Until I began writing this book, and doing some fairly basic genealogical research, I didn’t know that my father had uncles and aunts who died young. I had no inkling of any of this until I stood in Sacred Heart Mission Cemetery on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation and saw the grave of a man named Edward Alexie.
“Who is Edward Alexie?” I texted my sister.
“Some relative, I guess,” my sister texted back.
At Edward’s graveside, I pulled out my iPad and did some quick research on him. Though I am half Coeur d’Alene through my father, I didn’t grow up on that reservation. Culturally speaking, I am Spokane. So my knowledge of day-to-day Coeur d’Alene life is limited. I have family and friends on the CDA rez, but I see them only occasionally. And, after reading only a few documents, I called my sis. I needed to say more than texting would allow.
“Edward was Dad’s uncle,” I said. “He died the same year that Dad was born.”
“What did he die of?” my sister asked.
“Smallpox, bubonic plague, Custer’s ghost, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m an Indian on an iPad in an Indian cemetery with access to all the information on the Internet. But I can’t find his cause of death.”
“Why don’t you call somebody with the Coeur d’Alene tribe? A historian or somebody? Or be really crazy and ask one of our cousins what they know.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m too embarrassed to let them know how much I don’t know.”
“They’re sure gonna find out how much you didn’t know when you publish your book.”
I laughed.
“This memoir,” I said. “It’s going to have a lot of blank spaces. I suppose I could really dig into the research and get stuff as accurate as possible. But I like the blank spaces. I like how they feel. I want my readers to feel how I feel. I want them to feel the loss. To feel our loss. I want them to know how guilty I feel for not knowing this stuff.”
“It’s not your fault,” my sister said. “Dad never talked about bad things.”
“And Mom lied so much,” I said.
“Yes, she did,” my sister said, and laughed. “Just like you.”
I laughed.
“Okay,” I said. “I gotta do more research.”
I think nearly all of my father’s uncles and aunts, and his mother and father, died young.
One aunt, named Mary Magdoline Alexie, was five years old when she died, on January 16, 1911. I don’t know if her misspelled middle name was a typo on the official records or if it was misspelled on purpose by her parents. Two days after Mary Magdoline’s death, Eugene Burton Ely landed his plane on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay. That was the first time an airplane landed on a ship.
My father’s other aunt, Mary Catherine Alexie, was only a year old when she died, on April 11, 1911. Six days after Mary Catherine’s death, Southern Methodist University was chartered.
So, yes, while my great-aunts were dying young on the rez, some incredible things were happening in the outside world.
I can’t find any evidence of where my great-aunts are buried. I don’t know why they died. Were they buried in the old Coeur d’Alene way? Were they wrapped in blankets and placed in graves dug by their parents? I know those graves, unmarked and forgotten, must be located somewhere on my father’s reservation. Probably close to the town, Desmet, Idaho, where they were born. But that town is surrounded by wheat fields now. So did my great-aunts long ago become part of a harvest? Did they help wheat to grow? Did my great-aunts become bread?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
There is another Mary Alexie. She was my father’s great-aunt and lived until 1982. Early census reports have her listed as Mary Agatha Alexie, though her gravestone reads MARY AGATH ALEXIE, dropping the third a from Agatha. So which is mistaken, the early census reports or the gravestone? Has to be the gravestone that’s correct, right?
But I don’t know for certain. I don’t know.
During my childhood, my father would often take me on long drives around his reservation. He’d mostly tell me stories about his athletic successes and failures. Sometimes, my father would park on the shoulder of a rez back road—a dirt-and-gravel one-lane history book—and then he’d stare out the window and remember things that he never shared with me. He’d gently ignore me. He wanted me to travel with him. He wanted my presence. But not my words. So I’d gently ignore him back and read my books and comic books.
On those road trips, my father would sometimes visit his great-aunt Mary Agath(a) Alexie, but I’d stay in the car. She looked so old that it was intimidating. As a child, I didn’t have the words to describe what Great-Aunt Mary evoked in me, but now I think it was something like Holy shit, I am never, not once in my life, gonna be as Indian as that Indian is Indian. I worried she might be a ghost. That was irrational, I know, but my father spent part of his childhood among Indians who were alive when Custer and Crazy Horse were battling each other. My father was alive on the reservation with a few old Coeur d’Alene Indians who had gone to war against George Wright and the Ninth U.S. Cavalry. My father toddled among indigenous warriors who had shot arrows at white soldiers.
