By the time I knew my mother, her Hollywood days had come and gone. The spiked heels, glamorous dresses, flamenco dancing past had left behind just an affinity for dark crimson lipstick, drawn-on eyebrows, and sometimes, when she felt good, bright red nail polish. Most days she wore stretch pants and sweatshirts, a pair of cheap sandals or Keds. She liked black coffee, not too hot, and Pall Mall cigarettes. Real butter when she could get it, margarine if not, and pasta, and meat. I remember standing beside her as she made dinner – she’d snack on bites of raw hamburger, laugh at my revulsion. Vegetables were not her friends. She liked orange sherbet in a mug with milk poured over it for dessert. Her culinary specialties included homemade egg noodles, tacos, flour tortillas, meatloaf, apple and blackberry pies (best pie crust ever), lemon meringue pie, enchiladas, refried beans from scratch, French toast. Comfort foods.
On her birthday, if we were flush, we always went out to the one Chinese restaurant in town; growing up in Los Angeles, she’d grown fond of Cashew Chicken, deep-fried shrimp and other Americanized dishes. My mother read constantly, fat books of fiction or obscure self-help treatises that temporarily made dark reality bearable. She was smart – probably, brilliant. She could have earned a Ph.D. in how to feed a family on a food stamp budget. She put herself through two years of community college, earned an Associate’s degree in library science, and interviewed at a local TV station for the position of videotape librarian. They hired her in large part, her Black co-worker later whispered, because of her Hispanic last name – it boosted the station’s number of Affirmative Action employees up a notch. Miranda was my father’s name, which she’d gone back to after divorcing my step-father. Sometimes, fate works like that. She was single, poor, raising an Indian kid, she had survived my father once, and still had another round coming. I’d say, she earned the name Miranda and the one perk it ever gave her.
Madgel Eleanor Miranda, April 16, 1935 - November 21st, 2001
She worked like a dog at that TV station, long hours, low pay, little recognition. But the job gave her a blessed slice of freedom, independence. She loved to travel; mid-life, she paid her own way to places like Israel, Denmark, and all over the U.S. for genealogical research trips. She was brave. In her short lifetime, my mother had been many different women. Some of the lives she lived, I wouldn’t have recognized her. She was one mother to my older sister and brother in the 1950s, a completely different one with me in the 1960s. She didn’t use endearments with anyone. Never said “honey” or “sweetheart” with any of us at all, let alone with the promiscuity that I used (and still use) with my own children. My name was her only endearment for me: Deby,when all was well, Deborah Ann when I pushed her limits. My mother’s heart was a secret compartment which took in everything she experienced; very little ever came back out. She didn’t write things down, she didn’t go to a therapist, she didn’t have a close friend more than once or twice in her lifetime. She swore rarely, and only when profoundly provoked or completely surprised. She was a closed book, a story whose pages she burned as soon as each one had been written. She loved, however, and fiercely; usually men who hurt her, or who were unavailable, or both.
I realize only now how angry my mother was all her life – at herself, for her sins (real or imagined) or at losses she could not let go. Pregnancy at seventeen. “We didn’t have her long enough,” my grandmother once sighed, remembering that shot-gun wedding. Three babies before she was twenty-one. The death of a child through her own neglect and addiction. A thirsty woman in many ways, my mother drank for much of her life, never really stopped until she found the deep well of Judaism and converted in her forties, learning Hebrew, learning ritual. She was courageous under fire, and determined. She died an observant Jew, but her Conservative rabbi wouldn’t hold a memorial service for her because she had told me that she wanted to be cremated, and I refused to disobey her last wish. Six months later, when I finally located her will, I discovered that in this document, she had actually directed that she be buried in a plain pine box, like a good Jew. Why, in her last weeks, had she said “yes,” when I asked if she wanted cremation? I’ll never know. Secrets. Secrets.
That was my mother – always the smell of cigarettes, a smoke screen, a thunderous silence wrapped around her like a cloak. A kind woman who took in strays, paid for veterinary care she couldn’t afford, stuck up for the underdog, faithfully paid her union dues – The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers – and marched in the WTO protests through downtown Seattle, not knowing her body harbored squamous cell lung cancer, not knowing she didn’t have long, but living every moment as if she did.
Maybe if she’d lived longer – like her own mother, a week away from 95 when she passed – my mother would have eventually come out of her shell. Maybe we would have been able to talk with words instead of the inarticulate language of love mired in deep confusion. Maybe she would have told me her reasons for some of the inexplicable things she’d done in her life – done to herself, to her children, her parents, herself.
