A Disappearance of Stone, A Confluence of River Water

Words for cannonballs and Indigenous sovereignty

A while ago, maybe two years, I wrote a poem. I loved it, but it was confusing me. I judged it for being simple and out of touch with my other works. A poem about… cannonballs? It had no place in the poetic canon (ha) I was writing into at the time. I couldn’t place it, didn’t understand it, but somehow I loved it. And started believing in it.

An Elegy for Cannonball - a staccato song

CANNONBALL, CANNONBALL
CAN YOU NOT SEE

THE SEA BEDS ARE DYING
COME AFFLICT ME
AFFLICTIONS AFFLICT ME
THE SEA BEDS ARE DRIFTING

I’M WAITING ON WAITING
TER
MI
NATE THE WAITING
THIS TERMINATING FLAG
HAS DRESSED ME IN RAGS

FIND ME CLOTHES
FIND ME CLOTHES
Oooo, FIND ME CLOTHES, NOW
I THINK SOMETHING HIDES UP
THERE HIGH IN THE CLOUDS
CANNONBALL, CANNONBALL
ONE LOADED GUN

Why don’t you keep lookin’ somewhere else, hun?

Liturgy, elegy, psalm? It felt to become all of those, but I had no grip on it.

Today, I find that Cannonball is a place on land stewarded by the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Sihásapa, Tséstho’e, and Itazipco peoples.¹ Cannonball is part of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Sioux County of so-called North Dakota. Cannonball is a colonizer name for the river that borders this reservation. Cannonball is by Cannonball River’s confluence with the Mníšoše,² the Missouri River, a confluence relocated, weakened, by man-made Lake Oahe some 800+ miles from the Missouri’s own confluence with Big Muddy, aka the Mississippi. Lake Oahe, formed by a dam, both lake and dam harming sacred sites and Native resources. Lake Oahe, traversed by the Dakota Access Pipeline, nothing more need be said!

I find: Cannonball River became Cannonball River when settler colonists saw war and dead things in stone and running water:

At one time, the confluence of two powerful rivers churned with such energy that it created smooth, spherical stones. The Lakota people named one of these rivers ‘Íŋyaŋwakağapi Wakpá, “Stone-Make-For-Themselves River,” and called the stones Iŋyaŋ Wakháŋagapi Othí, “sacred stones.”^1* The Lakotas use these sacred stones in prayer and ceremony and view them, like the river, plants, and animals, as a living part of all relations.

European explorers and colonizers who came to the region also saw and admired the smooth, spherical stones shaped by the churning waters. But instead of sacred stones, they saw stones shaped like cannonballs, like ammunition for war. And so they named that river the Cannonball River, which converges with the Missouri River near Cannonball, North Dakota.^2* Sacred stones or cannonballs? Perspective shapes practice.

I was not expecting this return to stone relatives, the first person who put me onto this belief being a curandera. Nor this hidden connection from ages ago to a post from last month I finally hit post on.

The cannonball is disappearing from the confluence of its namesake river.

Dr. Ray Wood sums up the disappearance of the cannonball concretions in his Prologue To Lewis And Clark, “the banks and valley of this stream once were home to uncounted spherical sandstone concretions that ranged from a few inches to several feet in diameter. Some of them indeed were the size of cannonballs. Today they have been carried away by curio hunters in such numbers that they are very rare.”

And on that note, here’s an Indigenous creator and activist I followed from Tiktok, now on Substack

Fort Ross

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1. https://native-land.ca/

2. https://thefirstscout.blogspot.com/2017/03/origins-of-cannonball-stones.html