Mercy and “What Every Indian Knows”

Human mercy requires feeling the sufferings of others. We have and act from compassion—literally, “a passion with”— as we take on and experience another’s misery as if it were, in some sense, our own.

To promote deeds of antiracist mercy towards Indigenous brothers and sisters, I share the following poem by Pam Colorado.

“What Every Indian Knows . . .”

What Every Indian Knows
Auschwitz ovens
burn bright
in America
twenty-four million
perished in the flame
         Nazi
            not a people
            but
            a way of life
Trail of Tears Humans
ends in Oklahoma
                       an Indian name for
                       Red Earth

Redder still
soaked in blood
of two hundred removed tribes
the ovens burn bright
in America
Ancestral ashes
sweep the nation
carried in
            Prevailing winds
Survivors know
                       the oven door stands wide
       and some like the mouse
           cat crazed and frenzied
turn
and run into the jaws

at night
the cat calls softly
to the resting
us

I encourage rereading Colorado’s poem several times, giving careful attention to how it highlights white supremacy’s genocidal influence on Indigenous community without explicitly mentioning white supremacy. Note, too, the poem’s depiction of structural and legal racism.

Having reread the poem, ask: How do Colorado’s words enable me to feel the historic suffering of my Indigenous brothers and sisters, and what do they direct me to mercifully resist and remedy?