Combine
Frank Waln’s truth, Lyla June’s spirit, Supaman’s energy and you might
get close to Lara’s fiercely beautiful voice. She has been forced
through the sieve of many names, but she presses on, sings for herself
and for many. It is code, she says, in this book’s first pages. She lets
the reader decode the mystery.
When Lara lifts John Trudell’s
voice she lifts her own. “We’re not taught about our personal
relationship to power. We’re not taught about our relationship to the
Great Spirit. Recognizing power is what you have to do. When you
recognize it, you exercise it. You can’t take back what they have
already taken but you can stop the taking of your power, once you
recognize it.” She lifts her own voice as she investigates the absence
of Indian history, the erasure of Indian lives, the loss of Indian
identity in many ways including adoption.
Lara lifts mostly
directly through her poetry in “Masks” and “I Shook” and “When a
trickle… becomes a river.. then a flood” and “I Wasn’t Ready For Her To
Die” and most powerfully in “Ghost Shell.” It’s hard to leave the impact
of her words behind.
She writes, “a good poet would never let a
good catastrophe go to waste.” She shares the Hopi prophecy, “Now is
the time, we are the ones we have been waiting for.” In all her
powerful, hip-hop-like words, her closing statements resonate. In them
Lara writes,
“All our suffering is mutual.
All our healing is mutual.
All our thriving is mutual.”
Comments