Prologue & Tony Loneman

pages: 3-26

summon

To order someone to appear in a court of law; to call for someone to come closer or to do something. the Plymouth Court (4). His brother Wamsutta was, let’s say, very likely poisoned after being summoned and seized by

chasm

A deep split or opening in the surface of the earth. The rocks appeared when she spoke of them but didn’t stop the head, so she drew a hard line in the ground, which made a deep chasm the head couldn’t cross. But after a long heavy rain, the chasm filled with water (6).

slander

To make false statements about a person or group, causing them to acquire a bad reputation; to malign or defame. We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people (7).

massacre

The act of killing a large number of helpless and non-violent people; a cruel and merciless slaughter. Some of us grew up with stories about massacres. Stories about what happened to our people not so long ago (8).

assimilation

The process of adopting the beliefs and customs of a different culture; the process through which the members of a cultural group come to adopt the beliefs, customs, and lifestyle of the mainstream or dominant cultural group. Getting to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign (8).

powwow

A large social gathering held by Native Americans that often includes people from multiple tribes and typically features drumming and dancing. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brough out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork (9).

reservation

A tract of land that has been set aside for Native Americans to live on but that is technically owned by the U.S. federal government. The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced (9).

inauthentic

Fake or artificial; not real or authentic. Plenty of us are urban now. […] They used to call us sidewalk Indians. Called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples (10).

mandate

To require someone to do something; to force someone to do something through an official order. My friend Karen told me they got all kinds of intelligences. She’s my counselor I still see once a week over at the Indian Center — I was at first mandated to go after the incident with Mario in kindergarten (17).

medicine person

A person from a Native-American tribe thought to possess the power to heal illnesses or keep away evil spirits. Maxine told me I’m a medicine person. She said people like me are rare, and that when we come along, people better know we look different because we are different (17).