Poet Justine Chan on white settler narratives and the loss of cultural history

[Envelope for the salmon]

I.

Why does it swim in circles so
just below / the surface like a gold masked fighter, body
strange red & ragged, having lost a match an eye
maybe. Did it know it would shape shift like this? Did it
know the end would smell like this? The cold water—does it
taste like home? Will it still / be here circling tomorrow? Here,
by the bridge, the exhaust pipe rippling the surface,
the fire fighting foam dredges & the already dead below. I’ll still
check tomorrow. I can’t stand
the bitterness, the onceness, of November.

II.

The day the members of the Nisqually Tribe visited
the ranger training & held a salmon bake, I arrived
after almost everything. There was no salt on the fish.
The white rangers had taken most of the meat but left
the skin in the wet aluminum foil. They talked so much
during the discussion portion of my presentation that
I only had time for half of it. No one asked / the skin
what it wanted, what it wished for. The half they
missed was on how the white settlers retold the
stories to say to mean that the landscape & mountains
were empty for the taking. The skin did not fit
the dream. It just wished to be given. To lie in the forest
tucked in moss by scattered pine cones & owl pellets.
To be lifted & torn apart in the air by ravens, the bits
in the roots of the trees. I couldn’t can’t hold everything.