Yosemite Signals
Sitting atop Cathedral Spires, I overlook Yosemite. From Half Dome to Tuolumne lay a fall of fire colors worth a reckoning. Underneath my feet there lay mysteries of the most sacred kind. In the forest thick I spot smoke signals. Awhanechee stories whispering about the Miwok. Paiute. Lakota. Crow. Powhatan. Algonkin. Laguna. Blackfeet. Dawson. Pueblo. Apache. Ottawa. Grizzlies of white men glow gruesome. I watch illiterate to this black char way of speaking in gray. I look east. West. North. South. To the sea. But no clouds form an answer to the Awhanechee call. Above Spire I watch the Black Hills. I see Custers cruelty. Crazy Horses revenge. Sitting Bulls last stand. At the center of the universe’s feet, a thousand buffalo lay dead and rotting upon train tracks. A trail of tears reveals blood stained coyote hides. The trickster was no match for such ghosts. Once men came into this valley. They asked the Awhanechee for their name. They answered Yosemite. And so the marble men of lesser clay marched through, breaking oaths with loathsome greedy mouths. Defiling and desecrating those thing which they could not comprehend as holy. They called the natives Yosemite and hunted them like a lesser breed. Now the Awhanechee's clouds have too gone out. But here in Yosemite, we each mouthe the Awhanechee name for their Western executioners. It was not an introduction, it was prophesee. Yosemite, the Awhanechee called them, "those who kill".
