Sandra Wassilie
The Haunting
I.
The women are leaving the village
They are leaving trauma
Trauma of ruptured tradition:
The Old Ways simmer while
children attend schools taught by strangers
women work the local wage jobs
elders lament loss of language the dance the hunt
Modern demands New Ways overcome minimize tradition
Trauma of economic change:
Gap between TV reality and reality village
hunters imprisoned in villages made stationary
animals managed for sport for cash
diminished food for the village table
Husbands go away for wage jobs instead of hunting—not all go
or change
Trauma of personal despair:
Chaos erupts when the mail plane lands heavy with freight
the village on fire with alcohol-fueled anger
something inside people dies
Elders angry with youth—youth strike out at each other
or give in give up
Husbands jealous of wives working wives worried about children
losing their way to despair
Some sometimes hit rape shoot kill sometimes kill themselves
II.
So the women are leaving the village
the Old Ways no longer work there
the young thirst for New Ways
I left long ago
They are leaving for the city for jobs for safety
they are taking the Old Ways with them
they are mixing them with New Ways
They are mixing their culture their bodies
I mixed culture
I Outsider arrived in the village
Mixed my body with one born to the village
Wise Women wearing kuspuks spoke to me in dreams
Warned me to respect the Old Ways
To bring the Old Ways forward to bring my children
Mixed children forward into the mixed world
The mixed world is finding New Ways
The voices of the Wise Women echo in the New Ways
to stay the hand steady the hand study
The New Ways are remembering the Old Ways
That is my work to help the remembering
Previously printed in Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area, Pease Press, 2019.
Reflection Questions:
How can allies support healing for the trauma referenced in this poem?
What are some of the historical events that haunt the U.S.?
What have we gained from modernization, and what has it cost us?
How does that change depending on whether you are from Indigenous, immigrant, or settler ancestry?
What are the benefits and losses from mixing cultures?
What does "remembering" look like for you?
Sandra Wassilie was born in San Francisco, butlived most of her life in Alaska. Currently an inhabitant of Oakland, she frequently returns to visit her children and grandchildren of mixed Scottish-Irish-Mexican and Yup’ik Eskimo heritage. For more than 60 years, she has witnessed changes in the land and its indigenous cultures. She writes of places she has been and of the adaptations people make to survive loss and trauma inevitable in an increasingly crowded, often confusing, multicultural world.
Wassilie has served as managing editor and poetry editor for Fourteen Hills, and cofounded the Bay Area Generations Reading Series. Her poetry appears in a chapbook Smoke Lifts and in several literary publications. Wassilie is a recipient of the Ann Fields Award (2011) and Celestine Award (2014) for poetry.