Honor Song for Tulsa
May 31, 2021
The name Tulsa comes from the
Muskogee word Tallasi
meaning ‘old town’
but this place also holds names from
other languages
like the Mingo valley
from Choctaw and Chickasaw when
Tulsa made a home for us
after ours was taken
and Greenwood — for the street
that marked a segregation line
and the thriving
then destruction of life
but we have other names too
for ceremony and for family
and for each of the ways we relate
to each other
to this place
names that remember
that these city streets are the fraternal twins
of rivers, birthed at the same mouth
and slowly finding
their own separate paths, together
names that hold space
for histories that textbooks and
AP exams have erased
in languages our grammar teachers
didn’t even know existed
Tulsa is a relocation name
the name of a massacre
a place named home
by generations
who are still here
even after the etymologies of
our names have been forgotten
Muskogee word Tallasi
meaning ‘old town’
but this place also holds names from
other languages
like the Mingo valley
from Choctaw and Chickasaw when
Tulsa made a home for us
after ours was taken
and Greenwood — for the street
that marked a segregation line
and the thriving
then destruction of life
but we have other names too
for ceremony and for family
and for each of the ways we relate
to each other
to this place
names that remember
that these city streets are the fraternal twins
of rivers, birthed at the same mouth
and slowly finding
their own separate paths, together
names that hold space
for histories that textbooks and
AP exams have erased
in languages our grammar teachers
didn’t even know existed
Tulsa is a relocation name
the name of a massacre
a place named home
by generations
who are still here
even after the etymologies of
our names have been forgotten
Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) is an associate professor at the University of Illinois. Her first poetry collection, Trickster Academy, is forthcoming in 2022 from the University of Arizona Press, and her creative work has most recently been published in Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and exhibited at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
Art: Untitled, Amber Tattersall