Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and originally from Oklahoma. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where she lives with her partner and spends most of her time tending her cats (and cat-sized Chihuahua), plants, and the students in her American Indian Studies and Anthropology classes. Both her research and activism center contemporary indigenous identity, indigenous language revitalization, and the Two-Spirit community.
Jenny shared this post with us in 2016. |
Jenny writes: |
OFI’ TOHBI’ IHINA’
I didn’t carry my ancestors’ bones with me to this Midwestern place. I could not hear their voices. I asked Rabbit to carry a note to them but he baked it into cookies and ate them with rosehip tea. I asked Woodpecker to pound a song for them in cedar, but the songs could not cross the Mississippi. I scratched a song in four lines for our ancestors I wove a lullaby of yarn for our descendants, and I stomped for all of us moving counter-clockwise in between. Finally in the still of night Cicada buzzed answers in a tree beside my ear “We left our bones because we do not need them to dance along the white dog's way. You do not need them to dance along beneath us.” |