A Creative response to Jerry’s Wild Ride, by Vicki Robin - Author, Your Money or Your Life

Nobody knows who put the totem pole right in the middle of the village – or when. Even old Bomama, who died last year, said it was there when he was a boy. His parents told him it came from a people before ours. Everyone says,“Don’t think about it.” We are told to not think about what no one can know, but my best friend Tenekla and I, late at night when everyone sleeps, come out to look and look and whisper. We think it is a story ... or a prophecy. We don’t know if it is about the people before us, some kind of final warning before they all died, or whether our people, long ago, had a vision of what was to come. We think there was a time, in the past or in time-to-come, when all humans together were like that acrobat, big and silly and blind. See the closed eyes?

Our people and the people before us call the land we walk on Turtle Island. We no longer know why. We have only seen the drawings of turtles high on the walls of caves. They seem strong, steady and slow, like the seasons of our land that we count on for everything. So the acrobat does a handstand on the turtle, and we say, “Humans got too big for the turtle, too heavy.” We say, “The acrobat is upside down because the people lost their way. They thought, ‘Up. Down. It doesn’t matter because we are strong, and we can do up or down, and we don’t care.’” You can still see red stripes on the statue, and we say, “This is the blood of the people as they die.” The turtle doesn’t have a face. It has a skull. This means our land died – or will die.

Tenekla and I argue about whether it is a story of the past or the future. Does it tell us why we are such a small group in our village with other villages many days walking, villages where there are different names for the sun and the stars. Does it tell us about a time when the acrobat’s arms collapsed and all the people fell onto turtle and died because they were blind and upside down? Or does it tell us that this is coming in the future? Tenekla says it is the future, that if our people become many and we forget that we depend on the strong, steady, slow nature of life on the land, we will crash. Tenekla says it is a warning. A vision. A prophecy. If that is true, we say, then we must warn our people. We must be sure we stand on our legs, like honorable people, and not do silly tricks and forget and stand upside down. What do you think, stranger? Should we warn our people?