“Memories of the Past, Present, and Future”
Sierra Edwards
Sierra Edwards is a 21-year-old amateur poet, born and raised in central Minnesota. She is Anishinaabe, with relations to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and Red Lake Nation. Sierra is also Black on her paternal side, and white on her maternal side.
Having recently completed her third year at Stanford University, she is seeking her B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity under the Identity Diversity Aesthetics track, with a double minor in Indigenous Studies and Black Studies. At Stanford, Sierra serves as co-chair of the Contesting Committee for the Stanford Powwow, liaison for the Students of Color Coalition, and co-chair of the All My Relations Indigenous Artist series.
In her writing, research, and art practices, Sierra enjoys exploring themes of queerness, gender, Indigeneity, Blackness, history, and family—and of course putting them in conversation with one another. Both on-campus and beyond, Sierra is dedicated to building and uplifting the communities closest to her heart.
Follow Sierra on social media @ikwe.edwards on IG and @ikwe_edwards on Twitter
The four following poems, under the collection Memories of the Past, Present, and Future, have no attempted through-line—except that of the experiences of a young woman attempting to hold tight to her ancestor’s memories, her own memories, and the memories of future generations yet to come.
When
When I was younger I used to cry myself to sleep.
The passage of time has always terrified me, stayed stuck in my head.
Only love has kept the loneliness from consuming me.
It can take me months to finish the last episode of a series.
I want to change.
We weep every time I leave home. And home isn’t just a place.
There is so much they have yet to understand.
But I am still learning when it is my place and when it isn’t.
It wasn’t until my freshmen year I fell for another woman.
And one day I would like to bring a life into this world.
But the earth is dying.
I wonder when it will happen.
Floral sunset somewhere off the Pacific Coast in Southern California, captured by Sierra Edwards
hero or villain
i was in seventh grade when the history teacher told us to write an essay on whether chr*stopher col*mbus was a hero or a villain
a white classmate turned & asked me which i was going to write & when i told him villain
he said
but why?
it’s so much easier to argue he was a hero
Captured by Kenaba Hatathlie @kennijean on IG
Christian Indian, Savage Indian
My grandmother was my very own missionary,
Even converted me for a time—
Middle schooler proclaiming in her pink bible
that she had given herself to Jesus.
My only white grandparent
who tried to baptize us all—
What a legacy to carry on
to a family still reeling from genocide.
Though her attempts were aided by my grandfather’s
indifference to the second round
of his own brainwashing—
I mean christening.
His first being
at the on-reservation boarding school,
where children could be evangelized
without physically ripping them from their families.
And do you remember that one time?
When all I needed was a seat at the coffeeshop on campus?
But came face to face with
the young woman whose husband worked at
St. Mary’s Mission School
on the Red Lake reservation
where the nuns beat my grandfather?
What is it to be a Christian Indian?
To pray to The Holy Spirit not Gitchi Manidoo,
to prefer the taste of communion to the smell of burning sage,
to attend church service before ceremony?
Yes,
I would rather be a savage Indian
than a Christian one.
But I have the choice.
Mural at the Seward Co-op on E 38th St in South Minneapolis,, blocks from where George Floyd was murdered