WOKE

by Bradley McIlwain

Burial of the dead after the massacre of Wounded Knee. U.S. soldiers putting Indians in common grave; some corpses are frozen in different positions. (Wikipedia)

Native American communities that had long wanted the removal of military honors for the soldiers involved in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre had their hopes dashed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his effort to root out what he calls a “woke culture” in the armed forces. “The era of politically correct, overly sensitive, ‘don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings’ leadership ends right now at every level,” Hegseth said Tuesday to hundreds of military officials at a ceremony. The defense secretary announced new directives for troops that include “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness and painted a picture of a military that has been hamstrung by “woke” policies. Hegseth had announced last week in a video on social media that Wounded Knee soldiers will keep their Medals of Honor, part of a wider Trump administration move that Indigenous leaders and historians on Tuesday called part of a culture war against racial and ethnic minorities and women’s rights. —AP, October 1, 2025

Warriors whisper in the willows

Odyssey of blood and ochre 

Unheard under cannon fire:

No surrender—

Dancing ghosts raid the dawn;

Eagles still soar at Pine Ridge

Drums of the ancestors

Keep the fires of knowledge

No medals, no song, no glory;

Evergreens slope to the South—

Elders rise in the heart of the sun.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book Dear Emily was published by Roasted Poet Press last year.

BIERSTADT'S CHIMNEY ROCK

by Bill Sullivan

on the anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre,

December 29, 1880

From the Collection of Colby College Museum of Art: Albert Bierstadt, "View of Chimney Rock, Ohalilah Sioux Village in the Foreground" (1860).

Eighteen sixty—in his Manhattan studio

Albert Bierstadt studies his year-old photographs

and oil sketches of the Great Plains and foothills

of the Rockies. He then turns to his images of 

the Lakota, the Oglala Sioux and his collection

of their artifacts. He pauses, fills his brush with

oil paint, approaches the board sitting on the easel,

saying silently, "Everything must glow, must shine

like the soft rays of the sun." He adds more dove gray

to the last of the low clouds; steps back, saying, “Yes,

it's all there and more, the luminous amber sky,

the aquamarine river, the lush green bushes

on the bank, the soft shadows, the warmest of suns."

 

And there are the two horsemen in the shallow water,

one with child mounted in front, the other to his right

relaxed, but with a rifle at his side. Far right a woman,

water to her waist, ready to do the morning wash

and on the bank three tepees, shelter for this band

and just beyond another man riding off for the day's

hunt. And all the carefree children and unleashed dogs

scattered about. It is family, clan and tranquility,

life beyond what is and will be and he knows that.

 

Knows that when he includes Chimney Rock—

a storm shaped relic of a violent volcanic past,

a weathered cone that rose some three hundred feet

above the prairie grasses and became a marker for  

the fur traders, Mormons and pioneers tramping a trail

west—to Oregon and California. Knew it when he

and the government surveying team followed the North

Platte River reached the structure, examined the gifts,

messages and drawings left by previous travelers—

determined dreamers who heeded the prophets' call:

"Go west! Our destiny!  God's will! This land, ours from

the Atlantic to the Pacific." Now the creaking oxcart

and wagon, soon the hiss and steam of the locomotive.

 

He places the prominent rocky tower in the distant

background, makes it appear insignificant,

but knows his idyllic world would soon bleed.

He did not conjure up the brutal chapters then—

the butchery, expulsion, internment, deprivation

and suffering. But his life spanned the tale. Yes, he

lived long enough to read the reports of the massacre

at Wounded Knee. Lived long enough to examine

the photos of the corpses—men, women and children—

being tossed into a mass grave—lived long enough

to ponder the photo of Chief Big Foot's frozen body

lying in the blood-soaked snow—his cupped hands

outstretched as if reaching out for his slain followers.

 

And what did Albert say that late December day?

Did he think of that halcyon scene he had painted

thirty years earlier? Did he shrug his shoulders,

conclude that it had to be, or did he weep?       

 

 

Before retiring to Westerly, Rhode Island, Bill Sullivan taught English and American studies at Keene State College, the University System of NH. He has co-authored two studies of twentieth century poetry and co-produced two documentary films. Here Am I, Send Me, The Journey of Jonathan Daniels, aired by numerous PBS stations, streams at PBS.org. His poems have appeared in numerous print and on-line publications. Loon Lore: In Poetry and Prose was published in 2015 by Grove Street Press. 

ACHE

by Ron Riekki

Artist Frederic Remington painted “The opening of the fight at Wounded Knee” in 1891. The massacre took place on December 29, 1890.

"There have been more mass shootings than days this year: As of December 25, the 359th day of the year, there have been 406 mass shootings in the U.S., according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which tracks every mass shooting in the country. Twenty-nine of those shootings were mass murders." —Jason Silverstein, CBS News, December 25, 2019

“The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history took place in 1890, when representatives of the U.S. government executed as many as 300 Native men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for practicing Ghost Dancing, a spiritual tradition within our culture.” —Allen Salway, Teen Vogue, June 14, 2018

“Arise from their graves” —William Blake, “Ah! Sun-flower”

Ugh! Gun-powder!  weary of EMT
shifts, how it may look like an entrance
wound in front and an exit wound in back,

but it was really two bullets, fired behind
and in front, and bullets, now, with shitty
NRA-backed legislation are made to

ricochet around in the chest once they
enter, going from organ to organ, intro-
ducing themselves with a bloodbath,

destroying colons and lungs and spleens,
the way that colonizers smallpoxed
and large-poxed and sent poxes upon

thee—the Pawnee, the Cherokee, the
Kansa?  Have you never heard of the
Kansa?  Because extinction is erasing—

worse than erasing, de-racing, destroy-
ing the -ing of a people: their breathing,
talking, writing, hearts beating, cultures

living.  And over an Xmas dinner,
we get on guns, and I say that I wish
I could take all the gun-owners and

put them on an ambulance with me,
allow them to see what bullets do,
see bullets in merry-go-rounds and

bullets in dollhouses and bullets in
Etch A Sketches where you shake
the world and nothing changes.

