“Mom, Dad, how could you do that to another human being?”
Jesus, how do you explain that evil shit to your own kids?
But then I imagine those Abu Ghraib torturers have long ago forgiven themselves, have repeated their self-justifications so often that they have become personal scripture.
I imagine those torturers have exonerated themselves. I imagine they’d be able to persuade their children toward forgiveness, understanding, empathy, and agreement. Maybe those torturers have become good parents. Maybe they have become good people, better than could possibly be expected. Maybe they have earned the forgiveness of their children. But will they ever deserve the forgiveness of their prisoners? Have those torturers ever apologized to the tortured?
One of the tortured prisoners was named Satar Jabar.
Do you remember the photo of Mr. Jabar, hooded, standing on a box, arms eagle-spread, with electrical wires connected to his hands and penis?
He was told, repeatedly, that he’d be electrocuted if he fell off that box. Mr. Jabar testified that he was indeed electrocuted many times. His torturers claim he wasn’t. Whom do you believe? Whom do you want to believe?
If you fall off that box, you will be electrocuted.
Say it aloud.
If you fall off that box, you will be electrocuted.
Say it louder.
If you fall off that box, you will be electrocuted.
Scream it at the sky. Scream it for hours. Do you think it will ever sound like a prayer?
Do you remember the photos of other prisoners, naked and handcuffed, hanging upside down from their bunk beds? Do you remember other prisoners crouched and blindfolded with their arms tied and extended at acute angles behind their backs? Do you remember other prisoners being attacked by dogs?
When I first saw those photographs on television, I vomited on our living room carpet. At first, I was confused by my extreme reaction. Any compassionate person would be distressed by such terrible images. But my reaction felt more personal. Frankly speaking, it felt selfish.
And then I heard the news reporter say “stress positions.”
What are stress positions? According to the Collins English Dictionary, they are “an enforced body position, applied especially in the interrogation of detainees, which causes the victim pain by concentrating a large amount of his or her weight on a small number of muscles, joints, etc.” According to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Geneva Conventions, stress positions are a form of torture—illegal, immoral, and inhumane.
I didn’t vomit because I saw photographs of other human beings placed in stress positions. I didn’t vomit because of their pain. I vomited because I finally had a name for my pain, for the torture that my classmates and I endured at the hands of a second-grade teacher on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
To discipline us Indian kids, that teacher would push and pinch us. She’d scream in our face until our ears rang. An ex-nun, white-skinned and red-haired, she called us sinners and threatened us with eternal damnation.
Worse, she would make us stand eagle-armed in front of the classroom with a book in each hand. I don’t remember how long she made us hold those books aloft. But seconds must have felt like minutes; minutes must have felt like hours. Even now, over four decades later, I can feel the pain in my arms—the memory of pain—and the terror.
Don’t you drop those books.
Don’t you drop those books.
Don’t you drop those books.
That was a stress position. That was torture. That was a crime. A felony, don’t you think?
But that wasn’t the most painful thing she did to us.
Sitting at our desks, we were ordered to clasp our hands behind our back, extend them at an acute angle, and lean forward until only the tip of our nose touched the desktop.
She walked among us, screaming at those of us who couldn’t hold our arms high enough or who tried to rest our head on our desk. We cried in pain. Tears and snot dripped onto the desks, pooled, and rolled down off the edge and onto our lap. Some of us peed our pants from pain and fear.
Keep those arms up.
Nose on your desk.
Keep those arms up.
Nose on your desk.
Keep those arms up.
Nose on your desk.
That was a stress position. That was torture. That was a crime. A felony, don’t you think?
Abu Ghraib.
What does it mean to those American torturers?
Abu Ghraib.
What does it mean to those tortured prisoners?
Abu Ghraib.
What does it mean to you and me?
I vomited because I realized that we Indian kids, at seven years of age, had been treated like prisoners of war. We were guilty of the crime of being Indian.
I remember coming home from school one day, weeping, and telling my mother that I was afraid of that teacher. I remember telling my mother what that teacher was doing to us. I remember that my mother demanded a meeting with that teacher.
After the meeting, my mother told me everything was going to be okay.
I told my mother that I was still scared.
My mother promised me that teacher wouldn’t scare me anymore.
I believed my mother.
The next morning, when I walked into class, that teacher called my name.
“Hey, Junior,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Boo,” she said with her hands curled into claws.
I recoiled.
“Boo,” she said, and laughed.
I was only seven years old when I first realized that my mother was powerless against white teachers. She was powerless against white schools. She was powerless against white government. She was powerless against whiteness in all of its forms.
