"You ask me to plow the ground.  Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom?  You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men.  But dare I cut off my mother's hair? "
​                                                                                       - Unknown Native American, circa 1880s

​"In my book, a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung barb-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. ​If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it, and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all."
                                                            - Charlie Russell, speaking to the Great Falls Booster Club in Montana, 1923.

---

Nobody Owns The Land

This timeless land
of half-lives, forever
splitting through infinity
is emptiness playing at structure
relationship playing at form
each bond a bond
in passing
as real and absolute
as nothing, or anything,
at all.
 
And us, prepubescent bipedals,
caught in our feverish dream
of buying and selling
Earth and land,
trading Infinity,
with inky claims
on sheets of pulp
as real and absolute
as nothing, or anything,
at all.
 
I’ve caught the blackness
in between the stars
looking down and laughing
when I’ve stepped out
into its night
to take a leak--
and I’ve seen a pebble,
millions of years old,
smirking as it decomposed
in each second, knowing
itself to be as impermanent
as me and everything
else before my eyes
and under my feet.

---

"Nobody Owns The Land" Decal on Etsy.

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