“In a month,” I said. “At the Native American Music Awards.”
My wife looked into my eyes. We’ve been in love for twenty-five years. We know the what of the what about each other.
“I can’t do it,” I said. “My brain. I will get too tired. I don’t want to get all exhausted and start having seizures again. I have to stay home. And I don’t want to fall over if Shelly is there. I’m not going to die, but think how much that would traumatize her.”
“I know,” she said. “You have to tell her you can’t go.”
But I didn’t want to hurt Shelly’s feelings, so I performed a highly sacred indigenous trick: I avoided making a final decision by avoiding the person who needed me to make my final decision. This didn’t work when Indian tribes tried to avoid signing treaties with the U.S. government, and it didn’t work when I tried to avoid Shelly.
A few days after she’d asked me to consider performing at the tribute, Shelly texted me: “If you and/or Diane have time, I’m in town till Wednesday morning if you want to meet for lunch or dinner. I’m visiting the Burke.”
Located on the University of Washington campus, the Burke Museum has a cool collection of Native American art and artifacts. I’m not always a big fan of Native American museums or the Native collections of larger museums. I feel like museums too often lock us Natives in the past, but the Burke does a good job of honoring contemporary Native Americans while honoring our past. Plus, they have an Egyptian mummy in private storage, and drawers filled with bird wings.
After I read Shelly’s message about the Burke, I called her.
“Hey, it’s Sherman,” I said. “You better watch out. You’re so Indian and beautiful, the Burke might catch you and put you in an exhibit.”
“I’ll be all right as long as they put me in a canoe,” Shelly said. “And feed me lots of salmon.”
“It’ll be good salmon, too,” I said. “Remember, they still have wild salmon on this side of the mountains.”
“That sounds better than how my life is going now,” she said. “I might do it.”
I could hear the grief in her voice. I didn’t want to disappoint her about the tribute. But I had to tell her the truth.
“Shelly,” I said. “I’m sorry. But I can’t do the show in Buffalo. I think it would cause me problems. I get so tired now. I would be too exhausted.”
“Oh, Sherman, I understand. But I’m sad. We were thinking we’d get some of Jim’s musician friends to learn one of the songs you and Jim did together. And then you’d perform it with his friends and that would be the tribute.”
“Oh, God,” I said, and cried into the phone, fully understanding for the first time that Jim and I would never again perform together. I felt the full force of my grief.
“Oh, Shelly,” I said, barely getting out the words. “I don’t think I could even make it through the first few bars of the song. I don’t think I’d be able to talk.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” Shelly said. “Sometimes I can barely talk about Jim.”
“The sadness snuck up on me there,” I said. “It hit me hard like a storm.”
I realized at that moment that I’d have to stop listening to Jim’s music for a while. In my family, we cut our hair to grieve death. In 2003, I’d scissored off my ponytail after my father died. And I never grew it back. I became a short-haired Indian. For my mother’s death, I had no hair to cut. But I am writing this book about her. For Jim’s death, I would have to put away the music he and I wrote together. I didn’t know when I would be able to listen to it again.
“I miss Jim,” I said to Shelly. “I am always going to miss him.”
“I am going to miss him forever, too,” she said. “You and I are alike. Because I am going to miss your mom forever, too.”
I knew that Shelly and my mother had grown closer over the years. But I hadn’t realized how close. I also knew that Shelly had, for personal and spiritual reasons, decided to learn how to speak her tribal language. My mother was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language, a dialect related to Shelly’s language. Some words are the same or similar. Most are not.
“Your mom was so supportive of us learning our language,” Shelly said. “She encouraged us so much. I always wished she lived in Inchelium so we could hear her talk all the time. It’s a different language, I know, but we wanted to hear your mother speak it. We wanted to hear her fluency. We learn the language now, and we know phrases and we can talk to each other. But not like your mom. I told her she should come talk to us in her language. I told her she could talk about cutting her toenails and it would be beautiful to us.”
“She never taught us how to speak the language,” I said.
And Shelly said, “She didn’t teach you because she loved you.”
That made me weep again. I couldn’t talk for ten or fifteen seconds. And then I said, “Oh, Shelly, I have never heard it that clear.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “you don’t know something is true until you hear it for the first time.”
And I understood that Shelly, in learning to speak her tribal language, had tapped into something ancient and powerful. In reclaiming her language, Shelly now understood something beautiful and painful about the loss of language. And she had just taught me what she had learned. She had said it in English, but it spoke to my soul in the old way.
I realized that my mother had not taught us the tribal language because she knew her children would not be strong enough to carry the responsibility of being the last fluent speakers. She protected us from that spiritual burden. She protected us from that loneliness.
During my teen years, my mother sometimes said to me, “Junior, English will be your best weapon.” I had always understood that as a motivational sentence, but I now realize it was also about love. And how psychic was my mother about my relationship with English? At the very least, she perfectly predicted my eventual job description.
“Before your mom got really sick,” Shelly said, “she was supposed to come to Inchelium and talk in Spokane to us. She was going to tell us stories. And then a big snowstorm hit. And closed us off from the east, west, and south. But the north was open. Isn’t that funny? A big snowstorm but the north was open.”
I cried as I listened to Shelly speak.
“Your mom called me and cried,” Shelly continued. “She couldn’t get through the snow. She was so sad. You know, Sherman, I get so mad at some of the people in your tribe. Your mom knew all the words, and those people wouldn’t use your mother’s knowledge. They wouldn’t let her teach anywhere.”
I thought of how difficult my mother had been over the years. About how many enemies she made within our tribe. And then I thought about how my mother and I had stopped fighting but had never truly reconciled. I thought about my poor, poor mother trying to reconcile with our tribe—with her enemies—and being turned away.
“Shelly,” I said. “Mom and I struggled with each other over the years.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I know.”