My mother and father were so powerless against that teacher that she was able to torture my younger sisters, the twins, and their classmates the next year.
My sister remembers how, on the playground, that teacher grabbed her by the ponytail and pulled her to the ground.
“My neck hurt so bad,” my sister told me. “Hurt for days.”
Whiplash.
“When she got mad at the whole class,” my sister told me, “she made us draw circles on the chalkboard. Then we’d have to put our hands behind our back and lean forward until just our nose touched inside that circle.”
Stress position.
“But that wasn’t even the worst,” my sister said. “After tests, she would walk around the classroom and say out loud the names of the kids who got Ds and Fs. She’d call them the dumbest kids in the class. And say they were just going to be dumb Indians all their lives.”
“Boo,” that white teacher said, wanting to hurt and shame us.
I wanted to cry.
But I did not cry.
I wanted to cry.
But I did not cry.
I wanted to cry.
But I did not cry.
I never cried in front of that teacher again, even when she forced us into stress positions, even when she pulled out scissors and cut the long hair and braids of us Indian boys.
Don’t cry, I told myself.
Don’t cry.
Don’t cry.
Years later, long after that teacher had retired and left the reservation, I heard she’d been bragging about me. She told other folks how proud she was of me, how she had to take a little credit for my literary success.
Okay, Miss Teacher.
Okay, Miss Torturer.
I give you full credit for the pain you caused all of us. I give you full credit for my scars. And I give you full credit for making me realize that my mother could not protect me from the likes of you. I give you full credit for making me wonder why my mother was so powerless.
Dear Mother, were you also tortured as a child?
Dear Mother, were you also a prisoner of war?
Dear Mother, did you also look into the eyes of your moth
er and see only pain and fear?
Dear Mother, were you broken in the same places where I am broken, too?
42.
God Damn, God Dam
IN JULY 1933, construction began on the Grand Coulee Dam. Still one of the largest concrete structures in the world, that dam submerged ancient villages and falls and eventually killed all of the wild salmon in the upper Columbia and Spokane rivers.
My mother once told me, “When I was just a toddler, before the dam was finished, I walked from one side of the Spokane River to the other on the backs of wild salmon.”
“Hey, wait,” I said. “Big Mom said she did that same walk when she was a little girl.”
“She did it and I did it,” my mother said. “We both did it.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
“It’s not a lie,” my mother said.
During the tumultuous course of her life, my mother told many clever and clumsy lies. As I have said, I think she was an undiagnosed bipolar grandiose fabulist. But, as an adult and indigenous half-assed intellectual, I also realize that she wasn’t lying about walking across the river on the backs of salmon. Well, let’s get it straight. Speaking in terms of history and physics, my mother absolutely did not make that walk across the river. And Big Mom certainly never made that walk either. But they weren’t lying when they claimed to have made that walk. They were telling a story—a fable, if you must—about how the Spokane River once was home to an epic number of wild salmon. If you insist that my mother and grandmother lied about making a footbridge of salmon, then it’s a lie in service of scientific and spiritual truth.
Scientifically speaking, there were endless numbers of wild salmon in the Spokane and upper Columbia rivers before the Grand Coulee Dam was built.
Spiritually speaking, the Spokane Indians and all other Salish tribes worshipped the salmon as passionately as any other people in the world worship their deities.
So, scientifically and spiritually, the Grand Coulee Dam murdered my tribe’s history. Murdered my tribe’s relationship with its deity. And murdered my tribe’s relationship with its future.
For us, the Grand Coulee Dam is an epic gravestone. And we Salish people have been mourning the death of our wild salmon for over seven decades.
What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.
43.
I Turn My Mother Into a Salmon, I Turn Salmon Into My Mother
This fiery summer, my mother is dying
Because the streams are too shallow
And warm. There is nowhere
For my mother to rest and hide
From the sun and heat and predators.
Experts warn that my mother
Will go extinct in certain bodies of water
As the earth grows hotter and hotter.
Yes, my mother will soon be the last
Mother to perish in this sacred river.
My mother will be mourned by the trees,
And diver birds and hungry grizzlies.
There will be nothing left to deliver
Other than centuries of eulogies.
44.
Communion
we worship
the salmon
because we
eat salmon
45.
Storm
It rained salmon
On the day my mother was buried.
The salmon fell to the grass
Among headstones
And struggled to breathe.
They wanted to survive.
My siblings and I gathered
As many salmon
As we could fit in the baskets
Of our arms, in our pockets,
And ran for the river
That suddenly flowed through the cemetery.
The salmon were dying.
The river was dead.
But we children dove into the water because
We needed the salmon to survive.
