Contents
357 Words
Contents
Prologue
East
South
West
North
The Four Directions
About the Author
Acknowledgements“I seek the religion of the tree…”
—George Morrison
My girl, every tree tells a story. The Standing People hold the stories of the land. They grow according to what happens around them. Story upon story unfolding, one story growing from other stories.
A tree is a story! Sometimes a story grows off the trunk into a clump like those big bulges you see on trunks sometimes. Those bulges. They’re a part of a story that got trapped there somehow and instead of becoming a branch it just bulged. Who can say how? Who knows? I don’t. Humans don’t know everything. We don’t need to know everything. It’s just how it is, my girl. Clumps. Backwards. Forward. The old days. The days that will come. Stories are not straight lines like how the whites think and write. That is not our way. Stories grow zigzag, branches off branches off branches, shooting in every direction, and more branches off those branches and so on until leaves unfold in the spring, until a story is spoken.
Then, like the leaves, once stories are spoken, they fall to the ground to go back to the earth and the next time the same story is spoken, a new leaf grows, and it is similar, but not exactly the same as the leaf from the year before. My girl, this is how it is—as my grandmother once told me stories, I now tell you stories that you must pass on so that the trees will always have leaves. If the stories stop being told, the trees will have no new leaves; they will die and soon after, so shall we, for we have breath because of the leaves.
The old Ojibwe man paused, focused on the branch he was whittling into a pipe stem. Even in the white world trees tell stories. Crushed flat and bleached. Called leaves! See, my girl. It’s as I told you. Even in their world, trees tell stories. Standing People. Stories. Indians. The land! Howah!
— Clarence Leonard Braun
- Writer
