New Town

There on a north bend of the Missouri where it is fat and
swollen with dams we built, dams that flooded the early white
town of Sanish and probably a majority of the Hidatsa, Arikara,
Mandan villages as well but it is hard to tell since we just don't
have aerial photographs of that time, but I can tell you that there,
buried beneath the water and the long bridge across to Four Bears Casino
where white men and women wear credit cards affixed to necklaces,
there you will find the kind of remnants that built towns worthy
of the name New, homes and hides that cut the first stretched
scars of people lining the North Dakotan poor-cell-reception areas,
places not where the refugees of the past have huddled cold and
in their coldness built a history.