Every Seed example essay topic

Itch Like Crazy: Resistance This is one of those days when I see Columbus in the eyes of nearly everyone and making the deal is at the fingertips of every hand. The voices beyond my office door speak of surveys and destruction, selling the natives to live among strangers, rewards fr sine service or kinship with the Crown. The terror crouches there in the canyon of my hands, the pink opening rosebud mouths of newborns or the helplessness of the primal song. Ghosts so old they weep for release, have haunted too long the burrs and ticks that climb, burrow and stick. Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Piedras, My Lai, Actual, Hispaniola, Massachussetts Bay Colony, my mother, the stones, channels of water, blood of her veins, every place a place where history walked, every ring on Turtle's Back a mortar to split our seeds, every sunflower bursting from asphalt raises green arms to the sun, every part of Tewaquachi has formed the placenta from which we emerge, every red thing in the world is the reflection of blood, our death and our rising. Now I dance the mission revolts again, let the ambush blossom in my heart, claim my victory with their own language, know the strength of spine tied to spine, recognize him when he arrives again, this hungry one, must feed him poisoned fish.

Must lure the soldiers into trap after trap, must remember every bit of this. source: web Margaret Opens the Bon Ton Saloon Bear Valley, Mariposa Land Grant, California 1859 To let: solid building, two rooms, suitable for enterprise and hard work: fronti e town on the Mariposa Grant in the southern part of the Mother Lode. Local Indians pacified and tame. - John C. Fremont, owner-seller I never liked that man. My new husband, Maurice, thinks the world of him. "John Fremont will be president one day" he says, with a grand patriotic wave of his old Prussian hand, grander than the wave he gives me when I saddle the mare for a ride. We would do well enough to sell sarsaparilla and meat, but Maurice says no; the miners must have their Saturday spirits and we must collect the coins.

There is not another white woman here. But I am strong. I listen without flinching to the cattlemen and miners explode through the door from the dust of the road and settle themselves at the bar. Let hang the next story writer who comes to my table with notebook and camera to ask of my long memory, the rocking on the sea and slow bump of wagon wheels, neverending tall grass of Missouri giving way to sagebrush and stone, the high mountain passes, a multitude of pigeons overhead. I will not say I was hungry or that redskins came to our wagon and frightened me. I say only that San Francisco was sweet and the stage to Mariposa smelled of mens's what and the cloying perfume from long petticoats rustling in the scrub oak leaves to sop the water from foothill creeks. source: web Alien Seeds (on reading a book about plants growing wild in California) How is it that I did not know the gold hillside near my house is as foreign to the land as any intruder, as the straight boards and liquid rock poured onto the land where my house stands All these, wild oats, the strangling grass, even the succulents with the secret of moisture within, the tumbleweed rode on the tails of strange beasts or were caught in the wool of Spanish sheep.

How can I not feel the killing, the massacre that clear the valley, the foothills, the mountains of my kind For every seed, its wagon train; rhizomes colonize underground, spines catch foxes on their little hooks-barbed wire crosses our nations and taproots suck the stolen dew no matter how dry the desert. Thistles thrive on the most ravaged flesh; invaders ruthlessly kill just as the bloodthirsty men who drove their cattle from shrine to shrine lowered their rifles, aimed, fired. The Elders have always known this. They fast and pray, then hunt for exactly the right kind of grass as their grandmothers before them; they pick a few, never the first one, never more than they need. They return home with great art in their eyes. And now they walk forever with empty hands, baskets made thin with ribs sticking out.

Beads, yarn, safety pins replace bear grass and willow. Eucalyptus rolls its seeds on the ground, we slip and fall, hurtle into the sacrifice, gather not grass but sorrow in our hands. Vanishing Americans, endangered species, vermin and weeds, call it what they will, rock hard places where bones rattle down. source: web For the White poets who would be Indian just once just long enough to snap up the words fish-hooked from our tongues. You think of us now when you kneel on the earth, turn holy in a temporary tourism of our souls. With words you paint your faces, chew your doeskin, touch breast to tree as if sharing a mother were all it takes, could bring instant and primal knowledge.

You think of us only when your voices want for roots, when you have sat back on your heels and become primitive. You finish your poem and go back. source: voices. cla. umn. edu / authors /Wendy Rose. html.