I also remember when an adult community member in Reardan publicly objected to me being named basketball team captain. He said, in my presence, that only a “local boy” should be captain. I wish I’d been rowdy enough to point out that I’d been local for at least forty-five thousand years. This is the same guy who, after he read my novel about my first year in Reardan, wrote me to ask why I had to invent racist white characters.
And I also remember the pep rally where my great friend and fellow Spokane Indian and basketball star, Steve, and I were wildly cheered by our schoolmates. Steve had transferred to Reardan the year after I did and had become quite popular, too.
As Steve and I were being celebrated, one of our white teammates leaned over and said, “You let two Indians in and they think they own the place.”
Once again, I wish I’d been rowdy enough to tell my teammate to shut the fuck up because Spokane Indians had inhabited, if not officially owned, that very land for millennia.
Of course, I could tell you far more stories about the kindness of many Reardan folks than about the racism of a select few. And I could also tell you about the incongruent kindness of some racists. But I must point out that I was most often subjected to active and passive racism when I threatened the status quo—when I was the Native student who was smarter than the white kids or when I was a better basketball player or debater or actor or comedian or public speaker. Or, most revealingly, when a white girl fell in romantic like or love with me.
In Reardan, I was subjected to racism when certain white folks feared I was taking something away from them.
I was subjected to racism when certain white folks were afraid of me, the indigenous usurper.
So, in the context of the 2016 presidential election, does any of this sound familiar?
In 2016, white conservatives elected as president a serial liar who is likely the most fearful and paranoid and wildly insecure white man who has ever run for the office.
And those white folks elected him because they believe they are victims. Yes, I am a Spokane Indian—an indigenous American—who grew up with white folks who think this country is being stolen from them.
Hahahahahaahahahahaahahahaahahahaha.
I wonder if I could have changed a few votes if I’d campaigned for Hillary Clinton in Reardan and the rest of Lincoln County. I completely doubt it. I graduated high school over three decades ago and haven’t stopped or spent any time in Reardan for over eleven years. The last I heard, my books are not taught in the school because they are “inappropriate” for the intended audience.
I wonder what my old Reardan friends think of me. I would guess they’re proud of my success but chagrined and unsurprised by my continuing liberalism.
I wonder if any of them thought about me when they voted for Trump. I wonder if they remember how much they loved and were loved by me. I wonder if they know they’ve helped place me, a public-figure brown-skinned liberal, in danger. How much of that danger is real? I don’t know. I am getting death threats. But I am more afraid of the quieter forms of right-wing anger and sociopathy that have found power with Donald Trump’s election. I never directly feared for my life and career during a Republican presidency until Trump won the office. I have never felt so scared for the peace and safety of the entire world.
And I fear that Reardan, the place where I was so loved and accepted and celebrated, is now just another little white town that I, in the name of personal and professional safety, might need to avoid.
Dear Reardan, I am afraid of you.
Does that make you sad? Or angry at me?
Dear Reardan, dear old friends, dear old lovers, do you realize that when you voted for Trump, you voted against me—against the memory of the person I used to be in your lives?
I was the indigenous immigrant, the first generation of my family to ever fully commit himself to the world outside of the reservation. I was the eccentric brown boy. I was the indigenous leftist. And for five years in the 1980s, I was a transformative figure. I made that little white town into a slightly more diverse and inclusive and accepting place.
Or maybe I didn’t do any of that. Maybe I was just a cultural anomaly. And though many Natives—many Spokanes—have attended Reardan since I graduated and have maintained friendships and marriages with white people, I wonder if all of that is superficial. I wonder if my friendships in Reardan have always been superficial. Maybe I was loved only because of the ways in which I was not seen as typically and stereotypically Native. Maybe I was loved only in part. Maybe I was celebrated only in proportion to the positive press I brought to the town and school. And maybe, in this Trump era, I would now be ostracized and vilified in Reardan for being who I have always been.
In order to survive, I always knew I’d have to leave the tribe of my birth, leave the limited and limiting Spokane Indian Reservation, but I am only now realizing that, in order to keep surviving, I also had to flee from my other place of birth, from the equally limited and limiting Reardan, from all those white folks who became another tribe for me.
I have always been an escape artist.
Escaping is what I do.
So, old Reardan friends, if you don’t hear from me for a while, then it means I am trying to escape you.
80.
I Am My Own Parasite
I dreamed that my spine was a spider and my ribs were its legs.
It revolted and molted me, leaving me husked in the dirt
While it put on my two best trousers and two best shirts,
And scuttled onto the stage, to claim that my rage, And all of my stories and poems, hatched from its eggs.
81.
Tribal Ties
Please remember As you read my brutal poems
About rape and murder And assault and dangerous
Loneliness ripped From the earth
Like uranium—please Remember as you read
These poems about My dead mother
And my dead father And all of my childhood
Pandemonium—
Please remember,
As I weep
Inside
My verse,
That nearly every Indian kid
I knew
Had it worse.
82.
Want List
I don’t want to miss my mother. I don’t Want my want to be tangible. I don’t want My tangible want to be elemental. I don’t want my Mother to be a baptismal fire.
I don’t need my mother to be clay and silt. I don’t Need my mother to be that basalt ridge. I don’t need My mother to be that evergreen. I don’t need my Mother like I need the enduring earth.
I don’t love minor chords. I don’t
Love every piano in the world. I don’t love My stereo’s choir. I don’t love my
Mother as much as I love song-drunk air.
I don’t grieve everybody that I have lost. I don’t Grieve damned and dammed rivers. I don’t grieve My way like a salmon through the dark. I don’t grieve my Mother like I grieve the sacred waters.
I don’t grieve my mother. I don’t grieve My mother. I don’t grieve my mother.
I don’t place my mother upon the pyre— Yes, I do, yes, I do. I’m a goddamn liar.
83.
The Staging
In the weeks after my mother’s death, I sleep Four or five hours a night, often interrupted By dreams, and take two or three naps a day.