Image-ing Poetry

Poetry videos have been around for quite some time now; I remember my first experience with them was some years ago at an AWP conference, when some conference organizer had the bright idea to pipe them into the elevators (which, conveniently, had small video screens).  For four days I'd get into an elevator to go somewhere and find myself riding up and down a few extra times just to see the loop of new poetry set to visuals.  I thought of it as "Image-ing" poetry, giving a poem a set of images to accompany the words, and to tell you the truth, I was not all that thrilled about it.

After all, for me, the moment when a poem's image reaches out and runs goosebumps down my arms is a joy, and a sacred one, at that: in part, because the poet's choice of words, syntax, pace, tone, all combine to connect - zap! - with some long-lost, subconscious image of my own.  If I have someone choosing the visual images for me, would that still happen?  Wouldn't that limit my possible responses to a poem, force me to see what someone else has decided I should see?

But years of exploring the connections between old photographs and documents in my poetry have given me another perspective on the inclusion of visuals in a poetic presentation.  Much of what I wrote in Bad Indians has come directly from a photo or the handwriting of a priest or the textures in a tule mat - and, given the historical significance of some of these objects, I do want my readers to see some of them for themselves.  In fact, I chose Heyday as my publisher in large part due to their willingness to work with me on making the book as multi-genre as possible, to give readers access to some of the materials I'd been able to lay my hands on, to tell the story on multiple levels.

So when my university offered a "Digital Storytelling" training session before classes began, I was eager to sign up for it.  Unfortunately other meetings took precedence, but I decided that it was now or never; I signed up one of my Fall courses for a workshop and crafted a vague-but-fun-sounding assignment.  Then I began watching iMovie workshop videos on YouTube and playing with that application in my 'spare' time - hoping to have some level of understanding by the time my students hit that part of the syllabus (nothing like the potential for sheer embarrassment in front of a classroom as a spur to preparation!).  I have a lot of interesting video footage and photographs from my June research trip to California, and some new poems/prose that might lend themselves to that kind of exploration...

Given my time limitations to learn by playing around, I have temporarily put aside doing the video project I had in mind - something that requires a bit more skill than I currently possess - but I have attempted a "poetry video" using still photographs culled from my own collection, and Project Gutenberg.  I figured out how to do a very basic audio recording and attach it to iMovie, and off I went - learning as I tried this and that. 

I'll be showing this to my Memoir writing class today, and my Native Lit course tomorrow.  Baby steps though it may be, I'm excited to give them another way of image-ing texts and creating a kind of snapshot of their own learning.

This video poem is part of a series I've been working on called "Interviews with California Missions."  My working summary goes like this:

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"In the summer of 2014 I traveled to eight of the twenty-one California missions established by Franciscan priests from Spain during what is now called the Mission Era, 1769-1823.  My purpose was to interview these venerable establishments in order to listen and scrupulously record for posterity their side of the historical controversy concerning alleged roles in the murder of tens of thousands of California Indians.  Were these missions complicit in war crimes?  Or were they, too, victims of Spanish colonial greed and conquest?  What secrets did they tuck away in those adobe walls?  My extensive research had not prepared me for the raw truth of these mission voices; not only was I fortunate enough to learn each mission’s secret name, never before revealed, but my sources seemed relieved to give their testimonies at last."

Enjoy my first effort!  And forgive my beginner's mistakes.

click on the photo to go to video

BAD INDIANS IN THE WORLD

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L to R:  Andy Smith, me, Dian's book, Dian Million, Jennifer Denetdale after Dian's book panel at Critical Ethnic Studies Association conference in Chicago, 2013

Hard to say goodbye to friends at the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference here in Chicago, but good to be heading home. 

So much to process.  So much work to do.  So many good human beings out there doing it!

Throughout the last few days, I have talked to many people who are teaching Bad Indians right now, all over the country. 

Pause.

Did I just write that?  yes, I did.  People are teaching  Bad Indians in universities around this country, and in Canada. 

