Authors: Multiple
Chapter Eleven
That Wednesday evening, I went to the Community Center to watch
Capricorn play in a basketball tournament. I always watched the audience more
than I did the players. I learned more. I practiced
seeing
, and was
surprised to discover the Barnsdoor girl was pregnant. Pregnant women are also
shiny.
I was taught when you went through the Vision Quest, you were
called in our language a “baby,” because you were being reborn into a new
spiritual life. A pregnant woman carried a baby which meant she was entering
into a new life. A woman who bled meant no new life had been conceived. That
meant for us, a young person undergoing a Vision Quest was at the same level of
a woman who had her period. They were both standing in the Doorway of Life and
Death—it was, after all, the same door—it was about direction. An
initiate was entering a new life—a woman bleeding was in the same
Doorway, but no new life was there. We are taught a woman will have greater
spiritual power than a man, but she will not achieve her full power until after
menopause. This is why many tribes see a Two-Spirit (if they are biologically
male) like me as the same as a post-menstrual female.
It was because I was only halfway paying attention to the game,
while examining the mom-to-be that I noticed there was something wrong. As they
say in Star Wars, there was a disturbance in the Force, although in this case
it was more of a Spiritual stench one could see, rather than smell. I got up
and walked in that direction, curious, but my sight line was blocked by the
fans jumping up and down in the bleachers. I shouldn't have been surprised to
see Mrs. Suskin in her dark wheelchair, pushed to the side where no one would
accidentally bump into her. Justin was noticeably absent. She wore a wing dress
that was such a dark green, it seemed to be made from the shadows of a cedar.
Her braids were a dull gray, covered in the traditional way with a knotted
scarf.
It's amazing how frightening a little old one-legged Indian lady
in a wheelchair could look. For a moment I thought about searching for one of
my older relatives—our mother was at a Forest Resources meeting in
Portland, and Aunt Beans had driven her. But I was young and stupid and that
often passed for appearing brave. As I got older and survived, I eventually
learned to tell the difference.
“You hurt my boy,” she said with little sound, but she still
overrode all the frantic noise of the tournament and the cheers and jeers that
would explode without warning. I wondered how she did that, and if I could
learn to do it too.
“Your boy tried to hurt me in the Longhouse. He may have been
upset with me for reasons I don't really understand, but what he tried to do
was a desecration of the
Kaatnam
. I repeated what I had just said
completely in our language, feeling insulted she had chosen to address me in
English, as if I was too ignorant to know anything but the White Man's tongue.
I kept trying to
see
her, but it was as if she were
surrounded by rolling clouds that hurt to look at. There was an inherent
“wrongness” about what she was doing—it was as if the Harmony and joy
that was so loud around us was being poisoned by her presence. For the first time
I wondered if I were out of my league. Young and stupid could only take me so
far.
She made me think of a time last winter when we were at a
Longhouse on the Coast where we were visiting relatives. An Elder got up to
“Indian Preach.” She stood straight and seemed to be the oldest person I had
ever seen. She began to tell us what it was like when she was a child in a
different century.
“I was ten years old and it was one of those rare days on the
Coast when it was warm and sunny. All I wanted to do was run out in the bright
daylight and play. But I was facing a sink full of dirty dishes, pots, and
pans. I felt overwhelmed, and hated those things that were keeping me from
being outside. I reached down and pulled out a pot of thin aluminum, which was
something new for us in those days. I put my other hand into the soapy water,
and felt a large knife. I grasped it and looked at the pan. I looked at the
knife in my hand. And because I hated that pot so much, I plunged my knife into
it and it went right through.
“I froze, horrified at what I had done and just stared at the
impaled pot. I heard something behind me and turned to discover my grandmother,
who had been watching me the whole time.”
The ancient Elder's voice held us all. I wanted to remember how to
do that. She said, “My grandmother didn't yell at me. She spoke softly and told
me the ones who loved me were outside of the kitchen, but could hear me making
all this noise at the sink. She told me those pans and dishes are what you use
to feed the ones you love. So you treat them with respect, the same way you
would treat a person. You do your work quickly and quietly, and then you're
done.” Then the Elder swept her small dark hands to indicate the whole of the
Longhouse where we were. “When I was a child, I was taught the Longhouse is a
person. The pots and pans—the dishes—they are all people—just
different types of people. You treat them as living people.”
She was silent for a moment and I wondered if she were finished.
Then she took a deep breath and said, “Evil comes when you start treating
people as things. You have to remember to treat all things as people.”
I looked back at Mrs. Suskin and felt I was about to be treated as
a thing—a very unwanted thing. If I were an aluminum pot, she would soon
be piercing my heart with a large knife. The Elder had finished by saying, “Do
you see how the poles hold up the roof?” She pointed to the carved house posts
that showed the different clans of the community—a wolf stacked upon a
killer whale, and a thunderbird at the top. “As long as all the poles are
intact, the weight of the roof is evenly distributed across them and they are
stable. But if one pole breaks, the weight is no longer evenly distributed and
it becomes easier for another pole to break. That's how our laws work. Once you
break one of the laws of Harmony, it becomes easier to break another.”
