“It’s not a lie,” my mother said.
During the tumultuous course of her life, my mother told many clever and clumsy lies. As I have said, I think she was an undiagnosed bipolar grandiose fabulist. But, as an adult and indigenous half-assed intellectual, I also realize that she wasn’t lying about walking across the river on the backs of salmon. Well, let’s get it straight. Speaking in terms of history and physics, my mother absolutely did not make that walk across the river. And Big Mom certainly never made that walk either. But they weren’t lying when they claimed to have made that walk. They were telling a story—a fable, if you must—about how the Spokane River once was home to an epic number of wild salmon. If you insist that my mother and grandmother lied about making a footbridge of salmon, then it’s a lie in service of scientific and spiritual truth.
Scientifically speaking, there were endless numbers of wild salmon in the Spokane and upper Columbia rivers before the Grand Coulee Dam was built.
Spiritually speaking, the Spokane Indians and all other Salish tribes worshipped the salmon as passionately as any other people in the world worship their deities.
So, scientifically and spiritually, the Grand Coulee Dam murdered my tribe’s history. Murdered my tribe’s relationship with its deity. And murdered my tribe’s relationship with its future.
For us, the Grand Coulee Dam is an epic gravestone. And we Salish people have been mourning the death of our wild salmon for over seven decades.
What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.
43.
I Turn My Mother Into a Salmon, I Turn Salmon Into My Mother
This fiery summer, my mother is dying Because the streams are too shallow And warm. There is nowhere
For my mother to rest and hide
From the sun and heat and predators.
Experts warn that my mother
Will go extinct in certain bodies of water As the earth grows hotter and hotter.
Yes, my mother will soon be the last Mother to perish in this sacred river.
My mother will be mourned by the trees, And diver birds and hungry grizzlies.
There will be nothing left to deliver Other than centuries of eulogies.
44.
Communion
we worship
the salmon
because we
eat salmon
45.
Storm
It rained salmon
On the day my mother was buried.
The salmon fell to the grass Among headstones
And struggled to breathe.
They wanted to survive.
My siblings and I gathered As many salmon
As we could fit in the baskets Of our arms, in our pockets,
And ran for the river That suddenly flowed through the cemetery.
The salmon were dying.
The river was dead.
But we children dove into the water because We needed the salmon to survive.
46.
C Is for Clan
IN 1938, FIVE years after construction began on the Grand Coulee Dam, a wild salmon made its way to the face of that monolith and could not pass. That was the last wild salmon that attempted to find a way around, over, or through the dam into the upper Columbia and Spokane rivers. That was the last wild salmon that remembered.
The Interior Salish, my people, had worshipped the wild salmon since our beginnings. That sacred fish had been our primary source of physical and spiritual sustenance for thousands of years.
And then, over the course of five short years—after only eighteen hundred days—the endless and ancient wild salmon were gone from our waters.
My mother was two years old when that last wild salmon appeared at the face of the Grand Coulee Dam. My father was in his mother’s womb.
In 1945, when my father was six years old, his father died in World War II. Killed in action on Okinawa Island. Then, six months later, my father’s mother died of tuberculosis, a death as invasive and violent as war.
My mother and father were members of the first generation of Interior Salish people who lived entirely without wild salmon.
My mother and father, without wild salmon, were spiritual orphans.
My father was also orphaned by war and contagious disease.
My siblings and I were conceived, birthed, and nurtured by orphans—by the salmonless and parentless and non-immune.
And now, as I think of my mother’s and father’s salmon-grief, as I think of mourning the wild salmon I had never known, and of mourning the grandparents who died two decades before I was born, I remember a Navajo woman who hated me.
Many years ago, I was the visiting writer at her college, mostly populated by Natives of the Southwest.
“It’s weird to be a salmon boy in the desert,” I said to the students. “I feel extra thirsty.”
Because of my early success, I was younger than most of the students. I was not comfortable being introduced as a possible mentor to older Indians. But I was happy to be among Indians who saw the world through artistic eyes. I thought I fully belonged. I was wrong.
“What’s your clan? What’s your Indian name?” that Navajo woman asked. I had not met her previously. I have not seen her since. She was obviously angry at me. Ready to argue. I think she saw herself as being a real Indian artist and saw me, the world-traveling writer, as something less than artful and also something less than indigenous. I was suddenly involved in an Indian-versus-Indian cultural battle—a fight that I have faced again and again and again and again. Yep, that shit has come at me from all four directions. To paraphrase that tribal elder named Shakespeare, we Native folks are “more than kin and less than kind.”
“What’s your clan? What’s your Indian name?” she asked again. But she was actually asking me to prove how Indian I am. She was the full-blood Navajo. She was a 4/4 Indian. She’d proudly included that fraction in her bio and in her art. I had a Scottish grandparent, so I am a 7/8. I’d also included my fraction in my art, but with far more amusement and discernment. After all, I have grown so much chest hair in my middle age that I suspect my fraction is wrong. I suspect every Native’s fraction is wrong. That Navajo and I were suddenly in an Aboriginal Blood Quantum Test of Wills. She was trying to embarrass me in front of her Indian classmates. And in front of her Indian teacher. And that teacher just sat back and watched. She wasn’t a fan of mine either.
Arggh, I thought. Why do so many Indians do this fucking shit to one another? Why this need to become enemies?
That Navajo was trying to bully me. And my natural instinct was to fight back. I leaned toward her and prepared to verbally attack her—to use my forensic debate and stand-up comedy skills to dismantle and mock her fundamentalism. She was my literary heckler. And hecklers, indigenous or not, need to be embarrassed into silence. It’s the law.