Ron Riekki's most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press, 2019).

SMOKE SIGNALS

by Betsy Mars

In the town where the Pilgrims settled, members of Native American tribes from around New England gathered for a solemn National Day of Mourning observance. Thursday’s noon gathering in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts,  recalled the disease, racism and oppression that European settlers brought. It’s the 48th year that the United American Indians of New England have organized the event on Thanksgiving Day. —boston.com, November 23, 2017

Released, the dream where the pipe broke,
dumping oil into the water table.
Oil and water don't mix.
In another, the peace pipe
is passed, but one person,
or even a whole class,
refuses to share

or worse still—
turns it into a war drum.
Sticks and stones might break
my bones but names will be
thrown around haphazardly

igniting flames, festering old wounds,
clouding the discussion.
Run interference and divert.
Take up the cross. Toss that medicine,
man, unless you can afford it.

When you're on the trail
of tears, rub salt in the wounded.
Kneeling is a sin before football,
but not before God.

In God we trust, unless we're native
American, or any “other.”
The dreamcatcher is broken;
nightmares run rampant.

Betsy Mars is a poet, educator, mother and animal lover who spent part of her early childhood in Brazil. This experience led to an early awareness of income disparity, linguistic and cultural differences, as well as a love for travel and language. Her work has appeared in The Rise Up Review, The California Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. 

THE WEIGHT OF WATER

A Rhupunt by Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

The white man buys
With gold-plate lies.
His honor dies
On rocks that stand.

With greed, with guile,
Pale fists defile
The streams with bile
That poisons land:

“Hail, bottom line!
For leaks, a fine;
Let squaws drink wine!”
We understand

Their appetite
For oil will blight
Our sacred site,
Yet they demand

We yield this ground.*
Despoilers pound
The earth, and mound
Its bones and sand

With metal paws.
The hungry jaws
Of drill that gnaws
Devour our land.

Their serpent’s bite
Pours black of night
Through earth despite
Our protests and

Appeals to law.
So from the maw
Of death we claw
The dead, command

Their ghosts with dance,**
Add spear and lance
Of spirits’ stance
To human hand.

We string each bow
With words, strike blow
In court; the snow
We will withstand.

Foes agitate
With stones of hate;
Lakota wait
On rocks that stand.

* Current plans call for the Dakota Access Pipeline to pass under the Missouri River less than one mile upstream of the Standing Rock Reservation.  The Lakota have protested on the grounds that the project will contaminate their sole source of drinking water and disrupt their sacred lands.  



**By 1890 the Lakota faced starvation as a result of the U.S. Army’s systematic decimation of the buffalo, their primary food source. Members of the tribe began to practice the ghost dance, which was said to harness the spirits of the dead to fight on behalf of the living.  Sitting Bull was arrested for refusing to stop this practice, and the resulting conflict led to his death and the subsequent massacre of his supporters at Wounded Knee.

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a linguist, writer, and editor who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade.  Her tanka and bardic verse in the Celtic style have been published in England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States.  Recent work has appeared in Quarterday Review, Society of Classical Poets Journal, Bamboo Hut, Skylark, Atlas Poetica, Halcyon Days, and Peacock Journal.  She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA.

JUNE 12, 2016: WHO COUNTS

by James M. Croteau

New Orleans firefighters in 1973 assisting a patron of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar that had been set on fire. Thirty-two people died in the attack. AP Photo via The New York Times, June 13 2016

We skipped Pride to pack
for our annual Maine trip.
We left about 7AM and
on the on-ramp to I-94
we first heard:

at least 20 dead and 42 injured,
another shooting, Orlando,
a nightclub. This will be
our 27th trip  to Ogunquit.
Our first was 31 years ago.

We've never been there with
the right to be married. We
stopped for lunch just past 1 o'clock
at a Panera east of Cleveland.
I walked our dogs. My partner

went to get food. He returned
with 50 dead and 53 injured, and
at a gay bar. I google news from my iPhone--
the largest mass shooting in US history.
I also know it's the largest mass killing

of LGBT people in US history because
only five years ago I learned of the story
of Upstairs Lounge arson in New Orleans
during Pride month 43 years ago. It took
16 minutes to extinguish the fire and 32

of our lives. I turned to Facebook  feeling
my stolen youth raw and inflamed
again. I get reminded of Wounded Knee.
The biggest depends on how and who
defines what.  The army, with the

semi-automatic weapons of 1890,
massacred at least 150, maybe 300
people. I'll be 60 in three months.
It's near 4, and we're at a toll booth
near the outskirts of Buffalo.

James M. Croteau lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his partner of 31 years, Darryl, and their two Labrador retrievers. Jim grew up gay and Catholic in the U.S. south in the 60s and 70s and his writing often reflects that experience. His poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Right Hand Pointing, Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry among others. His first chapbook will be published by Redbird Chapbooks in 2016.