But my mother, she didn’t live to see anything like 95. She didn’t live to see anything like clarity or closure. Like the rest of her life, her death was hasty, hurried, a rush job that was over almost before we had time to realize it had begun. Sick in late August, diagnosed in September, treated in October, dead by mid-November. Eleven years later, I’m still trying to figure out how to say goodbye, all the different ways to tell my mother “I love you” even as she moves farther and farther away on a journey in which I, and our time together, was only one brief moment.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Mock-up of the book cover; coming out in January 2013. HeyDay.
Throughout the history of this blog, “When Turtles Fly,” I have published both positive and negative comments in the interests of dialogue and conversation. This morning, however, I received the following anonymous rant:
“Thank you defenders of us teachers!! The problem that I have with this blog, coming from an educated person, is the generalization that is being implied which greatly offends me as a 4th great teacher. Get over it people, not all teachers teach the "wrong" way or the "wrong" facts or force everyone to build a mission. All the history books I've ever taught with include all the negative effects the mission system had on the missions so I don't know where you guys are looking. If what you are really upset about is building that mission, then don't do it and ask for an alternative. I had fun building my mission project and got to spend some quality/creative time with my daughter when we chose to build hers, so I guess the building might not be the real problem for some of you. Geeesh, what a waste of my time reading all these complaints... I guess some just need a place to vent.”
Well Anonymous, because you posted anonymously, and will probably not visit the site again, there is no way for me to tell you that yes, “I guess the building [of a model mission diorama] might not be the real problem for some of you.” No kidding! I would like to reply that you need to read more of the blog posts, learning exactly WHY the 4th grade mission project is so very problematic (and it’s not because I don’t want parents to spend time having fun with their children, or because I think 4th grade teachers are stupid).
I would like to reply that I realize not all teachers teach the “wrong” way or the “wrong” facts; and that A) in fact it is in large part because of educational resources like this blog (not just this blog) that teacher awareness of California mythology about the missions has increased; and B) the teachers who are offering alternative projects and incorporating more of the truth about missionization into their 4thgrade classrooms need the kind of support offered by this blog and other information in the resource lists I provide. You wrote, "geeesh, what a waste of my time reading all these complaints ... I guess some just need a place to vent." This kind of venting, Anonymous, is called COMMUNICATION. I would like to tell you that Audre Lorde tells us, "Anger is full of information and energy," and that's it is a good idea to pay attention to anger, or venting, because it contains material you need to know about, and deal with.
I would also like to reply that the 4thgrade mission project is something that has had long-term effects on how California Indians are viewed in the mainstream press and population, and that those views are typically inaccurate, leading to the perpetuation of misrepresentations and stereotypes. This blog, you would have noticed, Anonymous, had you read further, is not primarily about the 4thGrade Mission Project. This blog is about exploring, exposing, and correcting the history of what really happened to California Indians during and after missionization. It is about giving voice to California Indian experience, knowledge and pain. Most importantly, it is about making connections between what happened THEN with the current conditions of California Indians (economic, educational, psychological, legal). How many of the history books have you read actually do that? or prepare students to think about these connections in their future? How many texts used in the classroom contain the voices of California Indians? How many texts teach children that Missionization was not good for Indians in any way, shape or form – not now, not then, not ever – and yet, the ideology behind Missionization continues to harm contemporary California Indians and the non-Indian children who grow up to be adults with no clue about that?
Southern California is covered in faux-Mission style buildings, red tile rooftops, tourist destinations that celebrate the Missions as cultural and civilizing successes. The culture itself is deeply damaged by myths that celebrate Spanish/Mexican rule and thereby denigrate Native Californian lives and culture. There is very little information available to the general public that even begins to question that mythology, let alone refute it. This affects the efforts of Native Californians alive today in a multitude of damaging and negative ways.
That’s why I write this blog. Not because I think 4th grade teachers can’t teach (I have my own elementary teaching degree) or because I’m seeking fame and fortune (don’t make me laugh!). Not because I want to waste your time, dear Anonymous; but have you considered all the ways your time (and your daughter’s time, and your daughter’s education) has been wasted on material that has no relationship whatsoever to reality or intellectual validity? If I were you, that’s what I’d be most worried about: why don’t I know this material? why isn’t it being taught? why don’t I have a curriculum that includes it? what really happened to Southern California Indians when the Spanish (and later, Mexican) government ruled here? Why did the Native California population drop from approximately one million to 5 or 10 thousand in less than 100 years? What mistakes were made that future citizens of California would like to avoid, learn from, learn about, to help them grow as humane and aware people?
