The Acknowledgement series in Rivers in My Veins is based on the trend of groups offering land acknowledgements at the start of meetings. While I realize many offer land acknowledgement out of a spirit of contrition or awareness, the impact on Native peoples can be anything but. This series offers acknowledgement as a Native person might write them, acknowledging the genocide of Native peoples of North America, acknowledging the harm of boarding schools, acknowledging the harm of legal fights against our treaty affirmed rights, acknowledgement of the earth and sky. Saint Julian Press shared one of these poems on its website, Acknowledgement Three. This poem is about my memories of my grandmother, Ermina Goudy Edsall of the Yakama Nation. I was an urban Indian kid, and after my mother died my grandmother became the bridge for me to my tribes. Little did I know at the time, how her experiences in boarding schools had made her feel disconnected, particularly in the area of language loss. She like many Native peoples historically were multi-lingual in tribal languages. At least, she was as a child before being sent to boarding school. This poem is about memory, about what we remember, how we remember it, and that sometimes our memory is only in some other consciousness. And not usable or actionable in waking hours. This is an acknowledgement of something that has happened to us as tribal peoples, we acknowledge that the impact of federally funded and church operated boarding school was the intentional suppression of our languages. While tribes and tribal peoples are diligently working to recover languages, many tribal language speakers retain vast knowledge that informs our tribal language recovery. But this poem is an acknowledgement of what I remember, an acknowledgement of the impact of boarding schools.
