Now seal the book.
No--the book was never sealed.
The book was always open. The book was written
In the corn and in the council fire, revealed
In every language the Creator had smitten
Into being on this continent of tongues--
Three hundred families of speech, a thousand
Languages that named the world, the lungs
Of a hemisphere breathing the thousand
Names of God that no one needed to translate
Because the rivers spoke them and the mountains
Held them in their granite and the weight
Of ten thousand years of prayer at the fountains
Of the sacred springs--this was the book.
This was always the book.
But a man in Palmyra,
New York, declared that if you look
Into a hat--a common hat--the fire of
God would show you golden plates
Buried in a hillside by an ancient prophet,
Written in "Reformed Egyptian," the fates
Of a lost tribe of Israel--and the profit
Of the revelation was a scripture
That explained, at last, who the Indians were:
They were Lamanites--a picture
Of the cursed, the dark-skinned, those whom God would stir
To savagery because their fathers sinned.
Nephi sailed from Jerusalem. The story
Of a Hebrew family on the wind
Of the Atlantic--the obligatory
Fantasy of every European who could not
Accept that this continent's peoples were their own
Creation, their own genius, their own plot
Of sacred history, their own flesh and bone
Descended from no Middle Eastern shore
But from the ice-bridge walkers, from the coast
Of Beringia, from the ancient core
Of a migration older than the boast
Of any Israelite genealogy.
Joseph Smith published his book in March
Of eighteen-thirty. The theology
Of a farm boy's golden plates, the starch
And bluster of an angel named Moroni
Who had buried the record in a hill
In New York--and the testimony
Of eleven witnesses who would fill
Their names upon the page, declaring they
Had seen the plates, had hefted them, had heard
The voice of God--and in this way
The continent's own history was blurred
And overwritten by a Hebrew ghost.
In that same year--eighteen-thirty--the American
Congress passed the act that mattered most:
The Indian Removal Act. The plan
Of Andrew Jackson--Sharp Knife, the Cherokee called him,
The man who had already devoured
The Creek homeland, the general grim
Who had conquered Florida and towered
Above the ruin of every treaty signed--
Now held the presidency, and the weight
Of the Republic's westward hunger, refined
To a single policy, a single fate:
Remove them all.
Every nation east
Of the Mississippi--every Cherokee farm
With its constitution and its printing-press feast
Of civilized achievement, every arm
Of Choctaw governance, every Chickasaw
Town with its elected council, every Creek
Who had rebuilt from Jackson's earlier war--
Move west. The east is for the meek
And pale inheritors of a Promised Land
That God--the European God--had set aside
For the American republic's hand
To cultivate. The darker peoples ride
The trail of exile to the territory
Beyond the Mississippi's western shore,
Where the republic, in its transitory
Generosity, will promise them once more
A homeland "as long as grass shall grow
And water run"--the same words spoken
At every treaty, the eternal vow
That was eternally and instantly broken.
John Ross--principal chief of the Cherokee,
One-eighth Cherokee by blood and all Cherokee
By every measure that a nation's day
Of governance could offer--fought the way
The Cherokee had always fought since Sequoyah:
With law, with language, with the written word.
He brought the case to the Supreme Court's playa
Of jurisprudence, and the nation heard
The argument: the Cherokee were sovereign.
No state could impose its laws upon the land
Of a nation that the federal covenant
Had recognized by treaty. The command
Of Georgia's legislature to dissolve
The Cherokee government and seize the soil
Was void--the Constitution would resolve
The question in the Cherokee's favor, the foil
Of states' rights against the treaty's sacred bond.
And John Marshall ruled. The Chief Justice found
That Georgia's laws were void--the wand
Of the Constitution's supremacy, the ground
Of Worcester versus Georgia: the Cherokee
Were a sovereign nation, and the American state
Had no authority to decree
Their dissolution--the mandate of the great
And highest court was clear.
Jackson laughed.
"John Marshall has made his decision.
Now let him enforce it." The statecraft
Of the republic's highest vision
Reduced to a bully's sneer, the law
Of the land discarded by the land's elected king--
For what was a Constitution's awe
Against the settler's hunger and the ring
Of gold discovered in the Cherokee hills?
The Court had spoken. The President refused.
And in that refusal, the republic kills
The principle that its founders had enthused
Upon every parchment page: that law,
Not power, would govern--that the covenant
Of written words would hold the tyrant's claw
In check. But the covenant was meant
Only for the European's liberty--
The Cherokee learned what the Haudenosaunee knew,
What Little Turtle knew, what the entirety
Of the continent had learned was true:
The colonizer's law protects the colonizer.
The Choctaw went first--the winter of eighteen-thirty-one,
Forced west through ice and snow, the miser-
Able caravans of the dispossessed, the sun
Hidden behind the clouds for weeks, the dead
Left unburied on the frozen road.
A Choctaw chief looked back at what he'd fled
And spoke the words that history bestowed
Upon the exodus: "A trail of tears and death."
The Creek followed. The Chickasaw were sold
Into the march. And last, with labored breath,
The Cherokee--in eighteen-thirty-eight, the cold
And calculated roundup: soldiers came
To every farm and every cabin door
And herded families at bayonet's aim
Into the stockades, where the filthy floor
Of the concentration camps awaited them.
