Outer World

Lover’s Eyes

I Loved You Before You Fell Into The Sky

What I Think You Want From Me

Horatio Dreams of Philosophy

Birdwoman Falls

With the Heart Ripped Out

I have let most of my work stand on its own, but “With the Heart Ripped Out” becomes meaningless if stripped of its context. This painting is about settler colonialism and genocide, in the Gaza Strip and the Missoula Valley.

On October 7th, 2023, Israeli forces began an acutely genocidal phase of the settler colonial process that has been ongoing since the Nakba, almost 80 years ago. From my phone, I watched people shot and killed with American weapons, starved and denied medical care, force-marched from their homes and their lands to make space for Israeli settlers. And I watched it from my house in the Missoula Valley, where settler colonial genocide took place less than 150 years ago.

When my ancestors committed those crimes, their goal was to replace the Séliš, Ql̓ispé, and Ksanka with their own descendents – with me. If the settler colonial genocide in the Gaza Strip proceeds as the crimes of my own ancestors did, then 150 years from now there will be a white girl like me in Rafah.

Let me tell you what she will feel.

For a long time, she will believe her way of life is simply how things are. The persistent, itchy, hollow feeling will have always been part of her; if she notices it at all, she will believe it’s just another part of what it means to be a person. She will learn what words like success, failure, good, bad, love, and purpose mean from the people who rule her society, and within those definitions, she will try her best to be good and successful.

As life accumulates around her, the hollow feeling she has no word for will eat away at her. She will try to fill it, or cover it, but it will swallow whatever she feeds it without changing, and its discomfort will make her shifty, frustrated, distracted, addicted, isolated. She will throw herself into work, or a relationship, or a bottle; whatever it is, it won’t work. She will know in her bones that something is missing, but she won’t know what it is or how to get it back. She will continue this way, perhaps forever.

Or perhaps something will happen; a friendship will develop or dissolve, a bomb will fall, an addiction will hit rock bottom, a god will be encountered out in some desert. She will decide to peer into the terrifying hollowness, and she will discover the ocean of blood that soaks the hands of her ancestors.

If she is me, she will learn that the Hellgate Treaty of 1855 guaranteed the Séliš people the right to continue to exist on their ancestral homelands in the Bitterroot Valley, in addition to things like hunting rights. She will learn that her government broke the Hellgate Treaty in October 1891, sending armed soldiers to move the Séliš to the Flathead Reservation in a Trail of Tears through the land you’re standing on this very minute. She will learn about the 1908 Swan Valley Massacre, when a game warden murdered four people exercising their treaty-protected hunting rights. She will learn about the boarding schools 40 miles north of here that were using isolation, abuse, and thought reform to “Kill the Indian (to) Save the Man” well into the 1970s. If she is her, she will learn about atrocities that are still only now being dreamt up.

First, it will horrify her. Then, guilt and shame will attempt to turn her away. If she stays, it will transform into profound grief, for her world and for the place in it that she inherits. She will realize her ancestors struck a bloody bargain; they exchanged the place in her heart which connects her to her land and people for domination. She will come to understand she can build that connection anew, but she will never have the lifelong spiritual union that ought to have been her birthright, and she will weep for what she never knew she lost.

Let me save 150 years, and speak with both our voices: your children do not want this world. We do not want our inheritance in stolen land and scarred souls. No dominance will balm that pain. I do not want this; do not make me over again.

Upon sale, the full $1200 proceeds from “With the Heart Ripped Out” were split between Montana 4 Palestine and ʾIt̓qaʾwxam Nk̓ʷúwilš Solidarity Program.