Pause again, while the skeletons in museums get up and dance.

Hearing from these professors, what they see happening in the book on both literary and theoretical levels, responses from students, is heartening, exciting.  I’m so proud of those Ancestors whose stories are being told, whose actions and words are changing colonial mythologies and re-writing histories and taking root in a new generation.  Thank you, colleagues, for trusting this book to be included in your classrooms.

And along with the news from classrooms, something that I did not anticipate: the problematics of being an Indian professor who has survived violence but now must teach about it.  Teaching the book is often a trigger, particularly for women.

Of course it is.  But I could not see this until Jennifer Denetdale brought it to my attention.  I had completely denied this possible and quite reasonable reaction in all of my imaginings about Bad Indians in the world.

I worried about critics.  I worried about student reaction to having their knowledge about history and the U.S. Government being mercilessly challenged.  I worried about family responses.  I worried about Catholic Natives for whom the book might seem sacrilegious or disrespectful.  But curiously (especially as a Native woman who has survived violence and sexual violation), it never crossed my mind to worry about something that now seems obvious: It is hard enough for Native professors to claim authority in the classroom, for many reasons; who wants, on top of that, to feel vulnerable and fragile, in front of one's students? to cry in front of them, or to get angry?

And yet, as Jennifer repeatedly told me, the book must be taught.

In many conversations over the past few days, my colleagues and I faced this dilemma head on, with an honesty and passion and frustration that I can only appreciate and thank them for giving me.  We’ve decided to talk more about it, via email, and perhaps plan a pedagogy panel about teaching texts in which violence (especially against women and children) is portrayed and demands an intimacy from us in order to be discussed with students. 

There is, it seems, something about Bad Indians that brings old memories to the surface in a way that violence portrayed in fiction or even autobiographical poetry does not, particularly for Indian women.  I am still sitting with this knowledge and information, and it will take a long time for me to unpack my own feelings about this.  My initial response was horror.  And shock.  And forehead-smacking:  my own response to trauma has always been to internalize it, compartmentalize it into writing, where I am in control, where I decide what gets said or unsaid, written or unwritten – or at least, I can pretend I control that (as I’ve said before, writers often have no idea what we are unleashing from our depths until the words are already out there - and sometimes, this is a way of protecting ourselves from even more trauma).  I honestly feel horrified that I have “done” this to my colleagues, to the dear and brilliant Indian women teaching this book.  What kind of person would do that? 

Here I am, caught between being an author, and a loving community member.

But the book had to be written, and those stories had to be told, and as my colleagues at CESA have told me, they want to teach them.  They just feel unprepared for the way it hits them in the middle of the gut, in the middle of the classroom.

We need to talk about this.  And we did, and we will continue that conversation via email and phone and skype.  We have thrown some ideas around: a panel about the pedagogical aspects of teaching about violence that hits home.  Sharing techniques.  How to teach our truths brilliantly and yet not forget self-care.  How, as Dian Million says her new book Therapeutic Nations which we celebrated at the conference, not to get trapped in “the place where Indigenous women are posed as the abject victimized subjects of our present neoliberal states.”  How to walk into our classrooms in our Indian bodies claiming our experiences fully, and teach the truth about violence in our communities without being swallowed up by grief or casting a false, pathetic image of what survival looks like. 

This is a fierce charge.

I think I’m glad that Bad Indians is a good place to start this conversation. That little hesitation in my voice exists because it seems, in some ways, a frightening place to be, to have positioned myself.  And yet, as always, I am sure about the ways the Ancestors are guiding me.  I feel sure that I am feeling my way along this path in ways that, as I said during our panel on Sovereign Erotics, are reaching toward balance and away from fear.  It’s a felt knowledge, as Million says: something not always honored by others as real knowledge.

My first task is to finish reading Therapeutic Nations.  And then, I am certain, entering into a conversation with other Native professors and scholars that will change and clarify and re-charge how we do what it is we do.

In the Beginning

I’m seven years old.

