Dear Stanford Review,

I have now had the opportunity to read both Stanford’s Who’s Teaching Us demands and your Juvenalian satirization. Menippus and Horatio are turning in their graves, by the way.

Delivered as what I can only assume is an April Fool’s joke, it’s pretty obvious who your target is: “We demand that Stanford builds [sic: get with the subjunctive] a wall around El Centro Chicano and makes [sic: please get with the subjunctive] MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) pay for it. “We demand that Stanford ends [sic: what do I even say at this point?] its use of European lanes, since they are inherently colonialist. We recommend Xhosa, Zulu, and interpretive dance as alternatives for person-to-person communication.” And, everyone’s favorite racist ditty: “We demand that Stanford renames [sic: hahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA] White Plaza to Black Plaza. Naming a central plaza after a race is hateful.” Nice one on implying Black isn’t a race, by the way.

This kick to the head was not without its own augury, I suppose. Your footballs have been echoing around me ever since the Western Civilization fiasco a few months ago. I wanted to speak out then, I wanted to be angry, but it remained a velleity, a bastard child begot by a crushing over-sensitivity and coddled by artistic sensibility. My mourning shroud for my people became metaphor. I fled campus for the desert. I wrote poems. I cried for my people while you laughed. I cried for the friends of my father, growing up in the shadow of residential schools, who are no longer alive. I cried for their children. I cried for myself.

But I’m done. If the Stanford Review wants to spew rhetoric my way, I refuse to engage in their twisted ethics of social exchange. But when they try to hide behind humor... we have a problem.

Because at the end of the day you can step back from your computer, leave the fight, live your life. But for me and mine this is a fight that never ends. The words are written on my skin in blood and sweat (and the case of this crybaby author, lots of tears). They are warmed by the Sun and the Chinook winds, soothed by the rain and the river in the sky, but they are always there.

Did you know the origin of the word tattoo is from the Samoan word tatau? It means "open wound". Unlike that which you suggest, I don’t draw lines in the sand because I am afraid to swim. I simply carry wounds that I won’t let you pour salt into.

I don’t plan on hitting back with demands of my own because I don’t believe in your concept of power, in your concept of change. I am disappointed, appalled - you remind me of so much I thought we had left behind. It isn’t funny. But I cannot tell if you know better, and I cannot tell you to do better.

Maybe we need to have another look at etymology, since I know you believe so strongly in your own particular brand of Western canon. I’ll appeal to that.

Demand. Verb; from the vulgar Latin demandare, meaning to entrust, to ask as a right.

There you have it.

I am entrusting you with your words, my wounds. I am trusting in you to get over yourself. I ask you to consider the cessation of your hateful, racist attacks, knowing that I ask this as a right. Come to the Native American Cultural Center for the Who’s Teaching Us Event. Look at the faces of the people you seek to hurt. Look at the faces of their ancestors behind them, and the faces of the supporters of all colors who stand in front of them.

You can take it or leave it, but when all is said and done, and I am an ancient kwékwa7, old like hills, old like stars, holding the hand of my grandchild, listening to a kind of laughter you have not fully let into your hearts, one that does not spring from hatred. Sung resistance.

When all is said and done, I held my hand out to you first.