Sitting in the Car Waiting

Abstract

like any good indian woman by Tanaya Winder i pull my brothers from words, stupid injun, shot like bullets. when people ask why my brothers hated school i say: the spirit remembers what it’s like to be left behind when america took children from homes, displaced families with rupture, ripping a child’s hand from a mother’s to put them in boarding school buildings. my brothers are mourning a loss they try to fix in finding home in another person, so they travel from reservation to city singing blues and 49 songs about love. i pull my brothers from cars named after indians: navajo, cherokee, & tacoma. on a danger-destined road my brothers are born longing for a way back from relocation & long walks across miles & miles & miles of removal. my brothers search for themselves in unhealthy addictions disguised as makeshift bandages. i pull my brothers from bottles they think answers might be hidden at the bottom of. my brothers stumble through back alleys looking for a love & laughter that was stolen from them like the land. and when their brown bodies try to find healing & love, other brown bodies cringe at their touch because like any good indian woman, our bodies are connected to an earth, still being raped by the pipelines forcibly laid down inside all that we hold sacred. and my brothers hold onto their colonial emotional baggage so tightly they think it’s gravity so i pull my brothers from oceans believing they deserve the hurt so much they nearly drown themselves in it. and sometimes my brothers knife ancestral grieving onto their wrists, slits to remember the only time we are ever red, skinned is when blood flows from the open wounds america knifed onto our brown skin. self-love: apply pressure. i pull my brothers from ashes. america tried to burn us not knowing we were already flame. & these will be the stories i tell my grandchildren when one day, they ask me – why being a good indian woman means we burn like phoenix repeatedly pulling our brothers. Tanaya Winder is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and performance poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She graduated from Stanford University, and her first book, Words Like Love, was published in 2015. Tanaya founded Dream Warriors, an Indigenous artist management company. Sitting in the Car Waiting by Linda Rodriguez for someone who’s been delayed on a cold, gray, rainy day takes me back to that little girl waiting in the cold car with the littler ones as the night took over the sky while her parents drank in the brightly lit warm bar. Each time the door opened to let someone in or out – the hope was always that this time it would be them – the light and music taunted in the cold dark. Swarming over each other like puppies for warmth, the little ones falling asleep finally, only that seven/eight/nine-year-old girl, who was me, sitting up, keeping watch, afraid some bad man would find the car, afraid that this was the time they would forget us altogether, instead of just for hours, knowing that might not be as bad as it could get when they were drinking, knowing all alone in this cold car might be as safe as it gets. Linda Rodriguez’s newest book, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, is based on her popular workshop. Her Skeet Bannion mystery novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as the St. Martin’s Press / Malice Domestic Best First Novel. WORLDLIT.ORG 69 ...