Pat takes us out to visit her childhood home, long destroyed and scattered in the ever shifting sands. She’s a park ranger now and leads tours into the dunes where remnants of people's lives endlessly become exposed and buried in the shifting landscape. She tries to find her childhood home but she never quite can, because it’s different every time.
As she walks, memories erupt. Memories that peak out of the dunes like the rusty can of nails we find together. Or the plates that she found when she went back for the first time with her sisters after many years away. She wonders if they were her aunt's plates, and she knows she’ll never know. She keeps coming back, keeps searching, keeps emerging memories, keeps battling the anger that wells up in her when she remembers the rage of her father when the National Park Service demolished their home. She navigates her ambivalence in becoming a park ranger which used to symbolize an enemy. An enemy which attempted to turn back time and restore the land to pre-settlement times, to times before humans had irrevocably mixed their labour into the land.
Vine Deloria, Jr. begins his essay Perceptions and Maturity by recounting an 1820 interaction: “George Sibley, the Indian agent for the Osages, a tribe in the Missouri region of the country, tried to convince Big Soldier, one of the more influential chiefs, of the benefits of the white man's way. After enthusiastically describing the wonders of the white man's civilization, Sibley waited expectantly for the old man's response. Big Soldier did not disappoint him:
As she walks, memories erupt. Memories that peak out of the dunes like the rusty can of nails we find together. Or the plates that she found when she went back for the first time with her sisters after many years away. She wonders if they were her aunt's plates, and she knows she’ll never know. She keeps coming back, keeps searching, keeps emerging memories, keeps battling the anger that wells up in her when she remembers the rage of her father when the National Park Service demolished their home. She navigates her ambivalence in becoming a park ranger which used to symbolize an enemy. An enemy which attempted to turn back time and restore the land to pre-settlement times, to times before humans had irrevocably mixed their labour into the land.
Vine Deloria, Jr. begins his essay Perceptions and Maturity by recounting an 1820 interaction: “George Sibley, the Indian agent for the Osages, a tribe in the Missouri region of the country, tried to convince Big Soldier, one of the more influential chiefs, of the benefits of the white man's way. After enthusiastically describing the wonders of the white man's civilization, Sibley waited expectantly for the old man's response. Big Soldier did not disappoint him:
I see and admire your manner of living, your good warm houses; your extensive fields of com, your gardens, your cows, oxen, workhouses, wagons, and a thousand machines, that I know not the use of. I see that you're able to clothe yourselves, even from weeds and grass. In short you can do almost what you choose. You Whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing aboutyou is in chainsand you are slaves yourselves. I fear if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”9