If you enter that house
do something
to stamp memory
in your heart
smudge, sing your song,
drink to your ancestors,
pray to the moon.
Because once inside there,
you will be stalked
by dead white guys
and madwomen.

Listen,
listen with a stubborn ear
for the faint sound
of something other,
whistling through cracks
in storm windows,
croaking up from
loose floor boards,
murmuring down lonely halls,
whispering the directions
for how to build a new place.

Once lodged,
fix for yourself a spot.
Some corner where maybe
the spider web that invents
might be tolerated.
Or some cranny where
Coyote's shit
won't get trampled,
where perhaps a hole
could be dug in the floor
so one can keep an eye
on Missepishu.

Sneak out sometimes.
On heavy aired nights
go warm yourself at the fire.
No shame, if you don't go back
to that house.
There are those
who are meant for the fire,
when they find out
that the fire ring
will outlast even brick and cement.
But leave a trail of markers -
paper scraps to pick up
and examine, and reconsider
- if you go back to that house
from the fire.

And if you return there
you'll come to know
that your imprint
is fresh and fragile
like the path of dried sage,
brushing circles in prairie sand,
compelled by the wind.
When you know this,
start planning your feast.
Think about who
will eat your food,
who will come for
full-bellied dreaming.

But make your feast
with protection at your breast.
Because,
the lard you spread
for your guests
is too heavy,
and messy for some.
And the salt you sprinkle there
is almost too much
for that house to bear.
Maagisaa, one more grain of salt
could bring it down.

Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, 1995

It's no renaissance, this slow and painstaking process. We can only come to be known, to be understood, to be seen if our languages, literature and orature are being taught in universities with the same honour, resourcefulness, and pervasive ubiquity as are almost everyone else's. These are ancient voices of the land and some are slowly dying from their long wait to be heard, to sing, and to teach again. However, this is a transformation of pedagogy that is looked on by most of these institutions with disbelief, skepticism, and stubborn reluctance - if they perceive it at all. This is a subtle, hidden, but most painful and dangerous twist of the racist knife.

This is why why it's so slow, this glacial "renaissance." It will be for a new generation of non-Native peoples who sat as children, youth, and young adults and heard and learned our languages along with their own, who remember and recite our ancestors' stories along with all the others, who's world view is shaped by these things - these will be the ones who will be true allies and partners with our children in a real and resounding cultural renaissance.

In the meantime, in the shadows, knives are still at work, cutting more false images of us from our own flesh, cutting us off from our own people. "You can't just do your work for Indians - your work has to be relevant to a REAL audience." (Read: sanitized and romanticized, always simultaneously too Indian and not Indian enough). Who but our own people can be a REAL audience when even the most basic and obvious elements of our histories are ignored, distorted, and brutally erased in the panicky, frenetic hysteria of non-Native contemporary culture? Or perhaps the perceptions, more ominously, are that First Peoples cannot constitute a REAL audience because we are dying or dead peoples with no art of our own, an non-audience of irrelevant ghosts - that we don't have a sufficiently sophisticated level of awareness to appreciate works of art - that because we have been forcibly gagged and restrained from actively contributing to the character of contemporary culture, we have no analysis of it - that none of our cultures have the degree of elegance, grace and vitality equal to the task of reading non-Native culture.

I don't think so. Our survival and growing strength proves emphatically that we've been able to read it, talk it and walk it - it was forced down our throats until it came back up as a weapon we've had to use to keep what little was left to us and to regain that which was stolen. Now we take up these new tools to help fashion our own images of beauty, passion, terror, healing, fury and joy from our own perspectives - incorporating these tools into the living skin of our cultures, working them side by side with older ones from our ancestors. Now our sneak-up dance is working, provoking the slow awakening of not Native peoples to the richness, complexity and depth of our ways of seeing and shaping the world. The families of our allies are growing, their children are being taught, the feasting and sharing together, with honour, has begun preparing for the renaissance when you will talk Indian to me.