Hear Rowan’s Story.

Each contributing Colour Theory artist created an original essay or story to accompany their visual artwork. You can listen to the audio or scroll down to read. 

How to Survive Genocide in Three Generations

Bezhig.

Run. Run your feet raw, red Heartrate so hard heavy the next seven generations will still feel their chests heaving. If you think these roughshod roads are bad walking wait until they find you again. Did you hear me? I said wait and they will find you again I said fucking run!

No time to put your feet up best not slow down Honey there is no such thing as “Home”.

Where is your Mother, child? Where is the child you were supposed to be? You perpetual motion machine, you refrigerator prank call turned rotten lamb leg – don’t let them touch you! You’ll make them sick and if you kick something don’t look back, you wouldn’t know how to help it anyway.

Where is your child? Don’t you know you’re a Mother now? Don’t you know what a Mother is? Don’t you know what the matter is you stub-toed boxer don’t you know your feet are weapons, woman? You, but a barefoot barbarian, running even in your sleep. Broken bones a better plight than bruises on your sorry knees. Don’t you know you’ll only bleed dirt, bitch? You’re not like those other pink-skinned, skinned-knee kids. Don’t you know that you’re unworthy?

Don’t you go telling secrets on that sick fucking pastor.

Just Run.

I said Run.

I said Run.

///

Nizh.

All this ocean toss and turning, throws you trough to crest. All this instability and never time to rest. When you learned there was no God, is that when you built your spine into a steeple, prayed for strength, hung yourself up on the cross?

When you learned about mishiikenh with the world on the back of his shell, is that when you pulled the hardcovers over your head like a Home? Fused them to yourself and hid? Learned how to protect everything soft inside you?

Sure, you’d heard of Apathetic Atlas but what’s a map when it’s not you, but the only home you might have had that’s lost?

They’re only stories anyway.

Stories you sew in puckered pages like moccasin toes.

Stories that you string in flatstitch, colourful catches of glass light.

Bookbinder backbone woman, stories heavy though they are, don’t you know your straight-backed spine is what holds it all together?

You built this house a hundred times, a hundred times it fell – leaving only skeletal support beams – leaving only two beautiful children. What will you do when you cannot save them both? What will you do when the ceiling caves in the day before your daughter’s birth?

Can’t you hear that sickly clicking? Click, click, click. Vertebrae by vertebrae: brick, brick, brick. How are you to build a home on a breaking back? How are you to house a heartbeat with no place to hang your ribs?

“Haven’t you heard the stories?” she says, weaving hide and heartbeat to a drum. “The only thing there is to do is stand and carry on.”

///

Niswi.

When I first dive my hand into the warm spring soil of my garden, I am reminded of a calving cow - of why everyone calls the earth “Mother” - of the brief moments before and after life and death where breath is forsaken to the soft pressure of protection. On the phone that night, ninosheyenh reassures me that the earth held those missing children just the same as she holds my hand, or the purple gem potatoes I deliver to the surface. Messages make their way from a homeland I have never seen whenever I seem to need them.

I cup smoke in my hands and pray to creation. I point birds out in the backyard and teach their names to the person I have begun to build a life with. “Aandeg! Boozhoo aandeg!” I say and they repeat, setting our bodies and words to sit down together like clay bricks.

I am a Maker, always have been - nothing exceptional so far but a nice life for myself and a few paintings. These hands do it for the joy of the work - that is, the satisfaction of scraping paint and dirt from underneath my nails with my navy grandfather’s old enamel-flag clippers. I’m told he loved his garden. I never heard whether you could say the same about his wife.

The heatwave kills everything I seeded this year but the more I sing and speak to it the more the weeds start to look like medicines, navigating cracks in the patio to crop up days after complaints of an ailment. My love craves parsley tea and the next morning it is springing cheerily beneath the front steps.

Gathered around a circle of stuffed toys left for the spirits of children, at the centre sits an emptiness so void that I can make nothing of it, least of all sense. Not until Emma fills my shaking empty hand with her own. A knowing look; it’s one thing to hold space and another entirely to step into it alone.

3 endangered yellow wood poppies bloom sunnily for 2 days. These are the footprints of wind walking incredible distances. Messages make their way from my homelands if you know how to hear the language. “Boozhoo!” my lemon-petaled relatives say, swaying softly in the only shade. “I heard you speaking and I knew that I was home”.