Eagle Sky, Buffalo Boy

Sienna Craig

To begin with, a spiral, koru, that inner whorl of fern that I’ve learned to love, from Aotearoa. And how it riffs off that other word, kora, the circles and cycles that pulse our days.

The way that floodwaters swirled in Grand Army Plaza yesterday, moving up and out instead of down and in, like a disoriented animal: lost, found, lost again, as if following a scent, as if trying to escape.

The way a perfectly round stone skips across water, but only when released by a skilled hand, by a hand of someone careful enough to find that little treasure only to let it go.

When I do not know where to walk, I walk in a circle. Leave my house and head down past what was my daughter’s high school; past the Norwegian cypress trees that get girdled in burlap each winter; past the grand, sloping lawn where herds of whitetail deer like to graze; past cars moving quickly on a country road; then veering away from traffic and down along Mink Brook, out toward the Connecticut River; past mallards and, in time and then time again, flocks of Canada geese; past the waste water treatment plant, with its furnaced churnings, its inimitably human smells;  past stands of poison ivy I’ve learned to avoid; past that massive maple, uprooted and felled along the river’s bank that slid slowly, over months, into still waters; past the beaver marks on other trees; past the sign that honors a young man – “Buffalo Boy” as his friends called him – who took his own life on the morning of my daughter’s 16th birthday, in that eerie, enervating quietude of our first autumn of lockdown; past, even, the bald eagle itself on an early summer morning, piercing sky with its language of protection.

I walk past and up up up, out of this small sanctuary into a staid if pleasant neighborhood – all lilac and daylily, all twinkle lights and snowmen – past homes we still call “colonial.” 

A friend of that young man, one of my dear students, spends last summer on the wide-open expanse of South Dakota, along the Cheyenne River in Oohenunpa Lakota territory – the place Buffalo Boy had called home. My student learns to live with the buffalo. He mends fences, drives a tractor, lives in the basement of his friend’s childhood home, with parents who are wise if still aggrieved. He is not their boy, but he is a boy, here, with them. Not a swirl but a strange circle of motion.

Not without beauty. Not without beauty.

Sienna Craig is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (USA). Raised in Santa Barbara, California, she received her BA in Religious Studies from Brown University (1995) and her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University (2006). Craig enjoys writing across genres and has published poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and children’s literature in addition to scholarly works in medical and cultural anthropology. Her most recent book, which combines literary ethnography with short fiction, is The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020). She is also the author of Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012), and Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalaya (Wisdom Publications, 2008), among other works.