November 15, 2011
Native American Heritage Month
We all do it. We eat our animals without knowing. Knowing them or ourselves. It makes it easier, doesn’t it? Easier to let others raise our food in confined feedlots where manure piles up so high the last days of our food lives are lived out on what we flush down the toilet. Would it be different, would our and our food’s lives be richer, if each of us, at least once, looked our food in the eye and shot it? Then, perhaps, we would no longer eat and live lives of sewage, but honor our food, again?
First Deer
I trailed
your guts
a mile through snow
before my second bullet
stopped it all.
Believe me now,
there was a boy
who fed butterflies sugar water
and kept hurt birds
in boxes in his room.
Joseph Bruchac
Chewing the Cud 