Five years ago today, George Floyd was executed by the police in the street.

On Franklin Avenue, I felt the shockwave in the following days, from a faint, disbelieving, “Did this happen here?” all the way to the spirits of Indigenous people killed by police on the avenue whispering, “It never stopped happening.” It shook everything.

An uprising and racial reckoning occurred in a time of a global pandemic where we had nothing but time and space to look at ourselves in the face. It shook at everything we thought we knew.

Rather than believe the eight minutes and 46 seconds of footage broadcast around the world, the racists choose to believe lies about drugs or pre-existing conditions because they cannot countenance the idea that the murder of Black people by the police is so widespread that it shakes their core beliefs about the people they believe are there to protect them. It shook at everything they thought they knew.

Here in Bde Ota, this place is about struggle for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Queer people. The white, straight, cis folks tell themselves good lies about their Christian benevolence and merciful reservations. But for the rest of us, it was a time to shake at everything they had built on our land and on our backs.

What, though, is different from five years ago? What has actually been shaken to its core? The white playwright who wrote, “There’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it” was telling on his people. Putting up a fancy, polished front is a fine way to ignore the cracks and chasms between the people, without ever having to confront why those gaps exist and what happens to people who are forced into the abyss. For me, I keep shaking things where I can. I keep trying to disrupt as best I can.

In her poem, “38,” Layli Long Soldier describes the action of our ancestors as poetry, “When Myrick’s body was found, his mouth was stuffed with grass. / I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem. / There’s irony in their poem. / There was no text. / ‘Real’ poems do not ‘really’ require words.” Our actions shake at the form of our oppression in ways we cannot ever truly know.