Saami
When I write about being Saami, my sister
cringes. She doesn’t want us to be indigenous,
but rather middle-class. My father is divorced
from his heritage, the nuns having beaten
my grandfather’s fingers if he ever spoke
a word of a language that is now dead.
And I think of the death of language, how
the heart of words stops hyper-perfusing
so that the hands grow cold and the letters
turn pale and the lungs cease. I want to be
indigenous, but it is more than writing poems.
It’s becoming a shadow to drums, covering
yourself in the stillness of your ancestors.
Link to Table of Contents: March 2018, Decolonization Issue
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Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017). Upcoming books include Undocumented (Michigan State University Press, co-edited with Andrea Scarpino), Posttraumatic: a memoir (Four Chambers Press/Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and yet-untitled books (with McFarland, co-edited with Jeff Sartain; and with Wayne State University Press, co-edited with Yassir Morsi). 