I sit down to write my first story:  How the John Rabbit Familys Lived in the Tall Grass.

The plural is important, as you will see.

Once upon a time in the wild wilderness in the tall grass a baby rabbit was born.  It was white with a little tail and a light pink nose.  Its mother was white and black and the father was gray.  Their eyes were red and they sparkled in the dark.

Colors are clearly important to me.  I add a baby brother rabbit, gray with a black nose.  The whole nuclear family thing makes me happy.  But …

Then in a year it was rabbit season and the mother and father had to leave the baby rabbits.

Next come words that I know never appeared in my school vocabulary list: scared, dangerous, rough, sad, hid, shot.  Phrases like there were few of them left. 

I don’t know the word “survivor” yet.

I do, however, have some idea how to survive.

…it was mateing time and they didn’t want to leave each other, so they chose mates and had their babies. 

And life is good again, especially if we overlook the incestuous nature necessitated by rabbit massacre.  They didn’t want to leave each other.  Who can blame them? 

I know one thing for sure: never let go of anyone.

The rabbit siblings become Father and Mother rabbit to a brood of four babies who learn early how to forage: when they were two months old they got their own food but their mother and father were still with them…they liked their home in the tall grass.

My seven-year-old self knows about seasons:  Then it started to hail and the rabbits started to look for food because when it hailed it would snow the next morning.

I know how to make grocery lists:  They had 8 carrots, 8 bushes of grapes, nine piles of grass and a tin can of water. 

I know about the importance of a home:  Father rabbit went to look for shelter…he found shelter in a nearby cave with hay on the bottom to sleep on.

I even seem to know that life is hard on parents.  My rabbit family waits out the heavy snow in their snug cave, and surprise!  the next day is Christmas Eve.  I was hoping you wouldn’t ask, Father rabbit tells the kids when they inquire about the holiday.  Clearly the guy is feeling the weight of responsibility. 

Still, the little rabbits receive decent, if sadly gendered, presents: “I got a sling shot.”  “I got a little dolly.”  “I got a toy gun.”  “Let’s play dolls.”  “Let’s play war.” 

Predictability ranks pretty high in my seven year old world.

I make certain that Mother rabbit is very resourceful.  She takes good care of Zelda when the little rabbit catches cold:  Mother gave her most of the food and some water.  Then she covered her up with hay to keep her warm.  Later, in the Christmas Eve scene, Mother made sure no one was hungry, thirsty or sick, then she went to get the tree. 

Mother rabbit also makes everyone go out to play when the snow melts, which makes the baby rabbits cry.  Father rabbit is very stern. Go outside or you can not have any food.  Since it is also little Dan’s birthday, Father rabbit wants to give Dan 1 swat and a pinch to grow an inch, but no presents because its too close to Christmas.  Now if youre going to cry get to bed, Father rabbit tells poor sniveling Dan.  Dan chooses to play outside. 

Good sport, says Father rabbit.  Evidently I have clear ideas about fathers and crying.

Then come more words a seven-year-old shouldn’t know so casually. 

Rabbit season again. 

They stayed together but five got wounded and soon died. 

And father rabbit was the only one left.

Like a good survivor, Father rabbit quickly remarries and raises up five more rabbit children.  Father rabbit told them he was the only one left in his family.  Alice, his new mate, asks, What did you name your other babys?  and Father rabbit reels off the names of the dead in a loving litany.  Then tells them, We better get to sleep, its going to be a rough day. 

Uh-oh.  Is it rabbit season again?

But no, I'm the writer of this story.  I may be only seven years old, but I’ve had it with this murderous universe these poor rabbits find themselves in.  I know how to fix things.   

When they awoke they were in a strange place.  “it's a house” said father rabbit. A little human girl arrives and gives them all the feed and water they wanted. 

They are saved!  No more living in the wild wilderness of the outside world.  No more rabbit season, guns, hunting.  No more dead, missing or wounded children and parents.

They were very happy to be with the little girl, I write on the last page, and they lived happily ever after.  THE END.

