My children are asleep in the next room as I write this. We are in Claremont, CA. It’s a quiet place in a very noisy part of the world. Just outside of Los Angeles. The lights and sirens and perpetual crisis—of the spirit, of democracy—that is LA is muted in Claremont by the green leafiness of the trees and by the equally green, leafy educated liberal ideology that planted the trees here in the first place. It is quiet and dark and safe. Now. But earlier today fourteen people lost their lives just down the road in San Bernadino. A mere fifteen miles away it is not so quiet or leafy or green. Here’s the thing: it would be a mistake to think that our little world here is somehow different from, or not connected to, the one in San Bernadino. It is the same world. It is the same road but, as with all roads, it passes through places that might be more or less safe depending on where you stop. I wasn’t surprised, not exactly, when the news of the shooting broke. I felt the same old sadness. I was reminded of another school shooting at Red Lake Reservation in 2005, and not because that shooting took friends and family, but because in both cases the ways the shootings were reported, discussed, and framed were part of another kind of violence, a kind much older and perhaps more pernicious. San Bernadino allowed people to stage their surprise and shock—how could this happen? The myth of distance or separation (not us, over there, that other place) is one of the myths that support the whole American enterprise, an enterprise committed wholly to the notion of its own innocence and goodness. The perversity of this commitment to the fiction of goodness (equaled only by the perversity of the violence—against blacks, against Indians, against immigrants—which is nothing less than the unwritten covenant meshed with, embraced by, our nobler-seeming founding documents because a Bill of Rights or a Constitution mean nothing without implied exclusions in the way untested faith is no faith at all) is not an act of ignorance. Rather, the fiction of goodness is itself an act of violence.
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So it was with anger and sadness (rather than shock or rage) I took in the news about San Bernadino and took in how the news of that loss was being told: as though this were a radical and inexplicable act, a violence that disrupted the calm, rather than a pulse, a beat, in the song of violence that has sung our country into existence. There is a debt of blood that must be paid. And white people aren’t the piper, they are the song.
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My children are not likely to be singled out for execution in the way the children of black people so often are, or their uncles, and cousins are. Partly, the reason for this is they are lighter skinned than most (but not all) of their cousins. They have a hue, if not an easily defined race. But then again I am much lighter than even my lightest-skinned child. And their uncles and great-uncles are light-skinned, too. Rather, my children are protected in a number of ways. I am raising them far from the reservation. And only someone who is from a place like the place I’m from can understand the many ways in which the reservation is a place of refuge just as much as it is a place of hurt. But I’ve also been able to pass along to them a set of codes that I learned only after I left the reservation—how to talk and please and thank you and the power of a winning smile and the perfection of a kind of social swagger that is the very walk of whiteness—while at the same time encouraging them to nurture their Indianness as a kind of secret self we never talk about outside the home, to nurture a second, secret, but truer self. And this is how we go crazy. Because in doing so we are participate in the deadly fiction of forgetting in order to get along.
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My children are good people. There is no other way to describe them. They believe in the concept of fairness. They laugh and walk and talk differently. They all look different from one another, too. And there’s no mistaking the culture—the culture of siblings with their codes and web of associations inherited and built. They belong together. The smallest of tribes. The tribe of the just. They believe in fairness so strongly that they are confused by history. Civil rights, to them, seems an unnecessary thing because to believe that other people or groups of people are somehow not equal, less than, worse than, etc, is not only unfair, it’s just, to use a phrase of theirs, weird. They tell the truth most of the time. And they aren’t self-righteous. Not yet. But there is much they don’t understand—about themselves and about you. They don’t understand that they are children born of violence.
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It was German violence that caused their grandfather (my father) to flee Austria in 1938. His flight took him through Germany, Belgium, England, and Ireland before he made it to America. He was alone for many parts of his odyssey. He made it here eventually, but not before shedding his language, his community, and his relatives, most of whom were murdered at Mauthausen, Dachau, and other camps. But neither he nor his parents shed their politics or their belief in justice, and even goodness, despite what they endured. It was your violence that shaped in ways I’m only now able to understand (because only now am I a parent) my mother. She is Indian, as am I, as are my children. She grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation. To be “rez-raised” is to be raised in violence. There are many kinds. Physical. Sexual. Developmental. Administerial. Cultural. The violence of neglect. Her father, my grandfather, was a WWII vet and he brought the hurts of the war back with him and so they became hurts of the home. The game warden would confiscate their deer and their rice (for some minor infraction) and so the family often went hungry. The teacher who, upon seeing her in the halls in the fall of her junior year expressed his surprise at seeing her there. Why wouldn’t I be? She asked. He shrugged. They both knew that no one expected Indians to go beyond their sophomore year. That was the violence of low expectations.
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Lest this become a kind of revisionist history—though letters or confessions such as these are always so—I should remember (to myself but also to you) that my parents did well and they created a childhood for me the likes of which were beyond expectation for them. They weren’t drinkers. They both worked. We had a large house set off in the woods away from the daily drama of rez life. Our days were ordered and orderly. For instance, during the summers my older brother and I typically labored under a vow of exhaustive play. Those early summers of ours we spent in the woods. The drone of deer flies, the storms of July, the heavy heat of August, the sound the tall parched grass made late in the summer and the sound the pine needles underfoot, all of this was the atmosphere, the fabric, the very rhythm of our days, interrupted only by the hand bell my father rang at 10 and 12 and 2 calling us back for snacks and lunch. We didn’t have electricity for a while and so we kept the milk cool in the creek that ran by the house. And despite my father scowling and repeating “cap it! cap it! cap it!” I sometimes forgot to cap it and we’d go down to the creek to get the milk to find the water pearlescent all the way to the lake. I knew I was in trouble. I was six and I knew I was in trouble because it was the only jug of milk we had and town—full of milk jugs identical to the one I had not capped—was ten miles away. I was also transfixed by the paradox: I knew creek water was filling that jug, replacing the milk with swamp water, and yet even though the creek was white with milk the jug was no less so, it remained as pure-looking and self-contained, as hermetically sealed, as when we pulled it out of the dairy case at Teal’s Super Valu.
