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When you grow up in Indian country, the TV tells you how to be Indian. And it starts with bows and arrows and headbands. They’re the exciting part of your heritage. They’re also the thing you can always find at the gift shop.
This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works. Just, if you say this to anybody, you kill that Crazy Horse you’re hiding inside. So, you walk around with this knowledge that he’s there if you ever need him.
the shots cracked the world in half, then quarters, then slivers of itself.
The way it was turning out, it was that you could maybe come back, be what you’d always meant to be, but to do that, you had to latch on to your people and drink them dry, leave them husks. After that, you could walk off into your new life, your second chance. With no family to hold you back. It wasn’t fair. He was going to be out there on the pow-wow circuit, taking every purse, walking out into the campers and lodges and back seats with whatever new girl, and nobody would ever know what he’d had to do to us in order to dance like that. After a few years, he’d probably even stay on one of
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Standing there, I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I was going to be different. It’s a promise every Indian kid makes at some point. You mean it when you say it, though. You mean it so hard.
This is what it’s like to kill your father. This is what it’s like to kill everything your father could have been, if only the world hadn’t found him, done its thing to him.
