TEARS
KAY WALKINGSTICK, 1990
It's small. About the size of a shoebox. A wooden scaffold, a leather bundle on top, words inscribed on the base. Kay WalkingStick made it in 1990. She called it Tears. Walk closer. Read the words. We were twenty million. Now we are two million. The year matters. 1990. America is about to throw itself a five-hundred-year party. The Columbus quincentennial. A whole national celebration of the moment a European guy arrived and started a chain reaction that killed ninety percent of the people who already lived here. WalkingStick is Cherokee. While the country builds parade floats, she builds this. The form is a funerary scaffold. Plains tradition. You lay the body on a raised platform, burn it. The body returns to the earth and rises into the sky at the same time. Two motions at once. Going down. Going up. Memorial sculpture usually picks one. She picks both. Look at the bundle. It's a body. Not symbolic. Not approximate. Wrapped in deer hide and cow hide and one piece of leather from a shirt she made for her first husband, who died young. So this isn't just about twenty million. It's also about one. National grief and personal grief, same shoebox, same little fire. You read this close. Quiet. Bent over a little. Which is, probably, the only way to read it at all.