Through the weaving of documentary poetics, first-hand accounts, dialogue, and lyric, these poems tell the story of co-running a school at the Ocethi Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock. Something Small of How to See a River interrogates the idea of narrative. Who gets to tell a story and what does it mean when the official story, the story told by the governor, the police, or the local media, is a fundamentally dishonest one? The poems collected here meditate on failure: how systems fail us and our environment, how whiteness fails to hold itself accountable, how future generations and the land are being failed–and how, in the face of all this, the Standing Rock movement was not a failure. At the heart of this collection is the strength, care, and radical joy of the movement, which shines through and against the violence.
