Yethi’nihstenha tsi Yonhwentsyake

(yeh tee nih STUN huh jee yoon HUN ja geh)

I get it, ma. Keeping your kids alive takes it out of you. When we speak of you in Kanyen’kéha (the “Mohawk” language), we call you yethi’nihstenha, from the verb root -‘nihsten-, “mother,” that shares a deep stem with -hsa’tsten-, the word for force, power, and strength, but also hardness and brutality. Yonhwentsya comes from -onhwentsy-, a word that means Earth, soil, land, and place. It shares its root with the word for what you need, want, and desire in the deeps of mind or body. The flat, dishwater English translation, “our mother, the Earth,” pushes you downstage where they like you—scenery painted on canvas, a CGI world made of ones and zeros. But when you’re called in Kanyen’kéha, we wake all your moods; the kahsa’tstenhsera—the strength—that holds us all up is the strength that can knock us all down if we don’t step gently around your hot heart.
Our people tell stories about how you came to be. Since the Great Lakes were fresh scars left by glaciers, since before we started calling ourselves Rotinonhsyón:ni, the people building the house, we’ve remembered you as the girl who lived in a world beyond this one. There was no death and no grief in that place, no seasons or days, only shy light from the million open blossoms of a great tree standing in the middle. Then, one day, the flowers faded, fell. The old man who kept the tree tried every other medicine before sending for you, a girl from the twilight edges, and married you. Some say he was a real bastard, that he pulled the sick tree up by the roots and threw you down the hole it made, just to keep his miser’s immortality. Other versions make him kind, as full of love for you as the father you didn’t have, heartbroken as he lowered you slowly down into that endless dark, letting go in agony, arm to wrist to fingertips whispering, I’m sorry, aktsikè:ta, it has to be this way.
But a fall’s a fall, eh, ma? We both know how bad it gets when you have time to think on the way down. It wasn’t how poor sudden homelessness made you (though it did, and you were pregnant); it wasn’t how scared you were (though you screamed your mind out so many times you lost your own name, never used again after that point in the story). It was understanding, after failure on failure, to find any life that you didn’t grow yourself in that cold place, that making the choice to live didn’t take all your courage just once. You would have to make that choice over and over again, with every breath, for as long as you lived, until you couldn’t find the defiance to live any more.
Your human children came last and, like they always say about the youngest in old stories, weakest. Maybe that’s why so few now remember the hardmindedness it takes to choose life, again and again. Some, you lay your stony fingers on and say, here’s tragedy, here’s the weight of its care and clean-up, so you’ll know your mother. The night I lay myself down on you, closed my eyes into the sweet rise of pill haze and said, “I want to rest and never have to get up again” was the night I began to understand your weariness. At the end of the story, you try to kill yourself, shut this place down, go back up to your twilight house in the world above to find some peace. All the beings you made here pulled you back. Ma, ma, we need you. Fuck your hurts.
It’s children’s cruelty that laughs, “Get up, get up!” when you’ve lain down to die of burnout, ma. Cruelty’s full-grown that digs out your flesh with machine fingers, taps your veins with deepwater drills, and bares you of your forests, that makes you too sick to fight even as it says more, faster, forever, you bitch. Ma, you made me learn rest, taught me to shut my eyes to everyone’s hungers and bury myself into re-germination. You made me see the hard hooks of bone in a back bent with exhaustion. Your defiance is my defiance, and mine yours, and they both need feeding with darkness and quiet. You show me how fast the knife we hold to carve and create, defend and defeat, can change hands to cut new rivers from wrists. You never let me forget how not to mishandle a mother.