This story marks the first time I ever used written words to save myself.  This story marks the first time I wrote down what had happened to me, and how much I wanted to be rescued. 

Forty-four years later, I finger these yellowing pages, the faded pencil on blue lines, the bright green yarn stitching the pages into my first book.  I have to smile.  There is no manly prince galloping up on his horse.  Father rabbit does not slay the rabbit hunters or lead his family to safety.  Mother rabbit does not sacrifice herself for the sake of her children, or if she does, it doesn’t work. 

No. 

As the author of this story, I’m seven years old, but I already know about genocide, abandonment, disappeared parents, hunger, hiding, tough love and a deep craving for home.  I’m seven years old and already I know how to trade independence for domesticity, wildness for the assurance of food, water and a nice cage (a temporary solution that will give me some serious issues with men and marriage later in life).

I’m seven years old.  My father, descendent of indigenous peoples ruthlessly diminished from one million to a few thousand, lives in a distant place called San Quentin not far from the missions that incarcerated our ancestors.  My four sisters from his first marriage have dropped off the face of the earth, though I can recite all their names.  My mother-who-disappeared-for-a-year has eventually returned; I’m still watching her every move to make sure she doesn’t run off again.  My two older siblings from her first marriage have been left behind in a foster home in California.  Once a year, my mother sobs over photographs of the baby girl who died from neglect.  My step-father moves us from one ramshackle trailer to the next as he patches together part-time jobs.  We can’t always pay the electric bill or fill the propane tanks.  We eat a lot of rice, beans, and USDA commodity food from the food bank.  I bounce from school to school, always a little behind everyone else, never on the same page of the reader or arithmetic book.

Notice that my rabbits form and re-form nuclear families, name their babies, celebrate holidays and birthdays, yet the concept of formal education is never mentioned?  School is not a friendly force for good in my life.  Yet.

But I'm seven years old and I’ve just figured out something enormous:  the alphabet is my friend.  Spelling may be tricky, writing may cramp my hand and teachers insist that my pencil grip is all wrong, but the alphabet makes me powerful in ways nothing else can.  Pencil and paper are my tools.  Words are my weapons.

Looking back at this story, I see it:  that little girl is going to use this alphabet to write her own way out of civilization.

Waking Up in California

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Because I have lived most of my life away from California, when I return for a visit I see it with different eyes than those who have never left.  Everything is new to me, and at the same time, I remember and know every detail.  There should be a word for that, a word for remembering what you didn't know you knew; the way déjà vu means you feel like something has already happened even though you know it hasn’t.  But déjà vu is not it, not what I feel when I step out onto California land.  This is, perhaps, more of a bone and blood memory:  the air, minerals, water, scents, pollen, light, angle of the sun and stars, that my body remembers, that some deep part of my brain remembers.  Usually this is triggered simply by being in California: feeling the thunder of surf on a flat sweep of beach, stepping over the rampant roots of huge fig trees bursting through slabs of sidewalk, or smelling eucalyptus on the evening air, running my hand along the ancient spears of agave or sitting beneath the shameless purple blossoms of jacaranda. 

Once, taking a bus a few years ago in Westwood, I suddenly stepped back into my four year old body, going up those bus steps, my hand in my mother’s hand, sitting next to the window looking out at hot sidewalks and palm trees planted along the way.  I had never consciously remembered taking the bus with my mom in Los Angeles, and yet once I stepped on that bus, I felt as if I’d never been without that memory.  It was as much a part of me as the color of my hair.

So my experiences in California now – as a middle-aged woman - are constantly doubled with memories of being a child here; sensory memories, emotional memories, that shadow my every move.  In some ways, this is like walking simultaneously on two timelines; my two bodies, one three or four years old, one fifty-one, connected suddenly by the geographic location and my history with it.  This probably wouldn’t happen with someone who had grown up in a place and never left, because there is no rupture in that timeline – it’s all connected.  For me, there is that moment when my mother and I got on a bus and left California “forever.” 

