the land here was levelled before the house was built
the trees felled the ground bulldozed burying the home burrows of those who lived here the mice and bees and beetles
we settlers call that development
today the flags are lowered after the bodies of two hundred and fifteen Indigenous children were found buried on the grounds of a residential school in Kamloops in the land of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc
today a century ago a white mob wearing police badges burned down the hopes of Greenwood Tulsa, Oklahoma
levelling thirty-five blocks of homes and schools and businesses built by the ten thousand Black residents
the number of dead unknown but in the hundreds
we have called the land real estate as it settled over the bodies
today on Turtle Island survivors use ground-penetrating radar to try to read the earth beneath a century of silence and call the lost names of the dead
