Apple: List 1

They have their own history of being tortured and killed by white
people, their own struggles with the nuances of the individual life.

The fort was designed to give white people shelter and sustenance
when they needed a break from “taming the West” by killing Indians
directly or wiping out the original food sources, so Indians would starve
on their own without the fort’s residents bloodying their own hands.

Where land base exists, sterilize fertile adults under the guise of current
helpful medical care, until they vanish on their own, unaware.

Optimally, within two generations, those slivers of their old cultures
will be so small, they cannot thrive, and assimilation will be complete.

They do not seem to understand that the only life learned
will be how to work for white people, expenses deducted
from their pay for the room they sleep in after work, food
they eat at these houses while indentured for summer
months between the school years for five calendar years.

Five years was the optimal amount of time school officials
believed it would take for children to find it impossible to rejoin
their old lives.

The school, founded by a military man,
Richard Henry Pratt, had an explicit mission:
“Kill the Indian! Save the Man.”

Of the five children, two never returned to their home
territories, one arrived near home, staying on the periphery,
living out his life thirty miles away, and two came back
and reacquainted themselves with the lives they had
almost lost, marrying young women from home,
starting families, and keeping our name going forward.

Even here, he seems
to fear revealing a wild side, fear the possibility that government
agents will return to his door, demand he gather his things,
forcing him to get back on the train to Carlisle for remediation.

Among the dozen or so names I’ve been given over my lifetime, most have atrophied in misuse or fallen to obscurity.

It is easy to see why I’d be okay with Batman. Though it does have sociopathic connotations, the idea of being a vigilante hero with an awesome car still holds all the appeal it ever did.

He is bamboozled by unethical merchants, but before he can deliver the lame gift he plans to offer his love, he selflessly helps an elf, who returns the kind gesture, transforming his gift of real tree and a real pigeon into golden replicas, with his bag of magic Pixie Dust.

What this story has to do with me, I have no idea, but my brother decided I should immediately be renamed Pixie Dust or if you are more into brevity, Pixie for short.

People will call you by that desired name, with the slightest inflection of laughter and pity.

Because our verbal talents allowed us to survive, even when we were supposed to burn our cultures out like self-cleaning ovens, we prize cleverness, quickness, the ability to find the right metaphor to reveal and obscure at the exact same time, depending on whose ears are receiving our words in the moment.