Ego of a Nation

Ego of a Nation

our blood is rich with rains absorbed by territories regenerated cycles come full circle our blood spills back premature with weapons of them 

who pay not their dues
but speak in untruths
born without an ounce of remorse 

our guts turn grey
like the ashen skin
of the murdered man slumped over the wheel
of his vehicle upon lands once known as his
where he only wanted to go 

his spirit now wonders
upon barbed-wired property and when his family
calls him
come home
he makes them wait
he’s been trying every door to escape so he
hangs around
just a minute more

and watches the great-great-grandchildren of his younger brother being told
be careful around here 

the murderer returns
to his cup of coffee
to the rantings of his wife who said she was so scared her hero took care of it
but his red-tinged-skin tells on him
this is illogical
and he knows it
bred into him
by his grandfather’s
racism
taught as the gospel
today
he does his ancestor’s proud lives out the fantasy
they so often talked about with their wives over coffee 

they come from another place they do not connect
the way we connect
but hold Realestate papers and wave them in our face like victory flags 

singing the tired tax-payers lament 

it is a shot gun
and a can of coke
it is sleeping pills
and ten different ways
to tell the same story in court
it is caskets
and feasts for the dead
these are ancient feuds
and justice has no
jurisdiction over something so old before paper and ink
before memory loss and (dis)trust

juries are just citizens collected from corrals of wayward cattle, themselves exercising the ego of a nation without identity or foundation spirit man will haunt them maybe not today 

but down the road where he is now free to go

The video below features the poem, Ego of a Nation — from a book of the same title — which represents a creative reaction to centuries of court injustice experienced by Indigenous peoples — more specifically the acquittal of the murderer of 22-year-old Cree man, Colten Bouchie, in February 2018, which created a great uprising of resistance by Indigenous peoples all across our occupied territories known as Canada, which still resonates today.

- Janet Rogers

If you are interested in more Indigenous poetry, Rogers recommends "When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry"