An Open Letter to the 'Rosebud'
Dear Rosebud,
I saw you in the harbour at Annapolis.
You were a beautiful elegant construction, neither gallant like the warships, nor stern like the frigates whose names come etched in victory. You were smaller, quiet, almost blushing at your own elegance as you held your own among swankier craft. A ketch. You stood out like a question mark moored in the wind.
My eye settled on your expression, 'Rosebud.’ How beautiful it was and, what gorgeousness it aspired to! Beauty that bloomed against the backdrop of flags. That kind that whispered more that declared; a name that belonged to gardens, memory, grief and celebrations.
You offered me the opportunity to save a fleeting moment and create a memory in a place bristling with uniforms, brass plaques and anniversaries, and of course boat sales. As your brave song stirred the resonance of a battle cry and replayed a scene played out,in Montana Territory, on June 17th, in 1876.
There. On a rise of prairie earth streaked with wild wild roses, the Lakota and Cheyenne rose like thunder against General Crook and the U.S. Army. They weren’t fighting for conquest, or empire, or the abstraction of a nation. They were fighting for their own democracy, a way of life grounded, in kinship, stewardship, and the sacred arc of the land.
They won that day. They tasted victory, peppered with defiance and unity. It was a victory that delayed Custer’s path to Little Bighorn. It was a heartbeat of freedom before the greater crushing came.
And yet, who remembers?
In the West’s Commemorations of 250 years of American democracy, we chart the great speeches, the bold signatures, the founding fathers with their neat quills and their unspoken debts. But we rarely speak of the democracy that predated 1776. The complex, sovereign nations whose ideas of governance were older than Plymouth Rock, and who paid for their freedom in ways the Republic never confessed.
So, 'Rosebud,' forgive me if I stood staring at your name a little too long. You were a boat. A beauty. You did not ask to carry history. But history found you.
You reminded me that day, that liberty, when selectively applied, is not liberty. That a republic cannot mature without remembering what it trampled on, on its way to adolescence. And that some roses only bloom in shadow.
A few years later I found myself in another port. This time in Australia. n Port Douglas, in Queensland, visiting with a friend and describing how and why if I ever had the opportunity to buy a small ketch I would name it 'Rosebud,' after you.
So I write to you now, not as a ship, but as a symbol. And may your sails remember what the flags forget. And may we all, 250 years on, learn to hold our myths more gently, so that the wind might carry every voice across the water.
Yours in reflection,
Mari
9/09/2025