
FEATURED ESSAY
Closing my eyes I
retrace my steps that brought me here to
Odaawaa Zaagaa’ iganing minawaa,
here standing in
this soil of government allotted land–
planting rhubarb and lilac
trees tending
these wooded acres of ni mama’s home.
I breathe.
Allowing the chilly northern wind to bathe I
rinse off those weighted sorrows of decades
old trauma–
I don’t breathe.
The wise ones instruct me to pray,
think good thoughts they say–
Release those concrete burdens you carry
to the Holy One.
I haven’t.
I need these sweetgrass prayers to.
I
Since being home
I’ve returned to that god’s eye above the stairwell in six-mile
minawaa and again.
I forced myself to enter that dark basement where
surrender remains
foreign.
I lose myself there still
in that childhood home.
My father… he wasn’t there.
Ever.
So I carry,
still
cellular memories storing fatherless
echoes my heart shattered for,
these, I rebelled against my own body for.
I’ve created a mosaic of scars–
individual burns and historical horrors
buried deep in my mixed-blood lineage.
I reside here, my
anemic body with the stones and birch
bark roots of northern Wisconsin. I
drifted in frigid waters of Gichigami
washing clean years
of penitentiary sorrows, barring my isolated
and pale skin. Realigning I with
elements of Aki.
Sweet, sweet Aki.
This poem was commissioned in conjunction with the exhibition SEEN, on view at Weisman Art Museum February 8 - May 18, 2025.
Louise Waakaa'igan
Louise K. Waakaa’igan is an enrolled member at Odaawaa-Zaaga’iganiing in northern Wisconsin. Her first chapbook, This Is Where, Aquarius Press, was published in 2020. She is also the first-place winner of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop’s Broadside Competition (2016). Louise’s work has been previously published in PEN America, 21 Mythologies, The Moon Magazine, Night Colors, 27th Letter, Words in Gray Scale, and Doors Adjacent. She is ready to publish her second collection and recently has moved back to her beloved Minneapolis.