The Last of Us to Look Back

Sacred Ponca corn planted in the path of the historic “Trail of Tears”. (Photo: Mark Hefflinger)

After being threatened, terrorized, and
starved out, our Ponca tribe was death-marched
down to Oklahoma.
My ancestors had to leave everything;
a thousand years of our life torched;
lanced a thousand times so that America
could keep growing.
Twice in my twenties I tried to read
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
but couldn’t finish it because the descriptions
of what happened to our Native people were
so graphic and overwhelming that I kept
getting woozy, grief-sick, and needing
to throw up.
(There’s a chapter on us Poncas and my grandpa
Chief Standing Bear in that book too.)
Recently and older now, I read about
that period when we were broken down into
submission, about the things we had
to leave behind, and a part of one sentence
referenced our fields of healthy standing
corn that we had to abandon.
You pull hard enough and you can break
a connection a lot of times.
How many hundreds of miles were we marched
down our Trail of Tears before some of
those connections to our corn snapped?
Or can such things ever truly be broken,
can they ever really be snapped?
We Poncas didn’t plant our corn again
for 137 years after that summer
that we were viciously and violently
ripped from our homelands.
137 years without a food, a being,
a central multi-faceted annual relationship
that we’d woven ourselves around for
a thousand years.
Who was the last of us to look back and
have our last visual moment with our corn
before the crop and growing all went silent
for that time, and what did they feel?
I walk out to my backyard in Astoria
and look at my seven stalks of Ponca corn
in 2021 and pray for my people,
pray for everything we once had
to keep coming back.