Growing Up Native American (26 page)

West of Jemez Pueblo there is a great red mesa, and in the folds of the earth at its base there is a canyon, the dark red walls of which are sheer and shadow-stained; they rise vertically to a remarkable height. You do not suspect that the canyon is there, but you turn a corner and the walls contain you; you look into
a corridor of geologic time. When I went into that place I left my horse outside, for there was a strange light and quiet upon the walls, and the shadows closed upon me. I looked up, straight up, to the serpentine strip of the sky. It was clear and deep, like a river running across the top of the world. The sand in which I stood was deep, and I could feel the cold of it through the soles of my shoes. And when I walked out, the light and heat of the day struck me so hard that I nearly fell. On the side of a hill in the plain of the Hissar I saw my horse grazing among sheep. The land inclined into the distance, to the Pamirs, to the Fedchenko Glacier. The river which I had seen near the sun had run out into the endless ether above the Karakoram range and the Plateau of Tibet.

I
n this moving essay, Joseph Bruchac describes his own “cycle of becoming” amid racism and the ridicule of his schoolmates. Raised by a beloved Abenaki grandfather who felt compelled by history and circumstance to deny his Indian blood, Bruchac describes how he transformed his grandfather's shame into a personal celebration and reclaimed his Native American identity
.

Joseph Bruchac was born in the Adirondacks in 1942 of Abenaki, Slovak, and French ancestry. As a storyteller, fiction writer, and poet, he has published numerous books, including
Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children.
Two of his best-known books of poetry are
Indian Mountain and Other Poems
and
Walking with My Son.
He has been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award
.

 

T
HE BEST TEACHERS HAVE SHOWED ME THAT THINGS HAVE TO BE
done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly—we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about,
waudjoset ndatlokugan
,
a forest lodge man,
alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan
, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones.

Who am I? My name is Joseph Bruchac. The given name is that of a Christian saint—in the best Catholic tradition. The surname is from my father's people. It was shortened from
Bruchacek
—“big belly” in Slovak. Yet my identity has been affected less by middle European ancestry and Christian teachings (good as they are in their seldom-seen practice) than by that small part of my blood which is American Indian and which comes to me from a grandfather who raised me and a mother who was almost a stranger to me. I have other names, as well. One of those names is Quiet Bear. Another, given me by Dewasentah, Clan Mother at Onondaga, is
Gah-neh-go-he-yo
. It means “the Good Mind.” There are stories connected to those names, stories for another time.

What do I look like? The features of my face are big: a beaked nose, lips that are too sensitive, and sand-brown eyes and dark eyebrows that lift one at a time like the wings of a bird, a low forehead that looks higher because of receding brown hair, an Adam's apple like a broken bone, two ears that were normal before wrestling flattened one of them. Unlike my grandfather's, my skin is not brown throughout the seasons but sallow in the winter months, though it tans dark and quickly when the sun's warmth returns. It is, as you might gather, a face I did not used to love. Today I look at it in the mirror and say,
Bruchac, you're ugly and I like you
. The face nods back at me and we laugh together.

The rest of me? At forty-two I still stand 6' 2” tall and weigh the 195 pounds I weighed when I was a heavyweight wrestler at Cornell University. My arms and hands are strong, as strong as those of anyone I've met, though my two sons—Jim who is sixteen and 6' 4”, and Jesse who is thirteen and close to 6'—smile when I say that. When they were little their games included “Knock Papa Down.” Each year they've found it a little easier to do. My physical strength, in part, is from my grandfather, who was never beaten in a fight. Like his, the fingers of my hands are short and thick. I hold them out and see the bulges
in the knuckles, the way both my index fingers are skewed slightly and cannot completely straighten. A legacy of ten years of studying martial arts.

