“Okay—,” I said as a dozen improvised insults synapsed through my brain.
But then I relaxed. Breathed deep. Cleaned my teeth with my tongue. I didn’t want to be the indigenous man arguing with an indigenous woman—didn’t want to re-create the domestic strife that had existed in my childhood home—didn’t want to replay what had likely happened in many of those students’ lives. I didn’t want to turn that Navajo woman into an avatar for my mother. No, I could not teach the class anything by arguing. But maybe I could teach them how to disarm—how to mitigate—how to step away with grace. That Navajo artist had likely targeted other people in the room. And I’m sure some of the other men and women were also anger-junkies. And, yes, I’m an anger-junkie, too.
But not that day. Not that day.
So I smiled, leaned back in my chair, and said, “I was not raised inside a clan structure. My parents are from different tribes and raised us to be powwow-goers and basketball players. My sisters know how to jingle. And my brothers and I know how to dribble.”
The other Indians in the class laughed. I assumed some of them came from powwow and basketball families like me. And, of course, they all knew, like all Natives know, a thousand powwow nomads and Indian basketball players. And, sure, in most ways, powwows and basketball are pop culture for Indians, but it’s pop culture with applied sacredness. Or something like that.
I just tried to be funny, okay, okay, okay?
But that angry Navajo woman didn’t laugh. She wanted none of it. She stood and left the room.
I regret that I did not directly and seriously challenge that other artist’s aesthetic—her working definition of indigenous art—with my own.
“What’s your clan? What’s your Indian name?” the Navajo woman had asked me.
So, please, let me properly answer her question now.
My name is Sherman Alexie.
Yes, I have an Indian name. But I ain’t going to share it with you. I learned a long time ago that the only way to keep something sacred is to keep it private. So, yeah, you might think I reveal everything, but I keep plenty of good and bad stuff all to myself.
On my mother’s side, I was born into the Clan of Busted Promises and Dynamite and White Man’s Hydroelectric Concrete.
On my father’s side, I was born into the Clan of Sniper and Head Shot and Posthumous Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
On my mother’s side, I was born into the Clan of Rivers Flowing with Wild Salmon Ghosts.
On my father’s side, I was born into the Clan of Bloody and Broken Lungs.
And all of us Spokanes and Coeur d’Alenes, after the Grand Coulee Dam, have been born into the Clan of Doing Our Best to Re-create and Replicate the Sacred Things That Were Brutally Stolen from Us.
My name is Sherman Alexie and I was born from loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss.
And loss.
47.
Apocalypse
There is a salmon swimming from star to star.
Some name it Comet. Some name it Distant Light.
There is a salmon returning to our sky.
Some name it Constellation. Some name it Moon.
There is a salmon swallowing the earth.
Some name it Black Hole. Some name it God.
48.
Creation Story
I catch the salmon
With my bare hands
And offer it
To my mother.
She opens the fish
And finds
A city of Indians
Living among the thin bones.
49.
The Loss Extends in All Directions
AFTER WE BURIED our mother, my big brother, little brother, and me and our cousins sat in the tribal longhouse and ate salmon.
“Hey,” my big brother said. “What’s the Spokane word for salmon?”
We all looked at one another and were embarrassed to realize none of us knew.
“Man,” my cousin said. “If there’s any Spokane word we should know, it’s the word for salmon.”
It wasn’t funny. But we laughed anyway.
50.
Revision
AT SOME POINT in my childhood—in my early teens—my mother, Lillian, told me the most painful secret of her life.
“Junior,” she said. “I am the daughter of a rape.”
“What?” I asked, unsure that I’d heard her correctly.
“A man raped my mother. And she got pregnant with me.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “When did this happen? Are you okay? Did he go to jail? Who was the rapist?”
My mother said his name. He was a man from another tribe who’d died years earlier. I’d never known him, but I knew his children and his grandchildren. They were tall kids. Unlike my siblings and parents, I was tall, too. I’d always wondered why I was so much taller than the rest of my family. Why I was darker. I’d sometimes worried that perhaps I wasn’t my father’s biological child. But I have the same widow’s-peak cowlick—a rebellious lock of black hair that defies styling—as my father. My biological older brother and my younger twin sisters have that cowlick, too. Plus, as I’ve aged from a skinny dark kid into a chubby paler man—having lived in sunless Seattle for twenty-three years—I have come to more strongly resemble my father and my siblings.
But not in height.
“The man who raped your mother,” I said. “Your father—”
“He’s not my father,” my mother said. She was understandably angry. “My father is James Cox, the man who raised me.”
I was always afraid of her anger. Everybody was afraid of Lillian’s anger. We were always trying to mollify her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The rapist. Was he tall?”
My mother immediately understood what I was asking.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s where you get your height.”
I didn’t ask my mother anything else. I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary. And I’m not sure she had the emotional vocabulary either. I would eventually talk about my mother’s story, but that would be years after I’d first learned of her violent conception.