Protest and Power Theme Analysis

“Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”

“Oxasuli,” she said. “Powerful medicine. Very dangerous. It can kill you, do you understand? You have to respect it.” She handed me the root and I put it in the bucket. There were some more oxasuli bushes around, but she said to let them be. We slogged some more, found two suitable plants, then Ma-ma-oo declared we had enough. “You put these on your windowsill, and it keeps ghosts away.”

“How?”

“Ghosts hate the smell. It protects you from ghosts, spirits, bad medicine. Here, you break off this much and you burn it on your stove—”

“Like incense?”

“What’s incense?”

“Like cedar and sweetgrass bundles.”

“Oh. Yes, yes like that. Smoke your house. Smoke your corners. When someone dies, you have to be careful.”

“Why?”

She paused again, frowning. “Hard to explain.”

Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.

In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter.

Remove yourself from the next sound you hear, the breathing that isn’t your own. It glides beneath the bushes like someone’s shadow, a creature with no bones, arms, or legs, a rolling, shifting, worm-shaped thing that hugs the darkness. It wraps its pale body around yours and feeds. Push yourself away when your vision dims. Ignore the confused, painful contractions in your chest as your heart trip-hammers to life, struggles to pump blood. Ignore the tingling sensations and weakness in your arms and legs, which make you want to lie down and never get up.