Do we make ourselves into what we become or is it built into our genes, into the fate spun for us by whatever shapes events? I was a small child, often alone and often bullied. I was different—raised by old people who babied me, bookish, writing poetry in grade school, talking about animals as if they were people. My grandfather joked when he called me a “mongrel,” a mixture of English and Slovak and “French,” but others said such things without joking. When I was seven I decided I would grow up to be so big and strong that no one would ever beat me up again. It took me nine years to do it. (“Be careful what you really want,” a Tai Chi master told me. “If you really want it, you'll get it.”) My junior year in high school I was still the strange kid who dressed in weird clothes, had no social graces, was picked on by the other boys, scored the highest grades in English and biology and almost failed Latin and algebra. That winter of my junior year my grandmother died. My grandfather and I were left alone in the old house. That summer I grew six inches in height. In my senior year, though clothing and social graces showed little evolution, I became a championship wrestler, won a Regents' scholarship, and was accepted by Cornell University to study wildlife conservation.

How can I now, in only a few pages, cover the next twenty-five years? How can I adequately describe five years at Cornell and the year at Syracuse University, where I held a creative writing fellowship? At Syracuse, told by an expatriate South African writing instructor that my prose was too poetic, I smashed my typewriter in frustration and burned everything I had written. (Carol, my wife of a year, looked out the window of our small rented student housing bungalow and wondered what kind of bear she had married.) What about the Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights movement, the march on Washington and that long walk in Mississippi where James Meredith and Martin Luther King, Stokeley Carmichael and Marlon Brando took water from canteens I lugged up and down the line while state troopers with shiny insect eyes took our photographs with Polaroid cameras, waiting for the night when their eyes
would look out from under white Klan hoods? And what about three years spent in Ghana, West Africa, where I taught in a school by the Gulf of Guinea? The Thunder Cult's drum rumbled at night in the next compound and a mad old man asked me to join him in a visit to Mammy Water under the waves of the man-eating sea. It was in Ghana that our son James raised his arms to the brightness in the night sky and spoke his first word,
Moon
! (I fictionalized my Africa experience in a novel completed in the 1980s. In it a half-breed American teacher discovers himself and his own country through life in a foreign culture—which he finds less foreign than his white expatriate colleagues. It is called
No Telephone to Heaven
.) Then came ten years of teaching in American prisons, and a decade and a half of editing and publishing multicultural writing: my introduction to
How to Start and Sustain a Literary Magazine
(Provision House Press, 1980) is a brief autobiography of my life as an editor. And all of that was made richer and more complicated by twenty years of marriage and sixteen years of learning from two sons—whose accomplishments bring me more pride than anything I've ever done. There isn't space enough here for more than the mention of all those things.

 

I can only go onward by going back to where my memories begin. I was not a black belt in pentjak-silat then, not a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, a Rockefeller Fellow, a published poet, a “well-known Native American writer,” as articles about me usually begin. (Thoreau might have written his famous “simplify, simplify” for the average newspaper journalist. How easily a few ill-chosen words can be used to encapsulate an entire human life!) Then I was only a child, with few experiences and fewer scars. All that I had in common with the person I am now is a confused heritage and the house I lived in then and still live in today. It is an old house with grey shingles, built by my grandfather on the foundation of a house owned by his wife's parents before it was burned down in a feud. It sits on Splinterville Hill, named for the ashwood baskets once made here. Just to the north of us, the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York begin. I look out the window of the bedroom where
Carol and I sleep and see, below the blue spruce trees my grandfather planted, the yard where I used to play.

How many memories of my childhood are my own and not those someone else had of me and told me about when I was older? I know that the image of a fence taller than my hands can reach is my own. I can still feel the chill, slightly rusted surface of its wire mesh against my face, my tongue almost freezing to its surface as I taste it on a day when the frost has glazed its red weave to the shimmer of a mirror. Is that my first memory or does the litter of puppies in Truman Middlebrooks' barn come before it? A warm milk smell of small animals, the sharpness of their teeth, the gentle insistence of their mother's muzzle nudged between me and them, pushing me away to roll on my back in the straw while someone's adult voice laughs. I know I am not being laughed at, so it is my grandfather's laughter that I hear. I never heard my father or my mother laugh when I was a child, and somehow life seemed too serious to my grandmother for her to indulge in much humor, even though she won her battle to keep me from my parents—that battle which I cannot remember but which has been replayed for me from the reluctant memories of those older than I. My grandfather, though, was often joking, often teasing. When he was serious it was a seriousness that no one laughed at.

