And Then She Fell

by Alicia Elliott

“There’s more than one way to kill a person.”

Mohawk feels like a weapon coming from Steve’s lips—not because he’s necessarily wielding it that way but because history is. Here was the language I had lost, the language my parents and aunts and half my grandparents had lost, which was so different from the English that’d been forced on us that I secretly worried my tongue would never be able to make those sounds. And here was Steve, rattling it off easily, as if it weren’t an endangered language, my endangered language; as if those words, which held my culture, were simply . . . words to him.

The thing is, though, they were. And why wouldn’t they be? He didn’t need to question his identity and worth every time he said a Mohawk word. His voice didn’t shake when he spoke, scared any mispronunciation would signal to everyone he didn’t really belong. That he never did and never would. That wasn’t his legacy. It was mine.

In those moments, I am truly thankful. And at the same time, I am absolutely furious I have to be thankful in the first place.

Like I’m looking at someone else, someone wrong, someone who does see good soaks as the key to loving myself.

Folks off the rez—folks like Steve and his coworkers—introduced themselves not by talking about their families but by explaining how they made money, as if that said anything substantial about who they were or what they offered their communities or the world.

How the people Steve cared about perceived Indians, despite their reassurance that they were all quite disgusted with Canada over residential schools. Those assurances couldn’t rewrite history.

As if we were genetically broken as a race and unwilling to do anything to change that.

It’s hard being a new mom. In ways it isn’t necessarily hard to be a new dad,”

I’m focused on the mothers, wondering how they’re so put together and confident while parenting. Is it something they learned watching their own mothers and studying countless books, memorizing all the rules and tips and tricks, or is it something they were born with, a dormant skill lying in wait until pregnancy hormones activated it?

. Worse, the thought of having to be grateful to some committee somewhere because they liked the way I’d stamped a Native face on “universal problems,” otherwise known as problems legible to white folks, instead of stories that mattered to our people and arose from the land, the way Dad had always wanted—all of it was too much.

He has intergenerational wealth; I have intergenerational trauma.

I’m so far from being a perfect mother it’s starting to scare me.

Motherhood is sacrifice. Not metaphorical sacrifice. Literal sacrifice.

That’s the thing about happiness. It’s not a country with open borders. You can’t just settle there and stay. We like to pretend that it is, that we can. But that’s all fantasy.

women taken from us, either murdered or gone missing, that we have our own hashtag for it: #MMIWG. So many of our men taken from us, put in prisons or early graves for trying to survive. So many of our children taken from their families and placed in foster care that girls from my community were scared to even give birth in nearby hospitals. And Canadians blaming us for it all, as if this was something we chose instead of something that was forced on us over and over, by people who said they just wanted to help. So much loss. Inconceivable loss. The type of loss that doesn’t end, but instead finds new entry points, new ways to open old wounds. We aren’t allowed to heal. Not really.

But patience has an expiration date even if grief doesn’t, and I’m slowly running out of ways to lie when they ask me if I’m okay, if I’ll be okay.

I want to be entirely unnecessary, ignored, forgotten. No responsibilities. No mistakes making others hurt. No memory of the mess I’ve made. No me.

Or maybe—and this is the option I’m most scared of—Steve could see the racism if he wanted but deliberately chooses not to, like a teen refusing to wear prescription glasses because they think it makes them look ugly and uncool. It seems in the club of whiteness—particularly rich whiteness—it is always ugly and uncool to bring up racism. It is ugly to bring up race at all, as if even alluding to something that’s fundamental to the way we each experience the world stains you. After all, as Joan often explained to me in earnest yet condescending tones, folks like her “don’t see race”—that is, until they’re walking down the street and a brown or Black man happens to approach, and they happen to tighten their grip on their purse while their fingers search its contents for keys to splay between their knuckles or pepper spray or a gun.

Is this what Dad meant when he criticized academics like Steve—the way they swoop into our communities to take what they need and vanish? The way they think they know everything but never truly understand?

And I have a white husband who doesn’t believe racism exists, yet also believes cosplaying as an Indian will secure his career. The sad part is, it probably will. Everything Indigenous seems to have more value when it’s utilized by white folks. Our clothes, our jewelry. Our language. Even our identities. Especially those.

Maybe it’s because now I am writing with the expectation of making a product someone else could sell. Before, it was just for me. That’s the reality, isn’t it? I can’t make art just to make art. I have to make art to sell art. What I write has to be deemed potentially profitable by people who have no idea about my community, who have no concept of any value that lies beyond what can be measured in imaginary numbers and transferred between bank accounts. As though that’s more real than recognition from those you love, those you hope will see your art as honoring them in all their complexity. As loving their flaws and beauty in equal measure. As though sales are more meaningful than realizing your father’s wildest dreams. As though critics’ opinions are more important than making sure your peoples’ stories live on, so they can continue to teach all the coming generations about ourselves, the world around us, and our place in the world.

She’s someone who has a considerable stake in being considered “generous,” never once considering that generosity is itself a privilege people like me can’t afford, because the moment we give a millimeter, our massive territory shrinks to a whisper of land. Our generosity can never be virtuous; it gets repackaged as naïveté, then gets used against us to justify whatever crimes are rained down on our heads next. In the same way, no generosity shown to us is ever real generosity; it’s the flowers a husband brings his wife to smooth things over after giving her a shiner; the jewelry a cheater buys on sale to gift to both his mistress and his wife. It simply can’t be trusted.

painfully aware, as academics always make me, that knowledge is a privilege, a currency, even. Especially knowledge of my own people. They like for me to know they’re rich in knowledge that should be mine.

There’s a straight line from how the Catholic Church justified the murders and rapes of Indigenous people when countries like Canada were being settled, to the way courts and columnists justify the murders and rapes of Indigenous people today.”

I’ve been trained since I was a girl to know “be nice” is colonial code for “shut up.”

Because creation wasn’t just about making things and naming them, the way some folks made it seem. There’s a responsibility to creation, to bringing someone or something to life. Yes, when you have a child, that child depends on you. But you depend on them, too, in ways you’d never have known or imagined—a reciprocity that has to be honored. No mother is greater or more important than her own child, just as no tree is greater or more important than the seeds it releases to the wind. Each life equally important to the vitality of the whole, regardless of how enticing a promise it is to become, say, for example, the best woman who ever lived.

“When this country wants us dead, every breath we take is a tiny revolution. You don’t need to do nothing fancy. Just continuing to breathe is enough.”

It took a while—years, actually—but eventually she understood: The most important thing wasn’t that she had fallen. The most important thing was that she had been caught. That she had allowed herself to be caught.