“maskihkîwiwat” is the Third Place Winner of Room’s 2023 Short Forms Contest, as judged by Tsering Yangzom Lama. You can find the full list of winners, and what Tsering had to say about each winning piece, here.
maskihkîwiwat
My cousins made me promise that I’d spend more time at the water. That I’d make time to remember the land and to let it heal me. They packed me up with medicines on my last visit, giving me a filled Ziploc bag and some red cloth. An urban maskihkîwiwat to carry around as a reminder that I’m more than what the city lets me be. The best I’d been able to do since I came back home was to find a spot in one of the campus buildings near the river. To sit inside it, looking out, listening as the hum of the central air system blocked out the river’s song. Leaning my head back against the wall behind me, I read graffiti tags on the bridge legs that protruded from the riverbed. MARO. MONEY. DAWG.
They reminded me of the spray paint covered railcars that passed by me the last time I was in Duffield. My cousin and I waited to cross the train tracks down from my Auntie’s trailer so we could head done to walkabout our family’s old homestead. We followed the direction of the train into the city after, visiting my brother Gene. We got to talking about family, like we always do. The streets. Rehab. The people we’d lost to their demons. We mulled over suicide and grotesque deaths with calculated detachment. We’d learned to talk about tragedy with the factual air we used to trade baseball stats.
That time, though, Gene said something I’d never heard him say before: “I’m ashamed.” He muttered, “You know, I don’t want anyone knowing anything about me.” The blue eyes he’d inherited from our grandpa darkened like a storm brewing across the prairie sky. “I don’t want to sound like we’re from a bunch of God damn fuckin’ stereotypical–” He cut himself off. But we knew what he was going to say. The word he left burning itself into the tip of his tongue burned itself into ours, too – “Indian.”
I tried lightening things up and made a joke about everyone on the prairies being screwed up. Gene chuckled, “Yea, hey?”
Switching gears, I tried to push back the clouds, explaining to Gene and my cousin all the stuff I’d learned since I had been away at school. Words like “intergenerational impacts.” I told him matter-of-factly, “It makes sense. It helped me make sense of this…why we feel bad things happen, why we feel cursed, why there is so much bad that we can’t see any good.” I wanted him to feel the tiny streams of light I’d been able to let in. Instead he nodded, his wispy, brown bangs falling into his eyes. As he brushed his hair back with a pudgy hand, he asked, “Yea, but does it make it feel any better to say it ‘makes sense’?”
With a deep breath, I retrieved the plastic maskihkîwiwat and buried my face in the dried, fragrant leaves, trying to smell the memories away.
