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Reindeer
Fuck Santa.
You tell me the worst thing that ever happened to me
was finding out I’m indigenous.
But fuck Santa.
The reindeer were the heart of our religious symbolism
up until the time they turned us into witches.
And with Christianity everything’s a witch
if it isn’t part of the military-industrial complexity.
“Rudolph the Red-nose Reindeer is some racist shit,” Nils said
and you tell me that Nils overreacts to everything,
but there’s less than 100,000 of us in the world
and you say that no one cares about the indigenous
and I can’t understand why I’m dating you
and then we have sex
and I suddenly understand why,
but, seriously, when we walk into that Target,
you know the one, where you walk in and instantly
you feel like you’re in Big Brother central
with cameras pointing in your face
and the metastasis of security
and the goddamn name of the place is ‘Target,’
if that isn’t the creepiest thing in the world
and then all the Xmas decorations
are all of these symbols and icons
of other religions
that everyone pretends are Christian,
but it’s pure paganism
and Judaism
and shamanism
and all these other –isms
that Christians don’t know shit about
and I’m supposed to look at this plastic reindeer
and think how cute it is
when all I can think of is the genocide of my people.
We drive home in silence.
I keep going through words in my head,
words like
Pygmy
and Kwa
and Bantu
and Munda
and Digaro
and Vedda
and Lak
and Zan
and Silesians
and Ni-Vanuatu
and Karelian
and Saami
and I keep thinking
What did it take to make a people unknown?
And I keep thinking
The second I get home I’m going to write about who I am.
And we get home
and I type the word “Reindeer” at the top of the page.
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