46.
C Is for Clan
IN 1938, FIVE years after construction began on the Grand Coulee Dam, a wild salmon made its way to the face of that monolith and could not pass. That was the last wild salmon that attempted to find a way around, over, or through the dam into the upper Columbia and Spokane rivers. That was the last wild salmon that remembered.
The Interior Salish, my people, had worshipped the wild salmon since our beginnings. That sacred fish had been our primary source of physical and spiritual sustenance for thousands of years.
And then, over the course of five short years—after only eighteen hundred days—the endless and ancient wild salmon were gone from our waters.
My mother was two years old when that last wild salmon appeared at the face of the Grand Coulee Dam. My father was in his mother’s womb.
In 1945, when my father was six years old, his father died in World War II. Killed in action on Okinawa Island. Then, six months later, my father’s mother died of tuberculosis, a death as invasive and violent as war.
My mother and father were members of the first generation of Interior Salish people who lived entirely without wild salmon.
My mother and father, without wild salmon, were spiritual orphans.
My father was also orphaned by war and contagious disease.
My siblings and I were conceived, birthed, and nurtured by orphans—by the salmonless and parentless and non-immune.
And now, as I think of my mother’s and father’s salmon-grief, as I think of mourning the wild salmon I had never known, and of mourning the grandparents who died two decades before I was born, I remember a Navajo woman who hated me.
Many years ago, I was the visiting writer at her college, mostly populated by Natives of the Southwest.
“It’s weird to be a salmon boy in the desert,” I said to the students. “I feel extra thirsty.”
Because of my early success, I was younger than most of the students. I was not comfortable being introduced as a possible mentor to older Indians. But I was happy to be among Indians who saw the world through artistic eyes. I thought I fully belonged. I was wrong.
“What’s your clan? What’s your Indian name?” that Navajo woman asked. I had not met her previously. I have not seen her since. She was obviously angry at me. Ready to argue. I think she saw herself as being a real Indian artist and saw me, the world-traveling writer, as something less than artful and also something less than indigenous. I was suddenly involved in an Indian-versus-Indian cultural battle—a fight that I have faced again and again and again and again. Yep, that shit has come at me from all four directions. To paraphrase that tribal elder named Shakespeare, we Native folks are “more than kin and less than kind.”
“What’s your clan? What’s your Indian name?” she asked again. But she was actually asking me to prove how Indian I am. She was the full-blood Navajo. She was a 4/4 Indian. She’d proudly included that fraction in her bio and in her art. I had a Scottish grandparent, so I am a 7/8. I’d also included my fraction in my art, but with far more amusement and discernment. After all, I have grown so much chest hair in my middle age that I suspect my fraction is wrong. I suspect every Native’s fraction is wrong. That Navajo and I were suddenly in an Aboriginal Blood Quantum Test of Wills. She was trying to embarrass me in front of her Indian classmates. And in front of her Indian teacher. And that teacher just sat back and watched. She wasn’t a fan of mine either.
Arggh, I thought. Why do so many Indians do this fucking shit to one another? Why this need to become enemies?
That Navajo was trying to bully me. And my natural instinct was to fight back. I leaned toward her and prepared to verbally attack her—to use my forensic debate and stand-up comedy skills to dismantle and mock her fundamentalism. She was my literary heckler. And hecklers, indigenous or not, need to be embarrassed into silence. It’s the law.
“Okay—,” I said as a dozen improvised insults synapsed through
my brain.
But then I relaxed. Breathed deep. Cleaned my teeth with my tongue. I didn’t want to be the indigenous man arguing with an indigenous woman—didn’t want to re-create the domestic strife that had existed in my childhood home—didn’t want to replay what had likely happened in many of those students’ lives. I didn’t want to turn that Navajo woman into an avatar for my mother. No, I could not teach the class anything by arguing. But maybe I could teach them how to disarm—how to mitigate—how to step away with grace. That Navajo artist had likely targeted other people in the room. And I’m sure some of the other men and women were also anger-junkies. And, yes, I’m an anger-junkie, too.
But not that day. Not that day.
So I smiled, leaned back in my chair, and said, “I was not raised inside a clan structure. My parents are from different tribes and raised us to be powwow-goers and basketball players. My sisters know how to jingle. And my brothers and I know how to dribble.”
The other Indians in the class laughed. I assumed some of them came from powwow and basketball families like me. And, of course, they all knew, like all Natives know, a thousand powwow nomads and Indian basketball players. And, sure, in most ways, powwows and basketball are pop culture for Indians, but it’s pop culture with applied sacredness. Or something like that.