During my childhood, my father would often take me on long drives around his reservation. He’d mostly tell me stories about his athletic successes and failures. Sometimes, my father would park on the shoulder of a rez back road—a dirt-and-gravel one-lane history book—and then he’d stare out the window and remember things that he never shared with me. He’d gently ignore me. He wanted me to travel with him. He wanted my presence. But not my words. So I’d gently ignore him back and read my books and comic books.
On those road trips, my father would sometimes visit his great-aunt Mary Agath(a) Alexie, but I’d stay in the car. She looked so old that it was intimidating. As a child, I didn’t have the words to describe what Great-Aunt Mary evoked in me, but now I think it was something like Holy shit, I am never, not once in my life, gonna be as Indian as that Indian is Indian. I worried she might be a ghost. That was irrational, I know, but my father spent part of his childhood among Indians who were alive when Custer and Crazy Horse were battling each other. My father was alive on the reservation with a few old Coeur d’Alene Indians who had gone to war against George Wright and the Ninth U.S. Cavalry. My father toddled among indigenous warriors who had shot arrows at white soldiers.
There is a photo of my father with his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. In the absence of my father’s stories—of his personal oral tradition—I only have photographs like this. I have studied it for hours. I love most the expression of my father’s mother’s face. Susan Alexie. The grandmother I never knew. So she’s more like a stranger. No. That’s not the right word. She’s more like an idea. She’s the Idea of a Grandmother. She is pregnant with my aunt Ellen, who would die of diabetes during my first year at Reardan. But, in that old photo, my grandmother appears to be looking at something or someone out of frame. Not her husband, since he was already serving in the U.S. Army. Whom is she looking at? And what is that expression on her face? Bemusement? Suspicion? Irritation? Shyness? She is the indigenous Mona Lisa.
Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don’t know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I could write “I don’t know” one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.
My father was only six years old when his mother and father died. I’d love to think that he didn’t remember his parents—that time had erased his memory. But I can remember things that happened to me when I was only six. And it’s not the good stuff that I recall. No. It’s the most traumatic shit that plays in the 3D IMAX Theater of My Mind. So I know that my father remembered his dead parents. But he never said one word to me about them, not ever.
90.
Genocide
Grief is a sea
Creature, a predator Newly discovered, Or so you believe,
Until you remember, Genetically,
That this same grief Hunted your mother
And your father
And your grandparents And all of the women And men who created you.
What happens to humans Who live as prey?
We are furious, furious, Furious, and afraid.
91.
Greek Chorus
THE UNITED STATES did not believe the forest fire burning through the uranium mine presented any danger to the Spokane Indian community.
92.
Roller Ball
I SAW YOUR mom yesterday,” Pernell said. “At church.”
“So?” I asked.
Pernell was a nice Indian boy. He’d always been kind to me. We were reservation sixth-graders who’d never punched each other. That qualified as a close friendship. Some people called him Jack. I sometimes called him Jack, too. I have no idea how a kid ends up being named Jack and Pernell. And, no, Pernell wasn’t his last name and I don’t think his middle name was Jack or Pernell.
“Your mom sang a solo in the choir,” Pernell said. “She sings really good.”
My mother had a lovely singing voice. But I’d only heard her singing along with her favorite country songs or with Elvis. I’d rarely heard her sing any Christian spirituals because I’d never gone to church with her. She never asked or forced us kids to go to any of the various Christian churches she’d attended over the years. Inside our family, we children were allowed to practice the religion of our choice. I was vaguely Catholic for a time, then became an Assembly of God kid in order to romantically pursue a white girl from a little white town. She rejected me, so I quit going to that church. I quit all churches—white, Native, or anything else. Like most Indians nationwide, my sisters turned the powwow into their sole spiritual pursuit. My big brother has never made any declaration of faith, and my little brother became a fundamentalist Christian after marrying into a white Evangelical family. Our father was a childhood Catholic who spent his adulthood using vodka and fiery chili as his only Eucharist.
And now, as I write this, I realize that I’d rarely heard my mother sing any traditional Spokane songs—neither the formal religious hymns nor the casual stick-game gambling songs. She was always on the powwow trail, traveling from reservation to reservation to watch the dancers and drummers, but she didn’t sing along. Or maybe she did sing along. I don’t know. I rarely traveled to powwow with her. I was too busy playing basketball and reading books.
Spiritually speaking, my mother was as unknowable to me as any of her gods.
“And then after your mom was done singing in the choir,” Pernell said, “I saw your mom rolling in the aisle and speaking in tongues.”
“No way,” I said. “She was probably just speaking Spokane.”
My mother was one of the few tribal members who were still fluent in the old way of speaking Spokane.
“It wasn’t Indian talk,” Pernell said. “It was her Jesus voice.”
There were quite a few Spokane Indians who fell in love with Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. I think it’s rather easy for a universally damaged people like Native Americans to believe wholeheartedly in miracles, in the supernatural. But I’d never thought of my mother as a Spokane who’d go that far.
“I’m not lying,” Pernell said.
“I believe you, Jack,” I said, though I hoped he was mistaken.
When I got home from school, I immediately asked my mother if she’d been speaking in tongues.
“Yes,” she said.
“Weird,” I said, and walked downstairs to my room. I figured my mother was pretending to speak in tongues. She was just acting, I thought. It’s like a one-woman show, I guessed. My mother had always been so dramatic. And what’s more dramatic than an Indian woman rolling down the aisle of a little reservation church?
I tried to put it out of my mind, to allow my mother to freely practice her religion as much as she allowed me to fully practice my nonreligion. But, a few weeks later, I crawled out of my Sunday-morning slumber and walked the mile to her church.