Grandma Moon
BY RIVER IAN KERSTETTER.
I'm making pasta for dinner. Grandma sits and watches and my uncle is telling stories. Grandma says, it’s going
to be a hard winter. My uncle responds, Grandmother Moon has gotten us through worse. She’ll see us
through. She always does.
This is new.
Grandma is watching the news and she tells me she’s afraid a world war is coming. She served in the last one
and I don’t know how to tell her that the fighting never stopped.
I wonder if my uncle is right. If we’ll make it.
When my grandma moves, I find a journal tucked in between quilts and blankets. Whoever hid this wanted it to
be hidden in softness. I ask the moon for forgiveness for going through her things and I open the journal. I see
my great-grandmother’s name in perfect cursive on hundreds of pages of botany and math.
Carlisle Indian School opened in Pennsylvania in 1879.
In 1891 the U.S. Congress ordered all indigenous families to send their children to Indian Schools like Carlisle.
Congress did not recognize a parent's right to refuse their children's attendance until 1978.
The Indian Schools' primary mission was to erase indigenous culture from young indigenous people, and teach
them instead to be Good White Christians.
From everything I've heard, Great-Grandma was smart.
I can’t help but wonder what the alternative was.
When people talk about the Indian Schools, I used to picture soldiers taking children away at gunpoint.
But when I carry the journal to the living room where my aunties and uncle and father marvel at great-
grandma’s perfect drawings of flowers and delicate handwriting, they tell me that Great-Grandma and her
siblings were sent to Carlisle because there, they’d be fed and warm.
I learn that people don't always mean the same thing when they say Indian,
and colonization isn’t always a gun.
Sometimes it’s a warm school,
safe from another winter.
Phytoestrogens
BY RIVER IAN KERSTETTER.
the boy looks up at the big white refrigerator.
he’s about seven years old and
the latest healthy eating fad is
soy milk.
his parents, grown on
new england vegetables
try to eat well, but he could care
less about the lettuce and leftovers on the shelves
no, he is here for the
shiny carton of soy milk
glistening in the cold.
the boys at school say
soy milk has estrogen in it,
that if you drink it you'll turn into a
girl
or gay, or something
else unimaginable.
the boy carefully takes the carton
out of the fridge and pours it over
cereal, pours it until it spills
over the bowl. chugs it straight from the carton
splashes to into cupped palms
and on his face like sacred water.
pours until there
is soy milk rushing across the counter,
soaking his shirt
white washing the tile
and running down his chin.
soon the entire kitchen
is a pool of bright light.
the boy gulps and gulps
he isn’t afraid of what might happen,
of what the other children run from.
he doesn’t think he’d mind
turning into something
else
River Ian Kerstetter is a transfeminine queer artist, writer, and educator of Onʌyota'a:ka (Wisconsin Oneida) and European-American heritage, who grew up in central New Mexico and now lives and works in Chicago. Much of their work reflects their search for connection and meaning in a post-colonial world where queer, trans, and indigenous people are erased every day.
River recently received their MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. River is a co-founder of PansyGuild, a Chicago collective that seeks to investigate and celebrate the intersections of queer/trans/indigenous/black experiences through printmaking and papermaking practices. They were also a founding member of Vecinos Artist Collective, a New Mexico collective that partnered with community organizations and other artists to create collaborative, multidisciplinary art, from parade floats to poetry workshops. You can follow them on Instagram @ri.iver.
River recently received their MFA in Interdisciplinary Book & Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. River is a co-founder of PansyGuild, a Chicago collective that seeks to investigate and celebrate the intersections of queer/trans/indigenous/black experiences through printmaking and papermaking practices. They were also a founding member of Vecinos Artist Collective, a New Mexico collective that partnered with community organizations and other artists to create collaborative, multidisciplinary art, from parade floats to poetry workshops. You can follow them on Instagram @ri.iver.