SPLASHES OF RED Autumn 1867, Tuwutlamit Wusci*

Autumn, San Jose, 2008

March 10, 1991, U. C. Davis

SPLASHES OF RED
Autumn 1867, Tuwutlamit Wusci*

The stench of burnt gun powder filled the air
Sunrise, it lay in soft, thin, blue clouds
Over the earth of my people
In the high desert
South of Modoc, west of Paiute

As the Great Powers dwelling in the seasons of our world
Move the goose and the salmon and the deer to migrate
So, too, that awesome power
Moves my people to gather
For the last time before Ascui freezes the landscape,
To talk and to plan for the future of our children
And this is how it has been since the beginning, long ago

Trembling they gathered ever alert
Knowing the Americans were tracking them
Yet they obeyed that Great Mystery
And gathered as is the custom
Of all of the seasons of our lives

They smelled the sweat of horses
And of wela (devils)
They heard the distant report of the deadly rifle

Yet they listened to the life in nature moving around them
And they gathered
At tuwutlamit wusci they gathered
for the last time before Ascui gripped the land
And spring was already a dream

They did not think about
the Paiute woman
who slept with the soldiers
that they invited her to the gathering at tuwutlamit wuschi

At dawn they came on sweating horses
With their rifles in their hands
Frightened! Young mother ran towards the safety
of tuwutlimit wuschi

Too late!

When she looked back
There was blood in her tracks
But she felt no pain
for the pain was not hers to bear

Quickly she took the cradleboard from her back
Her breath would not come to her
as she lay the cradleboard in the autumn sun

The blood in her tracks
from her baby
Shot once through the neck
once but forever

With trembling hands
She dug a little grave
in a frightened crevasse of the shaking mountain
and dried her tears with the dust of sweet earth

She placed the eternal bundle
In that shallow effort
Covered it with stones and a wilted flower she found

Then, in fear with a shattered heart,
She cried
Among the splashes of red, Autumn, 1867.

*The Infernal Caverns are near Likely, where my Great Grandfather and my Grandmother were born.

[Cradleboard: The willow and twine, flat, basket babies are strapped in and is carried on the back of mother or father while the tribe is traveling. Often a child is strapped in a cradleboard and dangled from a tree limb, there to be moved by the wind, flitted by butterflies, sung to by the river and the forest while being maintained in peaceful suspension, weightless in forever and that which follows forever, thinking and dreaming]

{At Infernal Caverns the Army fell upon a gathering of my people and committed heinous crimes. That crime will be adjudicated some day. The Army will be found guilty. The judge and jury will pardon the crimes barring all testimony of the victims or their descendants. But that attitude, too, shall change even as winter turns to spring).

Sul’ma’ejote