But I can’t have this conversation with you, Anonymous, nor any of the other folks who have left comments but no names or email addresses. I can’t have this conversation because you don’t want to have it, and you have let me know that by posting your little rant (I hope it made you feel better; it certainly did nothing for me or, I’m fairly certain, for your daughter or the students in your classroom). And I’m tired of having one-sided conversations with people who aren’t even in the room.
Therefore, I will continue to publish all comments, with one important change: I will no longer publish comments that are submitted anonymously. If I can put my name, my tribe and my writing out there with full disclosure about who I am and how to reach me, then so can anyone who wants to comment. So, from today (March 15, 2012) on, please sign your name to any remarks and leave your email address so that when I, or others, respond to your comments, we can be part of a conversation and not rants that expose how much you don’t know and how badly you don’t want to know it.
At the end of January, I felt far from my friends, fellow authors, professors and teachers in Arizona, when the news broke: the State of Tucson had shut down the much-lauded Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District mid-semester; targeting and removing books from classrooms based on the racial and/or political perspective of the authors. Arizona officials stated that these books cause "resentment toward a race or class of people" - meaning, Caucasians - and "aroused emotion" in Mexican-American students. Many Mexican-American and Native American authored books are on the list, but so are texts like The Tempest and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” Isn't good literature supposed to arouse emotion in the reader? Isn’t it one of the few ways we have of experiencing different perspectives?
Regina Mills (’09), now teaching ninth grade in Arizona, wrote to me, "We have been banned from teaching our kids to feel empowered in a world where most issues stem from generations of powerlessness." Regina’s comment highlights the real issue: banned books tell truths that are often difficult for us to hear, but the MAS Program worked because it made critical thinkers out of students (all of whom, irrespective of ethnicity, scored significantly higher on achievement tests after taking the classes).
Several community responses arose at once; “No History is Illegal” organized a month-long Teach-In About Tucson, set to begin February 1. Seeking a way to engage rather than watch from a distance, I composed an email to my colleagues that included links to several informative websites, including the “Librotraficante” movement headed by Tony Diaz, and suggesting that we take part in the Teach-In by incorporating a lesson about Tucson into our individual classrooms.
I was overwhelmed by the immediate and savvy responses from my busy colleagues.
Washington and Lee students (and their parents) choose our university because they know our faculty is made up of professors highly skilled in teaching, scholarship and service – and what my colleagues told me in email after email is that we faculty honed our skills on book lists that would make TUSD's hair stand on end, books that taught us critical thinking skills and lit the spark in us that we pass on to W&L students.
Professor of Romance Languages and Program Head of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Jeff Barnett wrote, “Our assigned reading for the [Feb. 1st] class by chance is the Victoria Lena Manyarrows ‘Confronting and Surpassing the Legacy of Columbus’—an example of (contra)banned literature… On the night of Feb 1st, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies capstone course meets at 6:30. I would be happy if anyone wished to join us in the seminar that evening to participate in the discussion …Reading Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America: A History Of Chicanos was one of the formative experiences of my undergraduate education and training for LACS. Now, of course, it’s one of the seminal works that has been banned.”
Robin LeBlanc, from the Politics Department, wrote to ask for excerpts of banned literature, and I sent out several short pieces from Woman Hollering Creek, by Sandra Cisneros. Robin crafted her lesson plan and shared a story about how close Arizona is to W&L: “I'll be opening POL 255 Gender and Politics with a short reading from Freire, followed by a discussion of our regular syllabus assignment about Latinas in politics, and a reading from the Cisneros stories Deborah shared. Yesterday afternoon I was approached by a student I had not yet met and who described himself as a ‘Mexican American.’ He said he had overheard me describe the Arizona situation to my East Asia students yesterday and that he had been wondering how the Washington and Lee Community would respond to the issue. He said he was glad to hear what he described as my "fair" treatment of the issue; he said he had met students in California who had fled Arizona because of its politics. He had not yet heard any faculty mention the Arizona situation. The encounter reminded me of how important it is to let our students know that we do care about their multiple perspectives, and what a good chance this is to do that.”
