Friends,
I just finished reading a horror novel called The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. In it, a quartet of young Native American men are haunted - and hunted - by the ghost of a pregnant elk one of them shot on a hunting expedition 10 years before.
The entity seeking retribution and the way it exacts its revenge is, truly, horrifying. The author layers the propulsive action over the backdrop of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, where residents find joy, connection, love, ritual, and ceremony alongside the deep generational trauma they were born into as a result of Europeans colonizing and forcibly removing them from their homeland in brutal and horrifying ways.
The ghost elk was a mother who couldn’t save her baby. So she went after the people the men loved most and held closest. And engineered it so they’d turn on each other and ultimately destroy themselves.
I finished the book, sobbing, two days ago - right before hearing about the 19 children and two adults murdered at an elementary school in Texas. Continued sobbing, thinking about the violent, brutal, horrifying foundation of this country. The genocide, the slavery. The tenacious hold on power and money by an elite few. The extractive, Earth-degrading fossil fuel industry. The fucking list won’t end if I keep adding to it - you get the point.
In a way, what do we expect - we were born into this.
I remember Columbine so clearly, sitting in my literature seminar in college, a classmate bursting through the door, shaking, shouting the news. Sandy Hook is an equally crystalline memory, a harder hit because I was nursing one baby, the other off at his new daycare, stunned that I’d soon be ushering my children out of our nest and into this forever-changed world where 6-year-olds can be shot with assault rifles. Horrified that the parental promise of safety and shelter might turn up empty one day. Seeing the pictures of the kids in Uvalde - they’re every kid. They all have mothers who couldn’t save them.
I saw a pregnant woman and her partner sitting together on a park bench today. They weren’t speaking. I wondered if they were holding the same questions we’re all holding right now.
How do we go on? What is the next chapter of this terrifying horror story we’re in? Can we make joy, connection, equanimity, love, ritual, and ceremony utterly central to our lives as a protective buffer while we fight for all of our lives, for our right to go to school, church, grocery shopping, running - without the fear of being shot? To protect against hopelessness, cynicism, darkness in the face of assault after assault (guns and otherwise) on our lives, our health, our autonomy, our communities. What is this world?
The stupid flowers keep blooming and being beautiful, the trees keep rustling their leaves, the moon keeps rising. We keep loving, playing, fighting the bad guys. Celebrating.
At the end of The Only Good Indians, there’s hope for the end of violence and trauma. In our own book of horrors, we REALLY need the story to turn a corner. And no one can write that but us.
Donate:
Families and survivors in Uvalde
Sending love,
Leigh
Thanks for finding the strength to sit with this long enough to find the words.
Have you read Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You? I just finished it. In a much different context she wrestles with some of these questions. I'm glad the questions are on all of our minds even if the answers are sometimes simple in theory yet somehow elusive in practice on a large enough scale to prevent the need to keep asking these questions.