My name is Pardricotuma and I think in the history of the human species, if I can be so audacious as to say it,

there's been this long-standing relationship with knowledge. Of course we keep on accumulating knowledge and it has helped us and saved us, thank God.

But there's always going to be knowledge we don't have. There can be this idea that if I had all the knowledge about the specific thing the future maybe or what's going to happen here

If I had that knowledge I'd know what to do and I'd also know who I am

There's always going to be ways in which we come up against the limitation of our knowledge and where we're

going to have to use something else to figure out what to do and who I am.

And that perhaps is one of the ways where poetry comes in.

Our bird Aegis by Ray Young Bear. An immature black eagle walks assuredly across the prairie meadow.

He pauses in mid-step with one talum over the wet snow to turn around and see.

Imprinted in the tall grass behind him are the shadows of his tracks, claws instead of talons, the kind that

belongs to a massive bear. And he goes by that name, Macui Sotah.

And so this Aegis looms against the last spring blizzard.

We discover he's concerned and the white feathers of his spotted hat flicker

signaling this. Without stretched wings he tests the sutures. Even he is subject to physical wounds and human tragedy, he tells us.

The eyes of the Bear King radiate through the thick falling snow.

He meditates on the loss of my younger brother and by custom suppresses his emotions. There was something about the unknowing nature of my own experience about this poem that

grabbed me when I first read it. I was reading through Ray Young Bear's work and even though I knew that almost on every line of this poem

there was some kind of symbolism some kind of story some kind of reference that I didn't get at all

I kept them thinking about it. The footprints that seemed to be from an eagle as well as a bear. I thought what an interesting change. I don't know what it means, but I was really struck by it.

And that peculiar, powerful, unforgettable ending and by custom suppresses his emotions.

There's so much where the character in the poem,

is it an eagle, is it a bear, the way within which the voice is observing this eagle

...