I felt the wind blowing, the wind blowing.
I felt a rising, a rising.
I felt Lionel Bordeaux, big man, big spirit, big heart, telling jokes.
He’d told about a bird and a barn he’d told a hundred times before
as horses galloped across windswept plains,
and the Black Hills shined white with snow in the late fall.
I felt the wind blowing, the wind blowing.

Lionel has risen past the blanket woven of his days.
I have been told that.
Inside his rising were long nights on Rosebud, at Sinte Gleska University, at the tribal council

chambers, in Washington DC in a hotel late at night as tribal
college people got heated and argued and hit the table
where they were sitting with force, with the palms of their
hands, in New Zealand at an ancestor house after a long
day of talking with Māori who kept singing the fact that
he’d come across the ocean to see who they were.

Inside his rising were words that swept the future beyond the blanket woven of his days,

“Big brother takes care of little brother,”
“It’s all of us or none of us,”
“Land is sacred. The land is part of who we are.”

They have told me he is gone rising.
But I can feel him.
I can feel his deep laughter at his long jokes.
I can feel his spirit as he stood up from his chair around a table and wove bonds between tribes and peoples and tribal colleges and universities
and made them a movement, a force, a song of languages, cultures, and spirituality upon Mother Earth.

I feel the wind blowing.
I feel a rising, a glory, the blessing of what has been and will be,
the chant of yesterday, the chant of today, the chant of tomorrow,
the blanket woven out of all our lives.

Thomas Davis is a longtime tribal college leader and the author of Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings: The Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium poems (Tribal College Press)