Colors of the....

Black overcomes me, before the red washes over me. My aunt is dead. She is another number, a statistic. Black and white is what she is reduced to. But she’s my aunt. She’s my mothers cousin.

Now she’s gone, left to the nothingness, the black, buried in the brown dirt, that will grow green weeds in the coming years.

I was gone when it happened, left in a white pain of a migraine. Memories flood. A green knife. A copper penny. A dark night on a road covered in sage and rock gray.

But all that shows is red. The red of blood she must have spilled. The red I wore before her death in honor if missing and murdered indigenous women and men. The red of our skin, burned in the sun on a summer day, covered in dust as we work. The red of eyes at her funeral I couldn’t drag myself to.

The red sounds pretty. It sounds poetic. It’s as ugly as the wars we glamorize, that Natives travel to at crazy high rates to escape the red of our lands, drenched in spilled blood.

The red is the label our skin is given. We are the descendants if the red men of old. We are now a rainbow of colors, with blue and green eyes, some even huckleberry black, black to blond hair, and skin every pigment in the sun. And yet, we are red men unless we are other colors. Then our red is bled out, and we are clear, and belong nowhere.

We are red who listened to empty and clear words with no weight, no color, no identity. We are red who seek to lose the color without becoming clear. We seek the green grasslands, the pink sunsets of the desert, the white of snow in the north, the blue or green waters our ancestors knew, the purple and gold flowers of nature.

We seek the colors of the land, of ourselves, while trying to have blind eyes that don’t see the pigments of skin, the classes of division, and the destruction of community. We want to see the color of love. May we be blinded by that love, stunned and astounded by it.

May we experience culture and color and differences and love in as many forms as possible. May a yellow and black bee tell us they like purple and gold. May green turtle show us its nest of brown and home of green and blue. And maybe someday we seek past the colors we can’t see that sea creatures can. Maybe we see all and say all are needed for the beautiful art we call life.