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It was around the same time my uncle Mikey was shot by the sheriff. It is family legend how much that particular sheriff hated our family and wanted nothing more than to get us. Our ancestral village, Bena, is notorious for the number of ex-convicts who live there. Most of the men have done hard time, paying for their violence by having violence done unto them. I mention this only because I don’t know where the story—of the sheriff’s hatred, of Mikey’s lack of judgment—really begins. What I do know is that the sheriff was driving slowly on the main drag of Bena in his cruiser when Mikey shot an arrow at the car. It passed through the front passenger window past the face of the deputy and just in front of the sheriff’s nose before exiting his window and burying itself in the ground. The sheriff then fired two bullets into Mikey’s chest and knelt on him so he would die more quickly. The afternoon it happened my mother piled me in the car and we drove into town. I didn’t know Mikey had been shot. But I registered the strangeness of taking a trip to town with my mother, just the two of us, and not on a shopping day. I asked her why we were going to town and she said, tight-lipped, that Mikey had been shot and we were going to see him at the hospital. I didn’t ask any more questions. We entered the room (my mother in front, me hiding behind her). There were already a lot of other people there. His parents, my great uncle Howard and aunt Betty probably. A few of his sisters. Mikey was propped up in bed, his left arm and shoulder encased in a cast. My mother sat down and lit a cigarette. All the chairs were taken and so I stood behind my mother. Someone was talking. Or more than one person was. I’m not sure. My mother wanted to know exactly what happened and so they begin the story over again. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mikey. His long black hair was spread out against the pillow. His face was slack (drugs probably) and yet pinched with pain, which he tried to avoid by turning his head first one way and then the other. My mother was talking now, having gotten into the conversation. Even then—before she finished law school, before she became the first American Indian woman judge in the county—people deferred to her. She was steely and very beautiful. So she was talking and I tapped her shoulder but she shrugged off my gesture, and ashed her cigarette in an empty Styrofoam cup. I tapped her again but still she ignored me. I went so far as to grab the fabric of her shirt and tug on it. “What is it?” she asked, impatiently. Suddenly everyone’s attention shifted to me and I felt very uncomfortable. But since no one else had noticed I had no choice but to bring it to their attention. I whispered close to her ear that the doctors had made a mistake. Didn’t they know Mikey had been shot with bullets? I thought that would be enough. “What? What are you saying?” Finally, I blurted out that you need bandages when you’ve been shot. Casts are for broken bones, like when you fall down. The doctors had been wrong. They’d made a mistake. “Be quiet,” she hissed. “Just keep your mouth shut.” I was young and I didn’t know how to express my worry—I loved my uncle and he’d been shot twice in the chest. I was young and couldn’t speak the words of love. My mother wasn’t young and neither were my other relatives in the room. It didn’t occur to me that they didn’t know how to express their worry or their love either. Just be quiet. Just shut your mouth. And so the violence crept into our home despite my parents’ best efforts to keep the cap on the jug. The violence came in and we were not just in danger of being victims of it. We were in danger of being violent ourselves.
*
The violence was all around us. A couple years later my brother and I went to stay with our cousin Delbert in Bena. His parents left early to go out drinking and left us a frozen pizza, a TV that got no stations, and instructions not to raise hell. So we wrestled, played war, threw the pizza around the house (I remember one piece stuck to the front of the TV), got bored, and liberated the eggs from the fridge. These we threw at Bena Bar, the priest’s house, and the one or two houses we knew for certain were owned by white people, before heading back to Del’s where we pried the pizza off the TV and ate it. It was getting late when we saw a house across the village in flames. We couldn’t tell whose it was. At some point the phone rang. Del answered it. When he hung up he told us the caller said they knew we started the fire and that they were coming to Del’s house to burn it down, with us in it. We didn’t know what to do. His parents told us to stay home but the caller said she was going to burn it down. Del ran into his parents’ room and came back with a break action 20 gauge shotgun. We loaded it and gave it to my brother because he was the oldest. Del sat on one side of him and I on the other, facing the door. We waited. Del fell asleep after awhile. I couldn’t. Then the front of the house was sprayed by the headlights of an approaching car. Del roused. Anton stiffened and held the gun more tightly, the barrel pointed at the front door. The lights caught and held the front of the house. Then they went off. Two car doors slammed. We heard the crunch of yard gravel under foot. The screen door opened. And then the front door. Anton was just about to pull the trigger when we recognized Del’s father, leaning into the light from the kitchen. He didn’t seem all that surprised to be looking down the barrel of a shotgun because he snatched it away saying something like “What the fuck are you doing?” and he and Shirley staggered back to their room. Del and Anton fell asleep right away but I couldn’t. The creek water was in the jug and swirled and swirled and would not clear.
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“The Savage Mind” will continue next Saturday, April 8, and conclude on Saturday, April 15.
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Image provided courtesy of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.
