By Thomas Davis
In the midst of all the insanity in this country right now, yesterday I was sent news about one of the great leaders of the tribal colleges and universities movement in the United States and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education movement worldwide.
I am walking through the wilderness.
Time has twisted on me.
I keep wondering who I am
as my hair grows white,
my bones ache more fiercely.
Ron His Horse Is Thunder is gone?
Gone where?
To the top of a tall mountain
where clouds of snow-dust blow
into a sky so blue
it’s not a dome but a song
that lasts forever and ever?
I imagine him lean as he rides a golden stallion
running with a herd of wild golden stallions,
his face alive with the spirit of Sitting Bull,
with the fire of the tribal colleges in his black hair
as it streams backward in the wind,
as the colleges bloom out of the prairie, in the deep woods, in the shadows of great mountains, in the high deserts, and beside the Pacific Ocean
into history, the meaning of history.
I could tell you stories.
How he became a tribal chairman
and then came to an AIHEC board meeting
where tribal college Presidents
treated him like a rock star,
cheering every time he took a breath.
How he walked out on a narrow runway in Albuquerque
dressed only in a loin cloth,
holding a spear as old as the stories
told around campfires on cold nights.
Dressed only in a loin cloth,
his legs and abs shining.
How he and I argued for a different funding stream
for the colleges as the eyes of Presidents glared
and linked us into visions
of a future where Native men and women
dance and sing as the drum of the future thunders
and wildflowers bloom every time a foot touches ground.
And now the news.
The old leaders, the beautiful people, my friends,
those who would sit in cheap motel rooms
and fiercely debate for hours
as they conjured alive a movement
that is changing history,
are fading, fading, fading.
The fire in their eyes,
the power of their gestures,
the song of their voices
disappearing, disappearing, disappearing.
And who will remember where they have walked?
Who will know the force of who they were?
They created a movement.
They fashioned it out of dreams,
out of old bar rooms and trailer houses
and abandoned buildings that should have been condemned.
They did! They did! All of them together!
And now,
an email. An email!
A technology that wasn’t invented yet
when the tribal colleges first came to be.
It says that Ron His Horse Is Thunder,
a man so glorious they put his glory
on national posters and posted them all over the country,
is gone.
Nothing more than that.
That’s what it says.
How can that possibly have any meaning at all?
I feel the wilderness around me,
time twisting,
my spirit feeling how it felt
whenever I heard Ron His Horse Is Thunder laughing.
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