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Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening. And so, you see, her absence stopped time.
Oh, Geraldine! Just from those two words, it was clear that he was and had always been in love with my mother.
Don’t you Indians have your own hospital over there?
Which police? I asked. Exactly, he said.
Violently raped, I thought. I knew those words fit together.
The reason I go into this is that because of this show we set ourselves apart. We made drawings, cartoons, and even tried to write an episode. We pretended we had special knowledge. We were starting to get our growth and were anxious how we’d turn out. In TNG we weren’t skinny, picked on, poor, motherless, or scared. We were cool because no one else knew what we were talking about.
For the first time, I felt the lack of some ritual. I couldn’t just start eating. My father sensed this and spoke with great emotion, looking at us both. Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.
There was a moment of intense quiet. Then a low moan of air passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself.
During the old days when Indians could not practice their religion—well, actually not such old days: pre-1978—the
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.
I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
I took off Cappy’s shoes. Thanks, I said. We switched back. But I still believe that if it would have helped me, Cappy would have kept on walking in my tight old shoes.
The air was heavy with her breath, as if she’d sucked out the oxygen.
I went over to the window and was about to pull the shade up when my mother spoke to me. What I mean is, my before-mother, the one who could tell me what to do, she spoke to me.
You can smoke that if you want to, I said. I’m not gonna start. I’m not gonna be like you.
But do you understand that if something should happen to you, Joe, that your mother and I would . . . we couldn’t bear it. You give us life . . . I jumped up. Yellow spots pulsed before my eyes. You gave me life, I said. That’s how it’s supposed to work. So let me do what I want with it!
Before we were born, my twin had the compassion to crush against me, to perfect me by deforming me, so that I would be the one who was spared.
The sun was in its branches. There were prayer flags, strips of cloth. Red, blue, green, white, the old-time Anishinaabe colors of the directions, according to Randall. Some cloths were faded, some new. This was the tree where those ancestors were hanged. None of the killers ever went on trial.
My father tried to keep a conversation going every night, and when I had exhausted my meager store of the day’s doings, he forged on, a lone paddler on an endless lake of silence, or maybe rowing upstream.
I had to know. It’s good I know, I said. But it was a poison in me. I was just beginning to feel that.
Some old men said the buffalo disappeared into a hole in the earth. Other people had seen white men shoot thousands off a train car, and leave them to rot. At any rate, they existed no longer.
Now that they had the carcass in custody, now that something was being done, I felt a lightness. I felt like I could go back just to being thirteen and live my summer. I was glad I’d quit the station. I skimmed along the road.
she’d traveled all the way over from Helena, Montana, to convert the Indians, none of whom lived in tipis and many of whom had skin lighter than her own,
I’d thought she was the same mother only with a hollow face, jutting elbows, spiky legs. But I was beginning to notice that she was someone different from the before-mother. The one I thought of as my real mother. I had believed that my real mother would emerge at some point. I would get my before mom back. But now it entered my head that this might not happen.
Many an agent gained wealth on stolen rations in those years, and many a family turned their faces to the wall and died for lack of what they were promised.
Food everywhere. Fat Indians! You would never see a fat Indian back in my time.
When I tell this story to white people they are surprised, and when I tell it to Indians they always have a story like it.
As for me, I left my ds behind when I went to college and I took up the th. So did lots of other Indians.
There were a few days when things were normal—but it was holding-your-breath normal.
You’re crying, aren’t you? Cry all you want, Joe. Lots of men cry after they do something nasty to a woman. I don’t have a daughter anymore. I thought of you like my son. But you just turned into another piece a shit guy.
Speculators are acquiring rights on treaty-held Indian land and on land still owned and occupied by Indians—white people are literally betting on smallpox.
Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time. Even to this day, his words are used to continue the dispossession of our lands. But what particularly galls the intelligent person now is that the language he used survives in the law, that we were savages living off the forest, and to leave our land to us was to leave it useless wilderness, that our character and religion is of so inferior a stamp that the superior genius of Europe must certainly claim ascendancy and on and on.
What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.
For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt. But with our own grocery now, run by our own tribal members and hiring our own people to bag and stock, we had something special.
The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.
We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You’ll see.
Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.
I forgot I hated her and remembered that I’d liked talking to her and that she had always loved my parents and was trying to help even now.
I overheard her. Or listened in on her. Eavesdropping was a habit now. My sneaking came of needing to know that there was no other way, that I had to do this.
Whoever did it left no traces, he said. There’s nothing to go on. Nobody seen it. Nobody seen nothin’. Then it rained so hard. You’ll be getting over this flu quickly.
What are we now?
None of it do I remember. Except that again and again I looked at the round black stone that Cappy had given me, the thunderbird egg. And there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people.
At the same time, I found, as I rose from the chair, I’d gotten old along with them. I was broken and fragile.
On every one of my childhood trips that place was always a stop for ice cream, coffee and a newspaper, pie. It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.
This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists. “Maze of Injustice,” a 2009 report by Amnesty International, included the following statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.