We took a Greyhound, actually, all the way from Los Angeles to Washington State.  I remember only parts of this (no doubt I slept much of the time).  I remember that someone had bought me a lovely new dark blue sweater that buttoned up the front, just for the journey, and that I left it on the bus when we got off.  How I mourned that sweater.  It had been a special gift for the journey, and I lost it to the journey.  I also felt bad that I hadn’t kept hold of my possessions, a little guilty that someone spent money on me and I’d wasted it. Mostly, I remember the heat: the bus must have had AC, but the sun beat in from the window anyway, and I stuck to the seat.

We must have gone up the middle of the state, up through the deserty valley, because my body is filled with those rolling golden hills and flat brown fields when I think of this bus ride.  We stopped at my grandparent’s home near Bakersfield for a visit, I recall; but then we got back on a different Greyhound and continued on to Washington, where my mother’s new husband and my new stepfather, Tommy, waited for us.  We would stay at his sister Tina’s house while looking for a place of our own to live.  I would enter another world, a lush, green, gray, wet, close, dark world.  And my Southern California body would withdraw deep into the core of my being, wrapped in fog and clouds and months, years of fir trees, rain, puddles, wet shoes and hair.  My California body would stay there, curled up, dormant.  Even when I returned for a visit at age nine, or when I visited Santa Barbara with my mother when I was nineteen, my California self didn’t emerge – completely enveloped in who I had become, a Pacific Northwestern girl, someone who had gone into that grey land and submerged herself, become a creature of water, mud, pine needles, decaying red cedar, salmonberries, creeks, stinging nettles that left raised tattoos on my skin, skin no longer the color of deep cinnamon brown but an olive-beige – reminiscent, I often thought as I grew older, of the underside of a mushroom.

Like most people who live in the Pacific Northwest for a long time, like any child relocated at this age, I quickly became fiercely territorial of my new home.  No other place was as clean, as beautiful, as friendly.  And California?  California became the Devil, signifying all that was wrong with the world:  impassable freeways, earthquakes, heat, violent upheaval.  People in the PNW who came from California did not advertise that fact; it was a slur to call someone a “California Driver!” or imply that some outsider was “from the land of shake n’ bake.”  Now I realize that part of this attitude must have come from my mother’s sense of having fled a past she wanted to forget, a place and time when she made unforgiveable mistakes and was subject to abuse that could not be forgiven.  She had fled California and who she had been there as if it were Hell on earth; as if the fires of Hell had caught her, burned her, left her with raging scars that could only be healed in the land of endless rain.  My mother was in hiding.  My mother had gone underground.  And she took me with her, because she had lost all her other children to the maw of a monstrous state that would never, never give them back to her.

And I loved my mother.  Oh, how I loved her.  My loyalty knew no bounds, and would suffer no correction of my mother’s behavior, even when that behavior wounded me past all healing.

So my California body slept.  Waited.  Dreamed.  Did it struggle to get out?  Or was it lulled into dormancy by the long wet winters that went on for ten months out of twelve?  I was always such a good sleeper, my mother told people.  I slept through car rides, bus rides, parties, even disappearing into my bedroom for self-dictated naps when life got too busy.  I became practiced at retreat.  I adapted.  I transformed.

At least on the outside.  On the inside, my body remembered everything.  I sit in this California coffee shop this morning and my skin tingles with what I know.  What I remember.  What I will remember.

My First Bad Indian

San Marcos, California. 7:20 a.m. 

I'm about to go hold Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir in my hands for the very first time as a published book.  I'm thinking about my first Bad Indian.

My dad once repeated the old saying, “The only good Indian is a bad Indian.”  Then he made that disgusted sound that meant he’d reached his limit.  “Ahhhh, hell.  Even when we’re dead, we’re not good enough.”  We looked across his small kitchen table at each other.  Left unsaid were the words, “So why not just be bad and enjoy it while it lasts?” but that’s what I was thinking, and suspect it was what he was thinking, as a way to explain his long and frequently bad life. 

