Thursday, August 18, 2022

(NONFICTION) THE SÁMI WORD FOR ‘HELP’ IS VEAHKKI! AND I YELL IT IN MY DREAMS TONIGHT, AND ALWAYS


by Ron Riekki


Above: Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, known as Áillohaš in the Northern Sámi language (23 March 1943–26 November 2001), was a Finnish Sámi writer, musician and artist.

“I am not saving my life for the future” 
Nils-Aslak ValkeapääTrekways of the Wind 
 
Tomorrow I go in front of a board 
to speak on the allegations that I 
was “speaking of native issues too 
frequently in class.”  When I heard 
 
these allegations, no, this allegation, 
no, this pissing-on-a-bonfire, I had 
the revelation of being had.  I had, 
yes, in class, spoke of indigenous 
 
issues, not realizing it’s a crime, 
but I am guilty of being native, of 
being Sámi, of being Karjalaiset, 
of being of a background where I 
 
hear, here, “I’ve never heard of 
that.”  The that falling flat.  And 
it’s a board of seven people.  And 
it makes me think of the time in 
 
Berkeley, where I was walking 
down the street and saw a black 
man, around 70 years old, peace- 
fully being drunk, on a bench, 
 
buzzed, yes, eyes red, yes, and 
leaving the world alone, then 
a police car drove up and an 
officer asked the man some- 
 
thing and he said something 
and another cop car pulled up 
and another cop got out and 
another cop car pulled up and 
 
more police got out and then 
a van pulled up, a cop van, 
a SWAT team reaction for 
this septuagenarian swept up 
 
so quickly into the back of 
the swallowing vehicles, all 
painted black, as if to mock, 
as if to mask them in night 
 
where the body was taken 
and I stood there and realized 
how there is the centrality of 
overreaction, of SWAT-style 
 
action movie hyperbole where, 
in the end, there is the pairing 
of kissing the woman while 
killing the man who didn’t 
 
matter, the man who was 
reduced to villain and a woman 
seduced by cliché and audiences 
in the dark, snoring.  And a First 
 
Nation playwright in Montreal 
told me that Hollywood cinema 
is all about conflict, that they 
love conflict, because colonialism 
 
is hearted in conflict, but native 
playwriting and screenwriting and 
story is about community, not con- 
flict, not the incarceration of their 
 
films, but instead about connection, 
and he said that there was a reading 
where afterwards a white man 
raised his hand and said he’d have 
 
to be honest and he said the play 
was boring, and behind him was 
a group of Anishinaabe who were 
all in tears, their sleeves filled 
 
with tears, and this man was 
bored.  And tomorrow I don’t know 
if I am getting kicked out of college 
or if I’m getting killed out of college 
 
or if I’m getting left in decorticate 
position, funeraled, how I was told 
that I was not only speaking too 
much about native issues, but I was 
 
being too “aggressive” with how I 
was talking about native issues and 
an elder, Red Pipe Woman, on 
the phone told me, “Oh, let me get this 
 
straight: a native person is being 
told they are ‘aggressive.’  They’re 
telling you that you’re being ‘savage’ 
by speaking of native issues.”  And 
 
our laughter was as normal as all 
the tall clouds above, and our laughter 
was sky-deep, and our laughter was tears, 
and the grey clouds were coming and 
 
I love walking in the rain and I walked 
home and I wondered if tomorrow 
they were going to try to destroy me 
and tomorrow I am going to find out. 
 
And tomorrow I am going to find out. 
And I will live even if they kill me. 


Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).