Stories and Memory

Giant Hyssop and Meadow Blazing Star, your cree names I am unsure.

You are a refuge for the birds, butterflies, and bees. I plant you in my garden and wonder if the land remembers your tender roots as their old relative. If the soils ancestral memory greets you and welcomes you home. I need to pay attention to who visits you- who drinks your nectar and eats your seeds- who greets you as a relative from before. When there was food and medicine for human and more than human. I need to imagine who else would visit you in a prairie meadow.

The butterflies gather and share the news of a friend with seeds so sweet they have not tasted in years. When laying down to sleep their câpâns tell them stories of the first butterflies, of how the meadow blazing star came to this land as a relative and sustenance, of how beautiful and sweet golden aster and hyssop are when paired together. The butterflies tell stories of their cousins who are no longer here to enjoy blazing star and hyssop, they tell stories of how beautiful and full of kinship the meadows were, they tell their stories to remember to remember and to look forward. They tell stories of food sovereignty and responsibility- of how to care for each other so they come back year after year. They tell stories of the humans too. Stories of destruction and lost ways, of the original instructions and broken trust. Of famine and genocide for all. Butterfly promises to ask their Kokum the Cree names for Blazing Star and Hyssop in the morning. They promise to ask their Nokomis if they are named in Anishinaabemowin too. Before they drift off to sleep aanikoobijigan tells them that tomorrow they will sing and dance for the return of their old relative, that they will teach them their songs. They remember, and the land does too. So the birds and the insects share their stories and sing their songs once more.