It’s more bullshit, right? I was just another kid with acne, yes? And, okay, my acne was more extensive and long-lasting than most other people’s acne. But that is all scientifically explainable, isn’t it? After all, I was a poor Indian teenager who had left his tribe for a town full of white strangers so HORMONES + STRESS + POOR HEALTH CARE = HORRIFIC ACNE.
When I was a kid, I once asked my mother if suumesh was real. And she said, “It’s real if you believe it’s real.” As an adult, I once asked my mother why she didn’t get me better health care for my skin. And she said, “I didn’t think there was anything that could be done.”
If my mother were still alive, I think I would ask her if there was ever a time when she felt powerful.
As for me? Well, my life is miraculous. I tell stories for a living. How amazing is that? As a storyteller, I sometimes feel like the most traditional kind of Indian. And, once in a great while, I feel like I possess a shard of that good suumesh.
But I have rarely allowed anybody to touch the most sensitive skin on my back. I’ve ordered massage and physical therapists to avoid my scars. I have never allowed myself to be that vulnerable, not even to my wife of twenty-four years.
I don’t believe that I was cursed by an enemy—I don’t actually believe in suumesh—but I still wouldn’t be shocked to learn that I’ve been continually cursing myself for leaving my reservation, for fleeing from my tribe, for abandoning the place where my mother was born and where she died.
So, yes, sometimes, I stand at my mirror and I strain my neck and turn my head so I can see the full of my back. And, yes, I still feel disfigured.
Look at those scars, the mirror whispers.
Look at those scars.
Look at those scars.
That is the skin of the boy who changed his destiny.
76.
Missionary Position
IN MY RURAL conservative Christian public high school, twenty-two miles from my reservation, I was the only Indian except for the mascot.
That’s the one-line joke about my racial isolation.
Truthfully, by the time I graduated, I was one of five Indians in that high school. Two of them were my sisters.
Despite this racial isolation, I was, at various times, the captain of the basketball team, president of the Future Farmers of America, and prom royalty.
During my sophomore year, as I shared a table at the local pizza place with five white friends, we watched a drunk and disheveled Indian stagger inside and slump at the bar. He yelled unintelligibly, then sang and finger-drummed a powwow rhythm on the bar top. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t a member of my small tribe. But I was deeply embarrassed. We were the only Indians in the place. We were connected by race and culture if not by tribe and blood.
My white friends were visibly distressed by that loud singer and drummer. One of my friends, whom I shall call Tara, leaned forward and whispered, “I hate Indians.”
My four other white friends gasped, but it took Tara a few moments to remember that she was sitting beside me, her Indian friend. She burst into tears and spent the rest of the night apologizing.
“It’s okay,” I kept saying. But it wasn’t. I was hurt, ashamed, and angry.
If I’d had parents I trusted, I might have hurried home and shared that experience with them. I might have learned about all of the times they’d dealt with overt and covert racism. They might have taught me strategies for how to emotionally and physically deal with racism. But I didn’t have parents like that. I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that my father and mother would have offered useful advice to me. I had to live as an Indian in the anti-Indian world without proper training. I had to teach myself how to practice racial self-defense, and I made some profound, amateurish mistakes.
Tara and I eventually dated for nearly three years. We talked about marriage. We lived together. She was always kind. I gave her a promise ring that I bought for twenty dollars in a pawnshop. When we broke up for the last time, she gave me back that promise ring. And I sold it for ten dollars back to that pawnshop.
That pawnshop is closed now.
What happens to the inventory of a closing pawnshop?
I would guess it is sold to another pawnshop.
A pawnshop buys a pawnshop.
I imagine that a poor man—as poor or poorer than I was—eventually bought that promise ring and gave it to the woman he loved.
That promise ring, small and lovely and inexpensive, is probably now buried in the jewelry box of that woman, who received a better ring when her husband could afford it later in their life together. But she keeps that first ring as a reminder of who she used to be.
I was once an Indian boy who was once in love with a white girl who once hated Indians.
This is a love story, I think.
77.
Shush
DURING HIGH SCHOOL, my white girlfriend’s mother warned her to never go to the reservation with me.
“Why not?” I asked my girlfriend.
“My mom said that Indians are too angry.”
Laughing at the casual racism, I later told my mother what my girlfriend had said.
“What your girlfriend’s mother doesn’t know,” my mother said, “is that you’re the Indian around here who has the worst temper.”
Because of my childhood hydrocephalus and resultant brain surgery and seven years of seizures, petit and grand, along with addiction to several painkillers and sedatives, I was prone to blackout rages where somebody bigger had to sit on me to keep me from running through walls.
I once spent hours repeatedly crashing into a smallish pine tree until it broke and fell.
That was me, the lumberjack of irrational anger, the ax of self-destructive wounding, the sharp blade of get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here.
That white girlfriend never did visit my reservation home.
But I married a Native American woman, a powerful Hidatsa, who’d spent time on my reservation before I met her.
“Before I went to your rez,” my wife said, “all the Indians in Spokane—all the Indians who weren’t Spokane—said you Spokanes were mean.”
“And?” I asked.
“You Spokanes are mean,” my wife said. “Not with fists. But with words. I never met Indians so good at teasing each other—at burning people with insults.”
“What about me?” I asked. “Am I mean?”
“You aren’t mean to me with words,” she said. “You’re mean to me with your silences.”
“Wow,” I said, feeling seen. “You know, there was a three-year period in college when my mother and I didn’t say a word to each other, even if we were in the same room. Even if we were in the same car.”
“Why did you guys stop talking?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“What made you start talking again?”
“I don’t remember that either.”
“You should ask your mom,” my wife said. “Maybe she remembers.”
“Asking my mom about a fight,” I said, “is like asking my mom to fight again. We probably stopped talking to each other because I reminded her of some other time when we weren’t talking to each other.”
“You’re scared of your mother, aren’t you?” my wife asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“So am I,” my wife said.
And we laughed.
78.
Harvest