The memory of me climbing the ladder, unafraid and right behind the old man, all the way to the roof forty feet up when I was only two, was my grandfather's. But it was recited about me so often that it became inseparably associated with my thoughts of my childhood. I know that I always dreamed of flight. I still do fly in my dreams. Its secret is simple—just lift your legs when you're falling and you'll never touch the ground until you're ready. To this day I don't understand why I can't continue to do it in the seconds after I wake from such dreams. But I have faith that eventually I will solve that problem one way or another and float away, with my body or without it. And though I've had some spectacular falls—at least one of which I should never have survived—I still love high places, cliffs and trees and resounding waterfalls. I inherited that fearlessness about high places and dying from my grandfather, just
as I inherited certain stories. Here is one of them which is as much a part of my own fabric as if I had been there when that day was being woven:

My grandparents raised me. I grew up only a quarter of a mile away from my mother and father's home on what we always called “The Farm,” a plot of ninety acres with several outbuildings, which had been the home of my grandparents when they were first married. My grandfather gave The Farm to them after they'd been married a few years and were still living with my grandparents. The room where I type this was my parents' room when I was a baby. They moved to The Farm with my younger sister, and I stayed “for a while” with my grandparents. I sat with my grandfather in the wooden chairs he had made and painted blue and placed in front of his general store: Bowman's Store. I was wearing shorts and my toes couldn't touch the concrete as I dangled them down, using a stick to keep my balance as I stayed in the chair. There was a shadow in front of me. My parents. My grandmother took my hand and led me back into the house. “Get to your room, Sonny.”

There my memory is replaced by that of my other grandmother, the Slovak one who lived three miles away up the South Greenfield road.

Though I did not hear that story until after I was married, I knew that I was important to my grandfather. I realize now I must have been, in part, a replacement for my mother's older brother, who died at birth. I was always close to my grandfather. He delighted in telling how I was his shadow, how I carried my stick just like a spear and followed him everywhere. But, close as I was, he would never speak of the Indian blood which showed so strongly in him. I have a tape recording we made soon after we returned to live with him, back from three years in West Africa to the old house on Splinterville Hill with our new son, his great-grandchild, whose life would start the healing of wounds I had caused by simply being wanted.

Yet I was conscious of the difference, of the way people looked at me when I was with my grandfather. When I was a freshman at Cornell University he came to visit, bringing two of my friends from high school, David Phillips and Tom Furlong. They spent two nights in the dorm, all of them sleeping in my room. My grandfather told everyone that David was my younger brother. They looked at my grandfather and then, more slowly, at me. David was black. When they asked me if it was true, I said, “What do you think?” When the fraternity rushing week came later that semester, I was on more than one “black list.”

I looked at the old man sitting in the front row in Burke's Funeral Home, right next to my grandfather's casket, and my own heart clenched its fist. Then the man looked at us. His face was younger and slightly less dark than that of his last surviving older brother. It was Jack Bowman. Though he lived in Lake George, the home of a more or less underground community
of Abenaki Indian people even today, we had never met him before. In the year we had to get to know Jack before his own heart found a weak aorta less strong than his love for the land and his wife of fifty years, we heard more stories about my grandfather and his family. We also heard some of the denials of Indian ancestry, even though Jack offered no more of an explanation than his brother had for my grandfather's cutting himself off from his own side of the family after he married my grandmother, a woman of high education with degrees from Skidmore and Albany Law School, whose marriage to a semiil-literate and dark-skinned hired man of her father's sparked scandalized comment in Greenfield and Saratoga. In the face of those denials I felt, at times, like one who looks into a mirror and sees a blur over part of his own face. No matter how he shifts, changes the light, cleans the glass, that area which cannot be clearly seen remains. And its very uncertainty becomes more important than that which is clear and defined in his vision.