Highways and Byways: Women of the Tempest

By Maik Strosahl

Last fall, an artist friend of mine who goes by the moniker Uni Verse posted a picture he painted to address the disappearance of Native American women from across the west and Canada. It was an issue I was not familiar with, but I had been driving through and around several reservations in Nebraska, so it caught my attention.

    Over the last 35 years, more than a thousand Indigenous women in Canada have been murdered, consisting of 16% of all female homicides even though they constitute only 4% of the female population. Avocacy groups also say that many more women have gone missing. In the US, Native American women are twice as likely to experience violence than any other demographic and one in three Indigenous women is sexually assaulted during her life—two thirds of these assaults are perpetrated by other races. A contributing factor to this issue is that policing agencies do not have authority across both reservations and state territories, leaving many of these crimes to fall through the cracks.
    This poem, was inspired by Uni Verse’s work and the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) across North America. It is hoped that, in some small way, his art and my poem can bring a little more awareness to the issue.
    Poem has previously been published on Project Agent Orange.

Women of the Tempest

—For all of the missing & murdered
indigenous women across the US and Canada

Hear our winds
whistling in your ears,
uttering words
of the storm coming—
it is here,
blowing away
the leaves of our daughters,
yet you do not thunder.

Hear us now!
Haunting your steps
as you walk in a rain of tears.
Where is your sister?
Where is your little girl,
the barely grown woman
whose smile just vanished
in a lightning flash?
Why do you not rage?

I am buried
deep in the cornfield,
she is hidden
shallow in the woods,
we are bound and
screaming breathless
with the girl in the hayloft
just west of the reservation,
innocence lost
to the man who zips up
and ponders where
he will toss her away,
now that she is useless to him.

You ask the neighbors,
you check under a rock,
you look back
to where she used to sit
and shrug your shoulders,
perhaps wondering
through the years

as the leaves continue to blow,
gathering in a distant ditch,
and our voices only come together
in the storms as they brew—
collect your hat and
pull your overcoat
closed around your face
as we rage—
your sister’s,
your daughter’s screams unheard,
their tears falling with the rain.

Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.