 Hi, I'm Tommy Pico, indigenous American poet, screenwriter, I co-host a podcast for like sluts, and um, yeah. And I, thank you so much, Anastasia. So a few months, like last October, my father commissioned me to write a poem to introduce this conference on healing from intergenerational indigenous trauma. And by commission, I mean, he said, I'm not going to pay you anything. And if you don't do this, you will bring a lot of dishonors to our family. And because he wasn't paying me, I didn't write anything new. But I ended up taking some material from my first book and my second book and my third book and marrying that with a bunch of new writing that I was doing for my fourth book. And I wasn't able to read it for them in October because I was traveling, because I'm traveling all the time. But a few weeks ago, while I was on tour, I was finally able to read it in front of my tribe, in front of aunties and uncles and cousins and elders and people who were born after I left, people who the last time I saw them were babies. And it was such an incredible moment. I wanted to, because these are conversations that I have with Anastasia all the time. So I wanted to read it for you too. It's called, I see the fire that burns inside you. It's one of those magical early summer Sherbert skies on a thin blue blanket on a rolling grassy knoll with the breeze off the East River tempering the city heat. As the sun begins its dip behind the buildings and all the little office and apartment and department store lights begin to twinkle, a sizzle of foam on the water. I'm listening to this Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast where they talk about the God Gene, something cellular that makes us look up and beyond and wonder at our creator. And Stephen Hawking talks, religion and science, saying they both articulate the nature of who we are, where we came from and why, and that those science produces more consistent results. People will always choose religion because it makes them feel less alone. And the debate turns to whether we're alone in the cosmos and the guest host says she hopes so because if not, if we encounter an alien civilization, they would likely be far more technologically advanced than us, she says. Look how that turned out for the Native Americans. And I suck my teeth because all we ever are is a metaphor or a cautionary tale or a spirit guide, nothing contemporary, nothing breathing, nothing alive. They just spent the previous half hour discussing other cellular inheritances saying, for example, that trauma could be passed down like molecular scartish, you like DNA cavorting with wars and displacements and your bad dads, bad dad, and what is being indigenous but understanding plurality of time that I'm here right now in this riverside park across the water from the trunk of the city in the golden light of the golden hour. And that light, that sliver of golden light is light unlike any other light you'll ever encounter because nothing we've ever made can come close to that glow. Not a filter, not a software, not a bulb, a gathering of circumstances of the atmosphere buffering the dusk light and the angle of the earth at this time right now, at this moment on top of this continent, on top of this blue blanket, I'm on top of our sacred mountain. I scout from the peak. I'm dragged to the center of town and chains. I'm old women scattered along the creek. My little hands squeeze my little mouth shut, drawn into nooks within the valley like a sharp breath while shaggy men on horseback following the water seek brown bodies for target practice, strong brown backs for breaking in the name of the church. Valle de las viejas. Blue echoes split the early evening, split the dusk. They spit and ride on, but I've held my breath ever since. It's like one minute I'm on stage and the next I'm in fifth grade, ducking behind the dash after a cousin high on something, points a gun in my face. And on stage, I'm a mess of tremor and sweat. The gift of panic is clarity. My therapist says, repeat the known quantities. Today is Thursday. Thursday is a turkey burger. My throat is full of survivors. It's okay. He clicks his pen getting ready for his next appointment. Lots of people get staged, right? But that's not what I'm talking about because what I mean is I've inherited an idea to disappear. In the mid 1800s, California would pay $5 for the head of an Indian and 25 cents per scalp, man, woman or child. The state was reimbursed by the feds. I'm alive. I am alive. I'm alive. This is a gathering of circumstances. This is the golden light. But when you've descended from a clever self, adept at evading and occupying force, when contact meant another swath of sick cousins, another cosmology snuffed, another stolen sister, and the water and the blood and the blood and the blood, you'd panic too, exposed onto the stage, under the hot lights. And I can't stand in front of the audience in Columbus, Ohio without wondering how that last person fell, leaving the ancestral homeland for the Indian Territory. But I'm on the road, right? And when I'm in their home, I say their names. The Olone, Kostanoan, Muwekma, Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, Shawnee, Lenny, Tokobaga, Pohoi, Uzita, Lumbi, Piscataway, Nakochtank, Moknama, Anishinaabe, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi. And now on this podcast, they have a linguist saying that language tells the story of its conquests, its champions, its admixtures while moving onwards and into new vessels that a language is dead when its only speakers are adult, that in 100 years, 90% of the world's languages will be kaput. He says, the most precise word in the whole world is Mami Lepinitapi from the indigenous Yagin language of what is now Tierra del Fuego, which means something like when you leave a cafe bathroom and you wanna tell the next person in line, it wasn't you who took the smelliest dump in American history, but you keep walking. Hey, just kidding. It means something like when two people look at each other and the look is that they both know what the other should do but neither wants to initiate, so they sit in stasis. It's a whole caravan of meaning, of feeling, and a single word, like how in kumya'i, in my language, you say hauka for hi, but the translation is more like, I see the fire that burns inside you. I see the golden light. And then this show goes to commercial and I make the mistake of opening the news app in my phone and it's a massacre in Palestine and in Pakistan, the journalists disappear and in Mogadishu, a bomb explodes in the bustling city center and ice loses thousands of indigenous children and drones fly over other countries and the quote-unquote president says, he literally says, we tamed the continent. He says, we are apologizing for America and murdered and missing indigenous women, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Get an article or a shout out or a headline, but I've been thinking a lot about the fuel sources that produce the heat of the fire that burns inside you and the term resistive circuits and active networks and mainly about Kirchoff's current law that the sum of all currents entering a node is the equal to the sum of all currents leaving the node by which I mean. Imagine you're a circuit. Imagine electricity. Imagine being fed and feeding. Imagine getting what you need. Imagine the fire inside you. Imagine heat. I don't have much of anything figured out, but I do know that to be Indigenous is not to be a miracle of circumstance, but to be the golden light of survival, the wit of the cunning of the cloud of ancestors above me now, a cloud of light from which something almost umbilical is plugged into my back, through which they feed me and they flow out of my hands and bear with me it's like this. My dad grows his hair long. The black waves cascade down his back because knives cropped the ceremony of his mother's generation in the Indian boarding school. And while I cut my hair short in mourning for the old life, I grow my palms long. A dark reminder on white pages. A new ceremony. Because palms light up corridors of the mind like food. They call where I grew up a food desert, a speck of dust on the map of the United States, in a valley surrounded by mountains that slice through the clouds like a loaf, where the average age of death is 40.7 years old. I'm 35. I live in the busiest city in America. I'm about to eat an orange. Every feed owes itself to death. Poetry is feed for the fire inside me. And what is trauma but a kind of rewiring as in I'm nervous where I feel most free. But then the show comes back on and now they're talking about what else we pass on after death and you know what too much for me. So I shut it off and I cracked my neck. The air is clear and all across Instagram. Peeps are posting pics of the sunset. Thanks.