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.
It seems like enough. I can survive if I keep
This sleep schedule as it has been constructed
For me. But if it seems my reflexes are delayed,
Or if I sway when I walk, or weep or do not weep,
Please don’t worry. I’m not under destruction.
My grief has cast me in a lethargic cabaret.
So pay the cover charge and take your seat.
This mourning has become a relentless production
And I’ve got seventy-eight roles to play.
84.
&n
bsp; Assimilation
DRIVING IN THE Cascade foothills, I stop for the deer that had already stopped for me.
Growing up on the reservation, by choice and desperation, we ate almost every animal that walked, swam, or flew.
In my rez youth, I would have seen that roadside deer and thought, “Food.”
In my urban adulthood, I saw that deer and talked to him. I rolled down my window and said, “You are way too tame, Mr. Four Point. Somebody is gonna shoot your ass.”
85.
Litmus Test
AFTER READING MY stories and poems, people often ask me, “Why did your father drink so much?”
But some strangers, the ones who know the most about pain, hear my father’s tragic story, and they ask, “Damn, why didn’t he drink more?”
86.
Standardized
Achievement
I wonder if my mother is at rest
Or if she’s laughing at her bequest:
A rigorous seventy-eight-question test
That quantifies our devotion & grief.
This test will be proctored by a machine
That thinks “slight misdeed” & “fucking stampede
Of maternal rage-horses” are synonyms.
Or maybe everyone sits for this quiz
And writes long essays about phantom limbs
And how we children ache in that place—
Now sterilized & amputated—
Where our good and bad mothers graced.
87.
Everything You Need to Know About Being Indigenous in America
IN AUGUST 2015, as a huge forest fire burned on my reservation, as it burned within feet of the abandoned uranium mine, the United States government sent a representative to conduct a town hall to address the growing concerns and fears.
My sister texted me the play-by-play of the meeting.
“OMG!” she texted. “The government guy just said the USA doesn’t believe the forest fire presents a serious danger to the Spokane Indian community, even if the fire burns right through the uranium mine.”
88.
Fire
IN AUGUST 2015, a forest fire burned nearly forty thousand acres on my reservation in eastern Washington State. Over three hundred miles away, in Seattle, I was able to log on to a U.S. Forest Service website and watch satellite images of that growing fire. Updated regularly, the images were snapshots of destruction. I was afraid for my siblings living only a few miles from the southern edge of the blaze.
“We’ve been ordered to prepare for evacuation,” my sister texted me. “We’ve loaded up the two cars with the most important stuff.”
“What stuff?” I texted back.
“All the photo albums,” she texted. “And all the beaded stuff. And quilts. And the jewelry. And everybody’s powwow regalia. And the Indian paintings.”
“Good,” I texted back. It had been only a few weeks since our mother died—since grief had started a flash fire in our bones—and now my brothers and sisters were facing another fire, which threatened to burn everything else.
“Can you see the fire?” I texted my sister.
“We can see huge smoke clouds on the horizon,” she texted. “The sky and the smoke are glowing orange.”
“Reflecting the fire probably,” I texted.
“Yes,” she texted. “It is scary and beautiful.”
Grief is scary and beautiful, too, I thought, but did not text. I wondered if you can look at smoke clouds and see objects and animals like you can do with regular clouds floating in the sky. I wondered, if I had been standing beside my sister, if I would have seen our late mother’s face in the smoke.
Yes, yes, yes, I would have forced myself to see her in the smoke. I would have invented her face. And thinking of my mother’s face made me think of the paintings of Indian faces hanging on the walls of my childhood home.
“The paintings you put in the car?” I texted my sister. “You mean the ones Dad bought?”
“Yes,” my sister texted.
I laughed. My father’s paintings were cheap shopping-mall art that depicted wise Indians in eagle-feather headdresses floating majestically over golden desert landscapes. My sisters had packed those corny paintings in their cars along with family and tribal heirlooms that would fit beautifully in any Native American museum.
l laughed at the dichotomy between Indian art and Indian kitsch. And then I laughed at us, the Indians, who were equally in love with that same art and kitsch.