There is a photo of my father with his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. In the absence of my father’s stories—of his personal oral tradition—I only have photographs like this. I have studied it for hours. I love most the expression of my father’s mother’s face. Susan Alexie. The grandmother I never knew. So she’s more like a stranger. No. That’s not the right word. She’s more like an idea. She’s the Idea of a Grandmother. She is pregnant with my aunt Ellen, who would die of diabetes during my first year at Reardan. But, in that old photo, my grandmother appears to be looking at something or someone out of frame. Not her husband, since he was already serving in the U.S. Army. Whom is she looking at? And what is that expression on her face? Bemusement? Suspicion? Irritation? Shyness? She is the indigenous Mona Lisa.
Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don’t know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I could write “I don’t know” one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.
My father was only six years old when his mother and father died. I’d love to think that he didn’t remember his parents—that time had erased his memory. But I can remember things that happened to me when I was only six. And it’s not the good stuff that I recall. No. It’s the most traumatic shit that plays in the 3D IMAX Theater of My Mind. So I know that my father remembered his dead parents. But he never said one word to me about them, not ever.
90.
Genocide
Grief is a sea
Creature, a predator
Newly discovered,
Or so you believe,
Until you remember,
Genetically,
That this same grief
Hunted your mother
And your father
And your grandparents
And all of the women
And men who created you.
What happens to humans
Who live as prey?
We are furious, furious,
Furious, and afraid.
91.
Greek Chorus
THE UNITED STATES did not believe the forest fire burning through the uranium mine presented any danger to the Spokane Indian community.
92.
Roller Ball
I SAW YOUR mom yesterday,” Pernell said. “At church.”
“So?” I asked.
Pernell was a nice Indian boy. He’d always been kind to me. We were reservation sixth-graders who’d never punched each other. That qualified as a close friendship. Some people called him Jack. I sometimes called him Jack, too. I have no idea how a kid ends
up being named Jack and Pernell. And, no, Pernell wasn’t his last name and I don’t think his middle name was Jack or Pernell.
“Your mom sang a solo in the choir,” Pernell said. “She sings really good.”
My mother had a lovely singing voice. But I’d only heard her singing along with her favorite country songs or with Elvis. I’d rarely heard her sing any Christian spirituals because I’d never gone to church with her. She never asked or forced us kids to go to any of the various Christian churches she’d attended over the years. Inside our family, we children were allowed to practice the religion of our choice. I was vaguely Catholic for a time, then became an Assembly of God kid in order to romantically pursue a white girl from a little white town. She rejected me, so I quit going to that church. I quit all churches—white, Native, or anything else. Like most Indians nationwide, my sisters turned the powwow into their sole spiritual pursuit. My big brother has never made any declaration of faith, and my little brother became a fundamentalist Christian after marrying into a white Evangelical family. Our father was a childhood Catholic who spent his adulthood using vodka and fiery chili as his only Eucharist.
And now, as I write this, I realize that I’d rarely heard my mother sing any traditional Spokane songs—neither the formal religious hymns nor the casual stick-game gambling songs. She was always on the powwow trail, traveling from reservation to reservation to watch the dancers and drummers, but she didn’t sing along. Or maybe she did sing along. I don’t know. I rarely traveled to powwow with her. I was too busy playing basketball and reading books.
Spiritually speaking, my mother was as unknowable to me as any of her gods.
“And then after your mom was done singing in the choir,” Pernell said, “I saw your mom rolling in the aisle and speaking in tongues.”
“No way,” I said. “She was probably just speaking Spokane.”
My mother was one of the few tribal members who were still fluent in the old way of speaking Spokane.
“It wasn’t Indian talk,” Pernell said. “It was her Jesus voice.”
There were quite a few Spokane Indians who fell in love with Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. I think it’s rather easy for a universally damaged people like Native Americans to believe wholeheartedly in miracles, in the supernatural. But I’d never thought of my mother as a Spokane who’d go that far.
“I’m not lying,” Pernell said.
“I believe you, Jack,” I said, though I hoped he was mistaken.
When I got home from school, I immediately asked my mother if she’d been speaking in tongues.
“Yes,” she said.
“Weird,” I said, and walked downstairs to my room. I figured my mother was pretending to speak in tongues. She was just acting, I thought. It’s like a one-woman show, I guessed. My mother had always been so dramatic. And what’s more dramatic than an Indian woman rolling down the aisle of a little reservation church?
I tried to put it out of my mind, to allow my mother to freely practice her religion as much as she allowed me to fully practice my nonreligion. But, a few weeks later, I crawled out of my Sunday-morning slumber and walked the mile to her church.
