My Journey

My name is Willow. When the trail of tears was finally over I was fifteen. I had seen what no other fifteen year should ever have to see, I've seen many deaths. I watched my best friend be shot. Anyway I was the oldest child in my family. I had two little sisters how I loved very much. They were strong but not strong enough. They caught a disease that killed them both. Now its just my parents and I. It is very hard to stay strong in such sad times. Depression has taken over my mother already, the death of m sisters was just to much for her to bear. My father is still holding out strong. Before we left our homelands Father was very high up in our tribe. Now we have land we can call our own, but we do not think of it as our own. This is the white mans land. We do not know the hunting grounds. So, we do not know where the best spots are. The animals are different hear. We have to completely change anything we knew before about hunting. Since the hunting is so different we do not have a lot of food. All the other families are different. I feel bad for the families who have less then we do. When ever Father does good hunting, after we eat, He gives the rest away to the families who did not do so good that day. We also have shelter to worry about. When we were on our land we all had homes. Now we all have to build homes. When they ripped us away from our homes we had to leave everything. So, now we have very little. Everyone tries to help out as much as anyone can, thats what tribes do. They are just your extended family. I believe when we get our roots set here and everyone has shelter. /then I think we can restart out tribe. We might be able to have a home here. It will never be the same as our homelands but, it should do. Even though the trail of tears was over we still had a lot of diseases going around. There were so many deaths. Sometimes I feel like there are more deaths now then when we were on the trail. I know it is not true but, it feels that way. On