I wondered how many laws Mrs. Suskin and her kind had broken over
the years. I don't really think I had broken a law with my note to Nathan, but
I was aware I had come very close. I didn't mind being wicked, but I didn't
want to end up old, one-legged and alone in a wheelchair. I thought of the aged
Coastal woman again, and wondered when Mrs. Suskin's poles began breaking. I
remember the Baptist Minister once saying “...I
the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation.
” Was
Justin the fourth generation? Christianity always seemed extremely complicated
to me.
“You must be very lonely,” I said in our language. I used the word
for alone twice, to emphasize the severity, in the way if you say our word for
water twice, it meant “big water,” or River. I looked down at this shriveled
one-legged woman and felt she had been drowning in a river of loneliness for a
long time. I had never heard anyone ever mention her husband, and I considered
the possibility her last name had always been Suskin, and others added “Mrs.”
to be polite. Suskin was not a name I had ever heard of on any reservation I
had visited, other than the woman before me. It wasn't Justin's last name. Even
her name was all alone. I had never known her two sisters—they had died
before I was born.
She looked directly at me for the first time and frowned. “It must
be painful to be so lonely,” I continued, using the word for us that emphasized
an emotional or Spiritual pain rather than a physical one. I deliberately took
a step closer to her, even though I definitely wanted to escape from her as
quickly as I could. Some have been thought brave because they were too
frightened to run away. “I know how much it can hurt being lonely,” I said,
switching to English. “I'm not exactly like everyone else.”
“When you are alone,” she whispered in our language—using
the word for alone twice, “your reward is being pitied by the Spirits who will
fill you with Power.” It took all my strength not to look away from the sour
colored clouds that swirled around her—my eyes were starting to water. I
wasn't technically crying. I suspected what had filled her had come out of the
shadows and not the Light. The Baptist Minister might think I was an
abomination, but I was pretty sure Mrs. Suskin was a corruption. She wasn't
broken because of her leg—her leg was just a reflection of how she was
not a whole person on any level. To be holy a person needed to be
whole—not in body, but in the soul. Mrs. Suskin was neither. The missing
leg was missing the point. She might be content with her Power, but our
grandmother had taught us some things are too costly to win.
I took another step closer, trying not to touch the acrid
Spiritual Power that surrounded her. I sat on the edge of one of the bleachers
so we were on eye level. I wondered what it would be like for Justin to grow up
around this skin-crawling corrupt spirituality. The word my Grandfather had
used when the Baptist Minister asked him to translate Exodus 22:18 for “Witch”
was literally “Two-Hearted.” It meant knowing the Path of the Heart and
deliberately choosing another. It meant a conscious choice of not being part of
the Harmony.
“I can't imagine what it would be like to be told by the White
Doctors you needed to lose your leg.” The swirling ugly mists I was trying to
avoid suddenly froze as if the Creator hit the pause button. I had never
seen
anything like that before. She was still moving slowly within, but didn't seem
to notice that which surrounded her was not.
In my heart I started to sing my Eagle Song, and then hesitated.
An aspect of the Eagle is the warrior. But I realized if I tried to match this
old woman with whatever type of warrior I was at that point, I would lose. She
had the bitter strength of rust, the force of pure bleach that leached away all
of life's colors. Instead I started to sing my Deer Song to myself, because it was
a type of love song and I
saw
this old woman had no real comprehension
of love. The closest she came was a sense of obligation. I suddenly felt pity
for Justin, because obligation did not nourish the soul. Obligation was about
giving others what you choose to give them, rather than giving them what they
needed. What would it be like to grow up in a house where love never walked
through the door?
As I continued to sing inside myself the smokiness around her
Spirit body began to melt, the way the mists will do when the morning sun warms
them. I kept singing and all I could see was a sad little old woman who kept
her leg in a freezer, the way mythic evil villains might keep their hearts
locked away in an egg, or a jar, so the only way they can be killed is by
destroying the isolated heart. “Would you like some tea, Grandma Suskin?” I
stripped away anything but politeness from my voice. She nodded and looked so
small. I went into the kitchen and poured her a cup and returned, placing it
into her hands and thinking I was going to draw a line on pushing her
wheelchair into the restroom later on.
Chapter Twelve
It was years later I found out Aunt Pork had been watching my
whole interaction with Mrs. Suskin, and that she had been ready to intervene if
things had tanked. Funny how I have always loved Aunt Pork, but my loyalty was
with Aunt Beans. Long and long ago Aunt Beans was in the hospital with
phlebitis, and was probably riding on pain meds. She spent a long time telling
me things I never knew. In my later years, I would joke I was an ordinary
member of an extraordinary family. But it was hard for me to imagine what it
would be like to be the youngest sister of the most powerful women of the last
four generations. Stuck to tubes and slightly out of it, Aunt Beans spilled the
beans on what it was like to grow up in the shadows of my mom and Aunt Pork.
The age difference was enough where Aunt Beans often felt left out.