And there she was, along with the white couple who led the church and a few dozen Spokane Indians, throwing books, magazines, and music albums onto a bonfire.
My mother and her fellow indigenous Charismatics were chanting something about the Devil—about the evil of the secular world—about all the sin-soaked novels and porn magazines and rock music.
I was grossed out.
On opposite sides of the bonfire, my mother and I made eye contact. But I think she was so deeply entranced—so hypnotized and self-hypnotized—that she didn’t recognize me.
I hurried home to make sure my small personal library of books and records was intact and unburned. And, yes, all was safe.
Later that night, at the dinner table, I told my mother to leave my stuff alone or I’d burn down her church.
“You’re a sinner,” she said, and pointed her fork at me.
“And so are you,” I said, and pointed my fork right back at her.
93.
Law & Order
Hey, shithead, if you’re going to forgive
Your mother, then you better hurry—
But, hold on, maybe you can delay
Because you’re the judge and one-man jury
And all of the lawyers and bailiffs.
Hell, you’re the Bible and the ornate gavel.
Most of all, you’re the journalist who opines
About justice kept whole or justice unraveled.
Hey, shithead, you’ve never worn a watch,
So I suspect this case will become eternal,
As you try and try and try your mother
For the crime of being unpredictably maternal.
94.
The Lillian Alexie
Review of Books
My late mother was once
Interviewed by the local news
About her son, me, the poet.
When asked if she knew
That I would become a writer,
She said, “I thought he was
Going to be a pediatrician.
There’s still time for him
To become a doctor, I think.”
She was also asked if it hurt
To read my most autobiographical
Stuff, the shit that detailed
How she used to drink and smoke
And punch old Indian women
In the face. She said, “I was ashamed,
And wished he used fake names,
But then I realized they made me
Think honestly about the past.”
I don’t know if she was telling
The truth. She mythologized herself
As much as I do. But I can testify
To this: Whenever I traveled near home
To read my poems, my mother
Would always sit in the third row
And gracefully withstand my utter lack
Of tact. Though, on the phone,
She once described me
As “13 percent book smart
And 87 percent dick jokes.”
Ah, the things our mothers know...
95.
Painkiller
My sister reminds me
Of the time that I stepped
On a nail, screamed
In pain, and ran
With the nail and board
Still attached to my foot.
Also screaming, our mother
Chased me, wanting
To deliver first aid,
But I was probably
Trying to elude the pain
By running from everything
In the world. When
She finally caught me,
My mother pushed me down,
Pulled the nail and board
Off my foot, and then removed
My shoe. We all expected to
See blood. But, no, no, no,
The nail had miraculously
Passed between my toes
With barely a scratch.
That nail had been impaled
In my shoe and not
In my foot. We laughed
And Mom asked me why
I was screaming from
Pain when there was no pain.
I had no answer then.
But now I think
That I’d been anticipating
The pain, much like the rain
Dancer who is always successful
Because he doesn’t stop
Dancing and praying
And dancing and praying
Until it rains and rains and
Rains and rains.
96.
Cultural Identity
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, at a book reading in Philadelphia, a white man asked me what made my work so “particularly Indian.” He said that my poems and stories didn’t seem “all that Indian.”
/> I said, “First of all, you’re a white guy from Philadelphia. What do you know about Indians you didn’t learn from some other white guy from Philadelphia? And secondly, would you ask a white guy what makes him so white? Well, let me tell you, pal, that question you just asked makes you the whitest asshole in Philadelphia right now.”
Yes, before I went on bipolar medication, I would sometimes lose my temper in very public and aggressive and completely justified ways.
But as the years have gone by, I have often pondered that white man’s question. And I often think of the other white people and Indians who have questioned the “Indianness” of my identity. And I have experimented with various answers to their questions and challenges. I have considered the genetic, cultural, political, spiritual, and economic aspects of “Indianness.” I have discussed the issue with other indigenous writers and scholars. I have read millions of words written by and about Indians.
So, if I could travel back in time to Philadelphia, I would answer that white man’s question in a different way. I would have said, “The concept of ‘Indianness’ is amorphous and highly personal and eccentric. It’s hard to say exactly what ‘Indianness’ is without reverting to generic notions of ‘cultural construction’ and ‘postcolonialism.’ But I will say that I have never been a dancer or singer. I have only intermittently believed in God. I used to be a math prodigy and now I’m a great storyteller. Does any of that make me more or less Indian? I don’t think so. You know what makes me and my stories Indian? All the goddamn funerals.”