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PORTSIDE CULTURE

I WAS BUILT BY INHERITED HUNGERS. THIS IS NOT A POEM THAT NAMES THEM.
 
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Kimberley Blaeser

Poem-a-day, 11/22/24
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_ Anishinaabe poet Kimberly Blaeser affirms her fealty to tradition
as well as to the resistance to colonizers at the core of indigenous
communities. _

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                                 i.
As a body politic we take up space in their ledgers.
Yes, my relatives are the salvage bodies of history.

We have ways they do not approve of.
How we feed ourselves for one:

           I have been taught where to find the winter cache of
squirrels—
                                             
            and how to walk away.

           As we walk, my brother quiets me:
           you cannot tell stories until you visit the places
where they make their homes.

           Father said the garden song calls the pollinators—
                                        and we
must sing in tune.

           Nimaamaa said leave some for the spirits and the
little people
           (and what she meant was we are small in the green
frayed body of belonging).   

           We learn from makwa, from maa’ingan—sometimes,
even from Nanaboozhoo.

By this I mean not everything tattered is ruined.

                                       ii.
They believe I was built of equations for gain.
(This poem is not an anthem.)

We still follow picto-spirits,
animal tracks, and seed paths:

           Not all of our tools have price tags.

           Not all of our safeguards are weapons

           You will not find wild game in our lexicon.

Ask yourself—are we the meat they covet?

_Kimberly Blaeser is Anishinaabe from White Earth Nation and the
author of five collections of poetry, including Ancient Light: Poems
(University of Arizona Press, 2024). Awarded the Lifetime Achievement
Award by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Blaeser is the
director of Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in the Minnesota
homelands of Anishinaabe people, and for part of the year, in Lyons,
Wisconsin._

* colonialism
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* anti-capitalism
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* indigenous resistance
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