I was proud of the fact she had achieved her own recognition as a
Storyteller when the Smithsonian Museum flew her to the nation’s capital to be
part of a CD featuring Native women from across the United States. That made
the irony all the more painful when a few years later she had a stroke and
became aphasic. To be one of the best Storytellers and no longer being able to
speak—that was like a legend.
There was also Aunt Dizzy, who was their first cousin, which in
our language and tradition is considered the same as a sister. Parenting tends
to skip a generation, since we don't consider someone young to be responsible
enough to raise children. Instead, adults in their child bearing years are
expected to work and bring home the food and resources to feed the extended
family. Elders are the ones who stay home and supervise and teach, since they
have the wisdom and patience to do a decent job. Our word for grandmother is
the same as the word for grandchild, since if you think about it, they have the
same relationship, just as buying or selling is the same process—it just
depends on which side you're on.
This means for us, first cousins have the same relationship to
their grandparents, so first cousins are considered to simply be siblings. That
tends to make our households very fluid, so people move back and forth into the
households of Aunts, Uncles, and other relatives. It also means if you're angry
at a family member, you simply move in with someone else, and another
cousin/sibling takes your place. That's how Aunt Dizzy came to live with my
mother and Aunt Pork.
It was rumored Aunt Dizzy was so open-minded her brain had fallen
out years ago. By the time I was aware enough to pay attention to what was
going on around me, visits from Aunt Dizzy were special events. She had married
well, and had moved to a place on the River that wasn't technically a
reservation, but the Native village had been there since Coyote had shown the
inhabitants how to do gillnetting. Her husband was the latest hereditary leader
of their Longhouse. It was part of their practice to not allow anyone in who
wasn't traditionally dressed. The floor of the Longhouse was the Earth Herself.
It felt so different to dance there.
When the federal court was getting ready to rule on treaty fishing
rights the Today Show sent out a camera crew, wanting to film a Salmon Feast.
This didn't go over very well, since none of the Elders felt it was appropriate
for the songs and ceremonies to be filmed. It was during this time many of the
Native Nations were having “sticker shock.” Early in the twentieth century, the
federal government had funded bilingual educational materials to be created in
the Native language of a community. One of the first things Senator Joseph
McCarthy did before attempting to sniff out every suspected communist in
existence, as well as to blackball as many people as he could in
Hollywood—was to kill Native bilingual education. He took the attitude
Native people were tribal, and that was just a step away from being socialist,
and that was pretty meant communist to him.
When the Indian Education Act was passed in 1972, a number of
bilingual programs were again funded on various reservations. Many Elders were
excited to be asked to come in and teach their language and culture in the same
schools where they had been beaten for speaking their language when they were
students. They worked hard to record their stories and traditions. Then they
discovered how American Law worked. Because the materials were federally
funded, they were now considered to be “owned” by the U.S. Government, and not
by the Native Nations.
This was coupled with a number of books written by White
anthropologists who quietly recorded Elders telling their history and stories,
then copyrighted them in their own name. Because American Courts only
recognized written copyright, and not oral copyright, it was decided
traditional material now belonged to those entrepreneurial Whites.
Just so, it was understandable why NBC cameras were not welcome.
As a compromise, the Today Show aired a few minutes of locals sitting on the
floor of the Longhouse, seated by reed mats. Not the most exciting of footage,
but I was told Aunt Dizzy had a good time bossing the cameraman around.
“This is the way it was,” Aunt Dizzy had once explained, seeing I
was bored and plotting to act out during a Salmon Feast. She began with the
standard introduction of a legend, so that got my attention. I must have been
around five. Taurus was beside me and had fallen asleep, which I remember
thinking was funny. “A young man from our People fell in love with a woman of
the water. Her father invited him to join them for a Salmon Feast like the one
we're having now. The foods were placed just as they are today.”
I yawned. Aunt Dizzy frowned. “The Salmon Chief instructed the
young man he must make sure and return every single bone he had found in the
salmon he had been given to eat. The young man thought this odd, so he took a
single bone he had found in his portion and placed it between his cheek and his
gum. At the end of the Feast, the Chief gathered the bones in a basket and went
to the River. He seemed to be ready to throw the bones into the water, but
stopped. Then he did this a second time. Then a third time. On the fourth
movement, he threw the bones into the water. The River began to boil and
bubble, and from the center of this liquid violence, the youngest son of the
Salmon Chief stepped out. But to everyone's horror, when the boy set foot on
land, he was limping.
“One of you has kept a bone of his!” the Chief accused. The young
man took the bone he had been hiding out of his mouth and returned it to the
boy's father. Quickly he repeated the ritual, and this time when the boy
stepped on to the land, he was whole again. “This is the way it will be between
our two Peoples,” the Chief told the young man. “If you enact the ritual when the
first salmon of the run is caught, then our People will continue to return and
feed your People.”
I suspect babysitting for us was the reason she put off having
children of her own for several years. When I didn't react to her story, she
asked me, “How do you stop a fish from smelling?” I just looked at her. “You
cut off its nose.”