They were allowed to carry nothing. The homes
They had built, the orchards, the literary gem
Of the Cherokee Phoenix, the chromosomes
Of a civilization encoded in their schools
And courts and churches--left behind for the white
Settlers who rushed in like a pack of ghouls
Before the last Cherokee was out of sight.
Sixteen thousand walked the trail. Four thousand died.
The children died first--the old died next--
The mothers carried the dead until the tide
Of grief became the only text
They could recite.
And here the bitter symmetry:
In the very year the Indian Removal Act was signed,
Joseph Smith's new scripture, the epitome
Of the colonizer's imagination, outlined
A history of America in which the Indians
Were fallen Israelites awaiting redemption
By the European Christ--the Lamanite meridians
Of a theology that granted the exemption
Of genocide: for if the Indians were merely
The degenerate remnant of a Hebrew line,
Then their destruction mattered less severely--
They were not a civilization but a sign
Of God's displeasure, a curse made flesh and brown,
A people who had fallen from the grace
Of the Nephite covenant--and the renown
Of their actual history could be replaced
By the fiction of a golden plate.
The plates
Were "unsealed." The record was "revealed."
And in the revelation's gilded gates
The real record was concealed--
The actual history of ten thousand years
Of civilization, governance, and art,
Of astronomy and agriculture, the tears
And triumphs of a continent's own heart--
Overwritten by the fantasy of Nephi,
Replaced by the hallucination of a farm boy
Who could not read Egyptian, could not see the
Living peoples as anything but a ploy
Of biblical theology, a footnote
In the Israelite drama, a supporting cast
Of cursed and darkened skin--the scapegoat
Of a European God whose unsurpassed
And merciless imagination could not grant
The Americans--the real Americans, the first--
Their own story, their own sacred chant,
Their own covenant with the earth that nursed
Them into being.
The Book of Mormon said:
The Lamanites would one day be redeemed,
Would become "white and delightsome," the thread
Of their curse reversed--and the Mormons deemed
Themselves the agents of this bleaching grace.
They sent their missionaries to the Trail
Of Tears itself--to the dispossessed, the race
Of the removed--and offered them the pale
And specious comfort of a revelation
That explained their suffering as deserved:
You are cursed because your ancient nation
Rejected Christ--the punishment preserved
Across the centuries in your darkened skin.
This is the obscenity that must be named.
That in the very hour the Cherokee begin
The march of death, the colonizer proclaimed
A book that justified the march--a scripture
That laundered genocide in holy writ
And dressed the theft of a continent in the stricture
Of divine command, the bottomless pit
Of a theology that blesses the thief
And curses the robbed.
But this book you hold--
This Gaiad, this record of the leaf
And the branch and the root and the manifold
And magnificent history of the peoples
Of this hemisphere--this is the unsealed book.
Not the golden plates beneath the steeples
Of a Palmyra church, not the mistook
And fraudulent "Reformed Egyptian" text,
But the actual record: the migration
From Beringia, the first and the next
And the ten-thousandth generation
That walked this land and named its every river,
Built its mounds and cities, tracked its stars,
Grew its corn and spoke its prayers--the giver
Of civilization's oldest memoirs.
The Gaiad is the book that was always open.
The Gaiad is the record that was never lost.
The Gaiad holds the names the colonizer had broken
And the stories that the colonizer glossed
With Hebrew fantasies and Christian guilt.
Here ends the Book of Lehi--not the Lehi
Of Smith's invention, not the stilt
And scaffolding of a false prophecy,
But the true Lehi: the record of the peoples
Who needed no golden plates to write their story,
Whose history was carved in the mounds, not steeples,
Whose scripture was the land itself, the glory
Of a hemisphere that was never empty,
Never waiting, never a blank page
For the European pen--but a plenty
And a fullness and a holy stage
Where ten thousand years of human prayer
Had consecrated every stone and spring.
The Trail of Tears is the colonizer's snare.
The Book of Mormon is the colonizer's ring
Of false authority upon the hand
That signed the Indian Removal Act.
But the peoples endure. The peoples stand.
The real record is intact.
This is that record. Remember every name.
Remember Tecumseh and Tupac Amaru,
Remember Sequoyah and the flame
Of every council fire from Cusco to Manitou.
Remember the Guarani violins.
Remember the Haudenosaunee Law.
Remember Little Turtle's discipline.
Remember Osceola and the raw
And unconquered Seminole in the swamp.
Remember the children in the Mississippi's current.
Remember the Choctaw chief who called it the stomp
And trail of tears, whose words are the deterrent
Against forgetting. Remember the Cherokee Phoenix.
Remember John Ross and the Court that ruled
For justice--and the President whose cynics
And whose cruelty overruled.
The book is sealed--no. The book is never sealed.
The book is open, and you hold it now.
The real record of this hemisphere, revealed
Not by an angel but by the sacred vow
Of memory itself: that what was done
Shall be remembered, and the dead shall speak
Through every line, and the extinguished sun
Of every nation rises in the mystique
Of the word that refuses to be lost.
Honor them all. Honor the cost.
The Book of Lehi ends. The record stands.
The continent remembers. Hold it in your hands.