I sit here, typing away on a keyboard, connected to the power grid and connecting a series of microchips and parts I don’t know the name of, always hoping that my computer is backing itself up into the cloud. Whatever that means, not cumulus or cirrus. The battery warm because I think I ultimately have a lemon on my hands, the hard drive completely lost less than a year ago. And to what is my memory now? But, nevertheless, it’s what I’m doing. Trying to preserve my version of things, the stories I’ve learned, am learning, the way I see the world. For what and for whom I’m not entirely sure. Maybe just for myself, to know I existed, I was here, I told my story. In narrative, still life photographs, exquisite moments of beauty.

When just two weeks ago I was existing in a different space and time, outside of the concrete and the poor air quality. Away from the winds blowing the stray trash around, the street noise from Benders and the sirens from the largest fire station west of the Mississippi.

In a place, a big house, that smelled like the cedar holding it together, dimly lit with just a few key overhead lights casting shadows, two-dimensional formline art carving its way up to the ceiling and the house posts, each ovoid telling the story of creation, of the founding of a people who were there before the ice age, on whose islands exists a rare white spirit bear to remind them of the time when it was cold.

Singing, dancing, celebrating, breaking bread, beating hand-hewn sticks on a fallen log, lovingly, painstakingly carved until it became hollow, the perfect drum to echo in and out of a heartbeat, a heart beating.

All that time on the land and the water, rocking side to side, hearing stories. Stories about a person’s self-esteem and self-possession. Stories about a person’s regard and disregard for the lowliest of animals, the rat fish. Stories about what exists in the deep sea. Stories about medicine, where to find it and how to respect it. Stories about the possibility of change, a tightrope walk across the chasm between evil and good. Stories about listening to the silence because it always gives clues. Stories about social norms as it were, the lack of hierarchy and guns and monuments.

Stories to carry across generations. Because when there is plenty of food to carry a people through the winter, and the darkness and rains keep them inside, by the fire whose heat provides light, and there is no written word, stories become the skeleton, the base of all the flesh and blood that follows.

They are not anyone’s stories either. They are given, with permission, shared with a purpose, credited to the clan house, the family, the individual who before conveyed the story.

And to hear them, to receive them, considered a gift. A sacred contract. A witnessing.

To listen, absorb, carry forward to whoever will come next.

It’s not romance of what it means to be Indigenous. It’s not the white gaze on an alternative worldview.

It’s focus. It’s DNA. It’s memory. And it’s alive.