The ideal Indigenous love story does not exist.
I don't believe it ever has.
Before 1942, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
There were my grandparents
I don't know their name nor their love story
Because they didn't have one.
They didn't have a love story that mainstream culture depicts.
Theirs was real and full of challenges faced in a different time.
Their love story was one offered up in prayer.
Their love story was woven from sheep they cared for.
Their love story traveled on the backs of horses they cared for.
Their love story was as natural as the plants they cared for.
Their love story was ideal, but never perfect.
Maybe my grandparents never loved each other in the way we're told to love nowadays.
Maybe they never loved each other.
Maybe they simply "got together."
Maybe they only loved their sheepskin beds and their mother (not sorry).
Maybe they only loved their children and their families.
That is the ideal love story.
I've felt that love.
Their love had foresight.
It was a foresight that has protected me and will protect my future grandchildren.
I have felt the ideal love in my chest when I cried out in loneliness.
That love is real, probably the realest thing I can be sure of.
No, the ideal indigenous love story is not found in lovers.
No, the ideal indigenous love story is not an easy find.
The ideal indigenous love story is whispered in prayer.
It's felt with the dawn and tadidiin.
It's felt in the calming smells of cedar, tobacco, sweetgrass, and sagebrush.
It's found in the faintest of glimpses in your deepest dreams.
The ideal indigenous love story carries the holiest of languages
centuries old,
most complex,
most heart rendering,
soul fulfilling,
spirit uplifting...
thing.
The ideal Indigenous love story is beyond my comprehension.
It is not taught or shown on huge white screens.
It is not something romanticized or rendered to simplicity.
It is not saved in books.
It is not etched in caves, on sandstone, nor on buckskin blankets.
The ideal existed a long time ago.
Like many worthwhile treasures,
it is up to those that are worthy of learning its lesson.
So while the rest of us follow blindly to the siren's call of love,
while we follow a trickster in disguise,
we ignore the love that we desperately need to heal.
That ideal Indigenous love is inside of us to bring out and emit as bright as the sun, the moon, and the stars.