I laughed because I would have saved those silly paintings, too.
“Is the air okay?” I texted.
“It hurts a little to breathe,” my sister texted back. “But we’re okay.”
Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we’re okay?
“If you have to evacuate, where will you stay?” I texted.
“They have shelters in Reardan and Airway Heights,” my sister texted back.
“No,” I texted. “Just call me if they make you evacuate and I’ll get you hotel rooms with kitchens.”
“Okay,” she texted. “Thank you.”
Over the years, I’d often had to give money to my parents and siblings to save them from their own bad decisions. And I’d often been angry about my family’s irresponsibility and would then feel guilty for harshly judging my loved ones. After all, wasn’t I the fucking progressive indigenous leftist who believed that every American should be guaranteed a minimum basic income? If I didn’t happily help provide for at least some of my siblings’ basic needs, then didn’t that make me a bad liberal and worse Indian? But, hey, I felt no conflict in offering to shelter my siblings (and the good and bad Indian art) in a clean and decent hotel if they had to evacuate our reservation. Their lives were on fire! Hell, sometimes it feels like the whole country is on fire. Like a constant conflagration is burning too close to all poor people. Shouldn’t rich-ass America be taking care of everybody?
“How many people are fighting the fire?” I texted my sister.
“About two hundred Spokane Indians,” she texted. “And maybe one hundred Indians from other reservations.”
“Is the government sending in their firefighters?”
“They said they’re low on resources. Low on men and equipment. They don’t know when they’ll be able to send more help.”
I briefly fantasized about driving to the rez to help fight the blaze. I would extinguish it all by myself. I’d blow out the flames with my epic and poetic breath like I was an Indian X-Man mutant. In reality, I knew I would throw out my bad back after scooping up maybe the sixth shovelful of dirt and ash. Then some Indian or Indians would have to carry my sad-sack ass away from the fire line.
“Jerry, Tinker, and Steve are cutting firebreaks with their tractors,” my sister texted. They were cousins, very good friends with my big brother but distant to me. I was proud to hear of their courage. They were blue-collar Indians. Their hands were callused from years of hard work. My hands are writer-smooth.
My late mother’s hands were often rough from manual labor. She sold her quilts mostly to white people and sometimes to other Indians. During my childhood, for months at a time, my mother’s quilt money was our minimum basic income.
“I’m scared of fire,” I texted my sister.
“Me, too,” she texted back.
My siblings and I have been afraid of flames ever since our big sister died in a trailer fire. I don’t have to imagine her face when I stare into a fire. My dead sister’s face screams at me from every fire—from the small embers of lit cigarettes to the massive fireworks shows in Seattle every Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve. Looking at these satellite images of that forest fire on my reservation, I could see that it was burning closer and closer to the abandoned uranium mine.
Yes, that out-of-control forest fire was threatening to turn the abandoned uranium mine into Dante’s rez-ferno.
That might be all you need to know about N
ative American history.
Or maybe you just need to know that my tribe survived that forest fire. And survived the much larger forest fire that burned a year later.
We Indians know how to survive every fire.
89.
Love Story
MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, James Cox, Spokane Indian and Scottish, died six years before I was born.
My paternal grandmother and grandfather, Susan and Adolph Alexie, Coeur d’Alene Indians, both died twenty years before I was born.
My maternal grandmother, Etta Adams, Spokane, died when I was fourteen.
So 75 percent of my direct connection to ancestral culture and history was gone before I was born. And 100 percent of that direct connection disappeared before I had a driver’s license.
My mother and father taught me more about modern Indian powwows and Indian basketball than they did about ancient tribal practices and beliefs. Much more. Well, to be specific, my mother taught my sisters how to be powwow fanatics, and my father taught basketball to my brothers and me. My parents sometimes talked about their autobiographical histories. But, in telling their stories, my mother often aggressively lied and my father often passively omitted key details. I think they both sought to disguise and hide their trauma.