Something Small of How to See a River

Through the weaving of documentary poetics, first-hand accounts, dialogue, and lyric, these poems tell the story of co-running a school at the Ocethi Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock.

Something Small of How to See a River interrogates the idea of narrative. Who gets to tell a story and what does it mean when the official story, the story told by the governor, the police, or the local media, is a fundamentally dishonest one? The poems collected here meditate on failure: how systems fail us and our environment, how whiteness fails to hold itself accountable, how future generations and the land are being failed-and how, in the face of all this, the Standing Rock movement was not a failure. At the heart of this collection is the strength, care, and radical joy of the movement, which shines through and against the violence.