I can still see him sitting there, old at last, the old age he never thought he would reach or deserve, still living with his third wife before they split and he ended up in Hospice; his hair now gone completely silver and thinning at last, his face lined, dark, his eyes watering with glaucoma, his tattooed arms having lost their bulk but still tight with muscles, his huge hands, the hands I will never forget, wrapped around a cup of coffee, fingers gnarled with arthritis.  His fingernails with those fine straight grooves on them, like mine.  My dad.  The man I know so little about, really, and about whom I know far too much.  Like my mother, I could never deny that I loved him – a love that sprang from someplace honest and naïve and tender deep inside me, from a place uncomplicated by lies and violence, by histories of betrayal and cruelty.  This kind of love that exists from me, for my father, is the kind of love I wish I felt all the time, and not just in these moments when I rise above all the grief like a drowning woman quickly grabbing a breath at the surface before sinking down again into the struggle.

I see him sitting there; he was so surprised by his old age, wondering how he got to such a weakened state – diabetic, arthritic, bad eyes, bad teeth, trouble swallowing – wasn’t it just a few years ago he was still out carousing in his beloved red truck, tearing up the road between our little trailer and the Red Rooster near the Muckleshoot Rez, king of his world, survivor of the worst the world could throw at him?  Oh, the stories inside that man.  He could tell them all day, when he was in the mood.  I imagine him talking to my younger brother all those years they lived alone together, telling Al stories I’ll never hear, and it gives me such a pause:  the light years apart that were their boyhoods!  My father, born in 1927, raised in Indian/Mexican family, the peculiar poverty of Southern California in the Depression, World War II.  My brother, born in 1971, raised for three years in Southern California, then snatched up and moved to Washington State: predominately white world filled with TV, computers, cell phones, ATMS.  Was there ever, really, any way the two of them could relate to each other?  It was as if they were from alternate realities.

But the same love exists between them, even stronger than what I feel in my moments of clarity and forgiveness.  It is a love forged out of alcohol, out of late nights, abandonment, rage, tears, hurt, fishing trips along rocky banks of cold rivers, eggs and tortillas and beans and potatoes, hot black coffee, Mariner’s baseball games on TV or at the King Dome before they blew it up, and oh, the tenderness that comes after violence when the two of you are the only family you have.

We miss him.  I never thought I would say that.  I miss him.  I wish I could talk with him again, sit down over coffee and a piece of his favorite apple pie, listen to him talk about his mother, how she "wrote everything down, like you," his grandfather, washing the old man’s feet, running bootlegged booze in his little red wagon, learning to swim in the Santa Ynez River, eating cactus apples and acorn mush because his father had left and they were poor, and his mother who isn’t Indian enough for the BIA went out and gathered what her ancestors had eaten for thousands of years, and fed her boys.  Stories about the day the four young Miranda boys were walking along the road, and a truck struck Richard, killing him; “I carried him all the way home in my arms,” was the most my father would ever say, in a voice strangled with a grief never resolved.  I wish I could listen again, Dad.

For every story my father told me, there are a hundred more he never shared, that I was never there to hear.  The history between us was a terrible storm on a sea that I couldn’t bring myself to cross often enough.  But maybe he told me enough, just enough, to maintain the thread across generations that is our family story, the story in Bad Indians that stretches back and back through all the bits of oral history, newspapers, mission records, ethnographic notes, census materials, back to where even stories can’t go, into a time immemorial where the Ancestors dwell, and whose presence sustains us.  Maybe the stories that I did hear are enough to keep us connected despite all the distances, the alternate realities we each lived in, enough for us to say that despite everything, despite history, we are still here, the thread between us still unbroken.  

The thread back to those Ancestors still wiry and tough, shot through with love.

