I sobbed again.
“Is this who you’re going to be now?” I asked. “Are you going to call up Indian men and make them cry?”
“That might be good,” Shelly said. “It might be fun to become an old Indian heartbreaker.”
We laughed.
“Your mother knew things that no other Spokane Indian knew,” Shelly said. “Words. Ideas. Stories. Songs. History. It’s all gone now. Buried with your mother.”
I suddenly understood that Shelly had become my teacher. And, maybe, by loving my mother so much and being so loved by my mother in return, Shelly was also my mother’s messenger.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “You are saying amazing things.”
“Oh, I’m just talking,” Shelly said. “Just talking.”
I felt blessed by her words.
“You know,” she said. “Our languages are amazing. Our languages do things that English just can’t do. There’s a word we use in Inchelium. And a word used in Wellpinit, too.”
Shelly said a word in Salish that I did not recognize, but I didn’t ask her to repeat it because I wanted her to keep telling the stories I did understand.
“That word means ‘earth-dream.’ And, depending on how you use it, it means we, the people, are dreaming the earth into being. And it also means the earth is dreaming us, the people, into being. We are dreaming each other. And making each other real. And it means other things, too, that I don’t understand. That I might never understand. But I am going to keep learning.”
Shelly and I said our good-byes and made plans to see each other in person. I told her that I would need to talk to her because of Jim and because of Lillian. I realized that Shelly would become my mother’s voice, at least my mother’s Salish voice. And I realized that my mother, Lillian, had dreamed me into being. And that I had dreamed her, my mother, into being. And that she and I would keep dreaming each other into being.
I don’t know the Spokane word or words that mean “The son dreams the mother as the mother dreams the son.” But I know how to say it in English. I know how to spell it. I know how to put it in a book. And that will make it magic enough for me.
148.
Epigraphs for My Tombstone
1.
You shouldn’t worry If you haven’t lately heard me Tell a joke about death.
I’m just catching my breath.
2.
I’m buried
Two hundred and seventy-nine miles From the graves
Of my mother and father.
That seems perfect.
No closer.
No farther.
3.
If I died
As an elderly man In his unarmored sleep, Then count
My quiet departure As an indigenous victory.
4.
Oh, shit!
Crank the pulleys And lift me into the endless span.
I hope to be remembered As the kind and generous man Who always fought the bullies.
5.
I’m sorry
If I sneeze myself dumb.
But I’m allergic To 78 percent of the dust, Ashes, pollen, and plants That I’ve become.
149.
After Brain Surgery
I forget what I was trying to say.
One word or another gets in the way
Of the word I meant to use. Nothing stays.
I forget what I was trying to say,
So I say something else. I compensate.
Like a broken horse, I’ve learned a new gait.
But wait! Are these the words I meant to say?
I think these rhymes help me to map the way.
I think these rhymes help me to map the way.
But wait! Are these the words I meant to say?
Am I a broken horse? Is this my new gait?
Damn! I’ve lost the path, so I’ll compensate By repeating the words I meant to say.
But these words migrate. They refuse to stay In place. This is my new life. My new way.
I forget what I was trying to say.
150.
Fluent
MY FRIEND SHELLY BOYD, a Colville Indian and dear friend of my late mother’s, made an observation during a dinner that keeps echoing in my head.
She pointed out that my siblings and I might be the youngest people who were raised in a household with two fluent Salish speakers—with a mother and father who were raised in households where they were fluent in Salish before they were fluent in English.
Shelly said, “Both of your parents thought in Salish. They dreamed in Salish.”
But, as I told Shelly, I don’t even think of my late father as being a fluent speaker because he so rarely spoke the language. In my lifetime, I heard him say Salish words maybe ten times.
Sometimes, when she was very angry, my mother yelled at my father in Salish, in the Spokane dialect, and my father listened and listened and listened. And then, maybe two or three times in all those years, he snapped a word or two back at her in Salish, something so powerful and shocking in the Spokane or Coeur d’Alene dialects that it would cause my mother to turn and immediately leave the room.
And yet my siblings and I are not fluent. My brothers and sisters, having lived on the reservation their entire lives, know far more words than me now. Growing up together, we shared the same limited vocabulary. But now, twenty-six years after I last lived on my rez, I can barely count to ten in Spokane.
Our parents did not teach us our tribal language. And that was mostly because of shame. The white government, white military, and white church worked together to shame indigenous people for being indigenous—for speaking the language.
But I also think our parents and grandparents hoarded the language. In a real sense, the original Salish language, in all of its dialects, was the most valuable treasure that any dispossessed Indian could hide—could keep for themselves.
Being fluent is perhaps the last and best defense against American colonialism.
So I think it was a combination of shame and possessiveness that prevented our parents from teaching us to be fluent.
But Shelly also made this observation: “Sherman, I have known you for almost thirty years and you have always been mysterious to me. I don’t understand how your brain works—how you see the world as you do. But I was thinking about you the other day, about being raised by two people with Salish brains. Who always thought first in Salish. Who, since birth and until their death, watched the world with Salish eyes. And so I think that, even though you and your brothers and sisters don’t speak Spokane fluently, maybe all of you have these Salish/English brains that nobody else has. Sherman, I think maybe your English has Salish hidden inside of it.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I have serious doubts that it’s true. But my siblings and I do have a unique relationship with the Salish language, and with its tragic history of destruction, self-destruction, near-disappearance, and recent resurgence.
But the new Salish language is not the same as the old Salish language.
“When a fluent elder dies,” Shelly said, “it’s like a river has disappeared. And inside the disappeared river are Salish words—Salish concepts—that have also disappeared.”