At mission school so far away from home
at night I heard the song through dreams of trees,
birches and jack pines in rocky woods
that I walked in my white nightgown, peering
through night fog for my mother, who perhaps
might walk in her own dreams, looking for me.
Days inside the classroom, prim and chaste
we kept our dark wool dresses smooth and clean,
covered by starched white aprons bleached
immaculate by our absence of sin
and practiced English by living it,
our lives limited as our proficiency
in that language, and our peculiar use of it.
Evenings, Sister Joseph read aloud,
her pale and unlined faced benign behind
spectacles that mirrored twin gaslights
while Sister Agnes taught us fancy work,
and so we improved our English by listening,
and our skills as ladies by embroidering
handkerchiefs and petticoat hems.
Nights, across the plain we heard them sing,
the foreign Indians, throughout that icy fall.
As winter started, still the people sang
in a language that we didn’t understand.
Sister Joseph said to pray for their poor souls,
those Sioux hadn’t been blessed with mission school
yet, and didn’t speak English.
You’ll never be White if you don’t try, she said;
I will confess I half-believed I could.
We mission girls had left our pagan ways
behind when we learned how to read and write
and about Jesus, and the sin of our old ways.
We tried to be like his Blessed Mother,
or as close as Christian Chippewa girls could get.
No wicked willfulness here. We had learned
to do as we were told,
which on that winter night we did, although
we didn’t understand why, awakened
from righteous virgin sleeps to stand shivering
beside our narrow white iron beds
by Sister Agnes, who told us to hurry.
Wrapped in blankets pulled from off the beds
and naked under our white nightgowns
a sight to scandalize the Blessed Mother
we did as we were told,
no wicked willfulness here,
and followed Sister outside into the night
stepping across dead grass, dry and brittle
that cracked under our bare cold feet
to lie in a frozen ditch. Beneath our warmth
sparkling frost patterns on dark earth
melted, turning ice crystals to mud
that smeared shocking stains on our nightgowns
as we did as we were told.
No wicked willfulness here.
From the ravine we heard gunshots, then a keening
that rose so quickly, a sliver of smoke into the sky
and Sister said to lie still, girls, head down
and she whispered to the Blessed Mother
“Please, ask your Son to spare these baptized girls”
who did as they were told.
And what did I think, while
pressed indecently to that frozen muddy ground
as the nightgown of the girl next to me
blew skyward in the icy wind
doing its own ghost dance; did I ask why?
Did I ask for the Blessed Mother’s help
and for Jesus to spare the baptized Indians?
Well, I prayed for my mother and my brother Louis.
I prayed to see them again.
I prayed for the other girls and for the Sisters,
for myself, I confess; forgive me
and for those foreign Indians the Sioux, God help them
for mercy for us all
and then
I prayed in my own language,
my lips open and moving to release no sound
unbound silent words a visible cloud
above ice crystals melting on frozen earth
turning to mud against my body, those words
shades of blue and gray without sound those words
uncoiling winding silent cold
and as determined as the wind.