THREE HUNDRED AND seventy-one days after my mother’s death—after enduring what can only be described as the worst year of my adult life—after maternal loss and forest fires and uranium radiation and brain surgery and seizures and more forest fires—and after a fevered and flawed and grief-driven study of family and tribal history, I realize that I am equally a child of Jesuit and Salish cultures.
I might be an atheist—driven more by my reaction to the politics of religion than its practical theology—but I am also the progeny of the mystical Jesus and the mystical salmon. I would argue that Jesus is made of salmon and each salmon is made of many parts of Jesus. And, yes, I know these are contradictory thoughts for an atheist to express.
So what?
If you believers want to corner me—if you force me to choose the Word—then I am going to choose only one word. And that one word is going to be a verb. And that one verb will be “return,” for I am always compelled to return, return, return to my place of birth, to my reservation, to my unfinished childhood home, and ultimately to my mother, my ultimate salmon.
I return to her, my mother, who, in these pages, dies and dies and dies and is continually reborn.
125.
Review, Reprise,
Revision
AT SOME POINT in my childhood—in my early teens—my mother, Lillian, told me the most painful secret of her life. I have repeated this conversation in my head many times over the years. I repeat it in this book. I can’t help but repeat it. I repeat the same words, sentences, and paragraphs. That’s what happens. Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive. And, maybe, this repetition can become a chant inside a healing ceremony.
“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 because of it.”
“Who was the rapist?”
My mother, Lillian, said his name. He was a man who’d died years earlier. I’d never known him, but I knew his children and went to the tribal school with his grandchildren. They were among the tallest kids on the reservation. 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 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 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.
Rape was common on my reservation. But it was rarely discussed. And never prosecuted. Why not? I would guess it has something to do with the strict social rules of a tribe. White folks love to think that Native American culture is liberal. But it is actually repressive. Indians are quick to socially judge one another. And even quicker to publicly condemn and ostracize. I wouldn’t realize it until I read more widely in college, but living on an Indian reservation was like living inside an Edith Wharton novel. Disruption was not tolerated. And I think I know the source of intolerance. For thousands of years, we Spokane had endured and enjoyed subsistence lives. We’d lived communally. Every member of the tribe had a job. And each job was vital. So, inside a subsistence culture, a socially disruptive tribal member would have been mortally dangerous to everybody else.
But there is a logical problem with that, isn’t there? First of all, we were living in the twentieth century and not the fourteenth or fifteenth.
And if that were still true—if socially disruptive tribal members were traditionally punished no matter the century—then wouldn’t it make more sense for the tribe to ostracize and even expel rapists? Well, not if the rapist was a culturally significant figure. Not if the rapist, however economically poor, was socially rich and powerful. Not if the rapist could put on an eagle-feather headdress and make a beautiful and powerful entrance into the powwow arena.
And what would happen inside a small tribe if every minor or major crime, if every small or large transgression, was made public? What if we Natives practiced the same kind of justice inside our own communities as the justice that we demand from white society? Of course, centuries of genocidal acts by white Americans have certainly helped teach us Natives how to commit genocidal acts against one another. But at what point do we Native American victims start demanding more justice and freedom from our Native American oppressors?
And what happens if those indigenous oppressors happen to be our parents?
For over three decades, I believed that one of my biological grandfathers was a rapist.
I thought I was the grandson of rape.
But in July 2016, just over a year after my mother died, I had a telephone conversation with my sister Arlene. We were discussing our half sister, Mary, and her convoluted parentage. I wanted to get the details correct for this memoir.
“Mary was the child of a rape,” my sister said.
“Wait,” I said. “You mean Mom was the child of a rape.”
“No,” she said. “Mom was the child of an affair.”
“No,” I said. “Mom told me she was the child of a rape.”
“She never told me that. Who did she say she was raped by?”
I gave her the name of the accused rapist.
“No,” my sister said. “Mom’s mom was having an affair with him and they got pregnant.”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to laugh. It wasn’t funny. But its awful seriousness is what made it hilarious. Jesus, I’d believed yet another one of my mother’s fabrications. Or wait, maybe my sister had been fooled again by our mother. Or maybe she’d told us two different lies. Would our mother lie about rape?
“And you know what’s really messed up?” my sister said.
“What?” I asked, wondering what could possibly be worse than lying about rape.
“You want to know what our cheating grandma and her cheating boyfriend did?”
“What?”
“Well,” my sister said. “Do you know the name of the cheater’s wife?”
I said her last name.
“Yeah, that’s it,” my sister said. “But do you know what her first name was?”
“No,” I said.
“Guess.”
“Tell me.”