Following Isabel

Following Isabel

Re-reading parts of Almanac of the Dead, finding that it helps me write (by which I mean, get a grip on, wrap my mind around) these essays about my Carmel Mission ancestor, Isabel Meadows, and her survival of the missions ... and her narration of stories about those who survived with her, and those who did not.  Silko’s descriptions of wars that never end is so apt, and the nearly infinite ways of splintering souls that she describes, are so like what Isabel describes in her mixed Spanish-English heartbroken vocabulary.  How Silko found the words to write like this, and how Isabel found the words to speak like this, and how these words find their way into the world to change it, are just rocking me back on my heels this morning.  When someone is broken down to the very bottom of what can survive, how is it that such power can arise out of those shards?  It has to be a power that comes from beyond one individual; it has to be the power of brokenness itself, the transformation that brokenness incites, absolute loss and betrayal.  How can I write about this?  Have the words to write about it even been invented yet?

One of the ways Isabel managed this was simply by telling the bare bones truth about the lives of Carmel mission Indian survivors.  Just that: telling what happened between husbands and wives, between mothers and children, between lovers, between sisters, brothers.  Between priest and confessor; between Indian woman and white rapist; between kidnapped Indian children and slavemasters.  The truth:  the infidelity, the physical blows, the moments spent gathering chia seeds or picking wild strawberries together; the drunken fights between brothers, the pain of having an only son hung by the whites, the exhibition of an ancient old woman to a group of thrill-seeking white picnickers for the few pennies it brought.  She just tells the truth, but it is a truth long hidden by mythology, lies, stereotypes, guilt, horror, fear, history-by-the-victors.  It is a truth which, beneath the piles of gilded bullshit called California history, doesn’t break down but grows sharper, more pungent, potent with repressed clarity.  Distilled truth, perhaps: cooked beneath the lies, growing harder, sharper, unrepentant and medicinal as rattlesnake venom. 

Isabel also managed to tell these stories by listening and observing the chaos she saw going on around her, rather than denying that it happened, rather than self-medicating to block out the pain.  It’s startling how little she writes about herself, despite living to be 85 years old; instead, she focuses on the Indian community where she lived all her life.  She takes in the stories of others, those who are not able to give them to Harrington, and she preserves them.  She is receptive as an open basket, calling those stories into herself.  At times, she appears judgmental towards her peers, condemning their drinking, multiple sexual partners, illegitimate children, cruelties toward each other, petty feuds.  That is the colonized soul in Isabel speaking, then; and even at that moment, she is testifying against colonization’s rapacious setting of Indian against Indian.  For in the very next breath, Isabel makes a direct connection between the loss of community and land, and that destructive behavior she records.  She says,

Some died of sadness and others went away from there, dispersed and scattered everywhere. Some ended up living away in Sacramento or in Santa Barbara. Throughout all those places there were Carmeleños hiding that they knew the language. And many died with smallpox also, and with measles—they didn’t know how to protect themselves. And years were ended with drunkenness. Before, in Monterey, it seems like every other house had a bar and these poor people drank until they died. Some drank from sorrow because they had been cast out.

The history of the Carmelo and of Monterey tells of many accidents and fights and stabbings and clubbings and everything that happened to the Indians when they were drinking. And many deaths resulted from the drinking of whiskey and wine. In this manner, the Indian people were finished off faster—with the drinking and with so much sorrow that they had been cast away from their land. 

I find that statement she makes about the loss of El Potrero to be a phenomenally astute analysis of post-colonial trauma; a moment in which she completely transcends her Catholic training, her European anti-Indian sentiment, and her own self-hatred.  A moment in which she loves her people, and mourns for them, mourns with them, mourns for a specific loss of a specific piece of land that happened nearly 100 years in the past, but which she ‘remembers’ as if it were yesterday.  Isabel had to have heard this story from her mother, and her mother’s generation.  Yet when she tells that story, she tells it as if she saw those El Potrero Indians – the infamous Estefana Real, her children, her sisters, their children – forced off of their land, camping on the banks of the Carmel River, and weeping with rage.  “They had to leave, and they were gathered together camping at the river – and from there the Indian people dispersed,” she says, and in my heart, I hear an echo:  “By the waters of Babylon, where we sat down; yea, we wept…when we remembered Zion.”  

