
That American people have looked at Native Americans,
the indigenous peoples of the Americas
as icons of the good old days.
They represented the idyllic life free, and wild,
and natural beings.
And yet they sought to destroy them.
And now, more than anyone else, indigenous
people insist on facing the reality of progress that
destroys and self destroys when it's in the man hands
and minds of the heedless.
In the present, there is no choice, but to resist.
There is no choice, but to resist.
In the hands, in the lands, cultures,
communities of the continents now known as the Americas.
Indigenous peoples have been in resistance for more than 500
hard years without resistance.
Guided by memory as a living history,
we could not have continued.
And today, in the present, we live.
In resistance, in the present, we live.
Today, we live.
'Ewai ih, studeh eh! 'Ewai ih, studeh eh!
That's actually the end of that long poem.