Isabel listened to that story about the theft of El Potrero, one of the last Indian-controlled pieces of land left; she listened to the immense, unspeakable grief underneath the words of the story, and she made the leap from that moment to the drinking, fighting, self-destructive behaviors that followed, and said:  we lost hope.  The descent into clinical depression, the self-medicating, the self-hatred at losing – she didn’t have the modern psychological vocabulary for that, but she did her best, and her analysis of the situation is deeply moving, insightful, beautiful, and above all, loving.  

Sometimes you write about pain in order to express love for those involved.  And oh, how Isabel loved those bad Indians.  That is the third way I see Isabel managing to speak the unspeakable: through sheer love.  A tenderness for those drunken Indians, those knife-fighting, coal-throwing, back-stabbing, starving, prostituted, wife-abusing, poor, Spanish-speaking, Indian-speaking, fragile souls who had been removed and erased to the point of ultimate despair.  Yes, she bad-mouthed their violence, their pursuit of alcohol, their cruelty toward women and children.  She didn’t like their behavior.  But she never lost sight of what had made them that way.  She never lost sight of who they could have been, if not for Missionization; she never forgot that they were good people driven insane by insane punishment.  If Isabel teaches me anything, she teaches me that: you can love even in the midst of witnessing your loved one’s self-destruction.  You can love, and despair, at the same time.

For me, this is of course about my father, about loving the broken jagged pieces of him despite the gashes inflicted by his touch; but it is not just about my father.  It’s about the contemporary Esselen Nation and our incessant in-fighting, the power-plays, the mistrust, the betrayals, the grief over lost sisters and lost relationships, cracks driven into us by the wedge of the BIA, the U.S. Government, the demand for blood quantum and paper trails for a people whose blood was spilled all over the state, and for whom even the joke of a signed treaty was so dangerous, they had to be hidden away from the eyes of the world for decades.  I see us as a forest cut down, stumps splintered and riddled with iron wedges driving through to separate us at the root.  Recovery seems impossible.   

I see my sister trying to hold the tribe together by sheer will power.  One woman, no matter how amazing, cannot do that.  Is she holding on to a memory, a dream?  I’m afraid to even think that way; her hold is so tenuous.  I want to believe we will make a comeback, we will remember how to love one another, learn how to love our broken selves as the makings of a mosaic.  I want a tribe to come home to, a center to the universe, a place and a people that will hold me, comfort me, welcome what I can give.  

I want what Isabel wanted.  It must have seemed impossible to her, too; but she never stopped hoping.  She wanted the U.S. Government to give the Carmel Indians some land, a place to call ours, a place to be a people again.  She was looking for an acknowledgment of our presence; for us to be given permission to exist.

Some say we can’t wait, and it can’t be given.  We must act now, and we must take what is ours, claim it.  Sovereignty.  But you can only claim it if you speak with a single voice, a single mind, a single dream.  And we cannot.  We are made of me and I and mine and want, multiplied by hundreds of years of violence.  

Yet Isabel never stopped hoping.  It was not simply because she was a strong woman.  It was because she loved.  It was because she knew the truth.  Her part in healing our brokenness was to listen, to remember, and to tell.

I don’t feel that I have done any differently; I don’t feel that I have done any more.  But it is all I can think of to do: to admit the power of story.  To follow her example.  To love our brokenness, and hope for transformation from splinters and shards into whole, vibrant, brilliant mosaics.

Can we do this?  How do we do this?  

We is the operative word.  This healing is not something that can be done alone; the healing of a community takes that whole community.  And how to lead a community toward wholeness is, I believe, something that can be accomplished through story.  We have so many great storytellers.  I’m trying to learn from them, trying to enact that transformation.  Isabel is our teacher.  In this project about her stories, I am trying to bring her teachings back to our tribe in a way they will be able to hear. 

Isabel, do you see me?  I'm so far behind you.  But listening.  Listening.