Suzanne Keen, Chair of English, reported after teaching her class on February 1, “My students in English 232 The Novel gasped when I held up AZ banned book, Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Five of them read it last semester. They explained to the others Freire's contribution to a pedagogy emphasizing dialogue and discussion over lecture. Since we are reading and discussing Xiaolu Guo, a filmmaker and novelist from the People's Republic of China, a discussion of book banning and the fragility of our American liberties fit right in.”
Jim Kahn, Professor of Economics and Director of the Environmental Studies Program, wrote that he planned “to use the situation in Arizona when I teach global warming and the assault on science associated with global warming (and environment change in general). I will use the situation in Arizona to help place the "denial" of global climate change in a context of a society that prefers to remain ignorant of the book banning is in some ways analogous to the State Attorney General of Virginia trying to prosecute climate scientists who worked at UVa.”
“I can also talk about the current issues in Arizona in my class,” Romance Language Professor Monica Botta contributed, “Tomorrow in my seminar we are going to examine how ‘selective’ is Sarmiento (1811-1888) when he constructs a discourse of his past by only mentioning his ‘criollo’ ancestors in ‘Recuerdos de provincia.’”
Gwyn Campbell, Spanish Professor, shared that she “did bring the subject up to the other classes today, because it is so appalling, and it dovetailed with the issues of censorship, in the one class, and issues related to the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ in the other.”
“I don't teach tomorrow,” stated Monica Gonzalez, also from Romance Languages, “but on Thursday I will be mentioning this in my two classes. Also, in my 240 Latin American Literature class, I am teaching Andrés Bello's ‘El castellano en América’ (‘Spanish Language in America’), a text written in 1847 that refers to the use of Spanish language by the new republics in Latin America. If you want to join me in the class to ‘re-read’ this text from the perspective of the current U.S. legislation towards hispanic immigrants, you are more than welcome!”
“My current course on ‘Ralph Ellison and the Civil Rights Movement’ meets Tu/Th, so we entered into this issue today and had a great discussion,” Marc Conner, English and Head of the African American Studies Program, told us, “About ¼ of the students knew about it, though two of them are in Deborah’s creative writing course so they have clearly been grappling with this. Some were stunned that such things are happening today. It led to a fine discussion of the complexity of American cultural experience, and the dangers of flattening that complexity. —it’s had a real purchase on what we’re teaching and talking about.”
“I will participate in the teach-in tomorrow, making this issue central to my ‘insider/outsider’ WRIT 100,” English professor Michael Crowley decided, “And I'll see if I can't fold it in to my ‘monsters’ class on Thursday too -- I could make several connections to our reading of Frankenstein...”
“I plan to incorporate it into my class for Wed in Poverty 101,” Howard Pickett reported from the Shepherd Poverty Program, and Theresa Braunschneider of English looked forward to “discussing the Tucson developments today in my seemingly innocent Brit lit class -- which, I hope, is actually fomenting ‘resentment’ every day by thinking critically about the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the British colonial imagination (we even did a critical reading of Columbus on the first day of class!).”
“I've been discussing this whole situation with my Cowboys and Indians class as it has been developing,” English professor and Director of the Writing Center, Kary Smout, commented, and Professor of Spanish Ellen Mayock responded, “This is a great call-to-arms… I'm still on sabbatical and so don't have classes this term, but I think I'll attend Jeff's on Wednesday evening in a show of solidarity. I absolutely love the term librotraficante--great to see trafficking going the right way for once!” –
The Philosophy Department’s Florentein Verhage found great inspiration in the intersections between her Phil395 work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gloria Anzaldua, saying, “we have been reading about lived experience and the lived-body: the body as pivot, hinge and cross-road between nature, culture, geography, biology, self and other. He speaks of a body as ‘being in and toward the world’, as being of the world, as open to the world. In that context I will have my students read short excerpts of Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and discuss the recent developments in Tuscon. Anzaldua’s writing is simply beautiful. In it I read passion, strength, love, rage, pain, confusion, ambiguity, power, hope, openness, but nowhere in this text I find hate.”
Floretein’s colleague, Melina Bell, also found the Teach-in experience profoundly useful, reporting that “We had a really excellent discussion in class about why we need ethnic studies and to have different points of view included in the curriculum. Most students admitted that they did not 'think about' the way history is told from a subjective point of view, rather than being mere 'facts.' We addressed why we need Mexican American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies and African American Studies, but not 'Caucasian Studies' or 'Men in Technology and Science.' I saw a lot of lightbulbs turn on over their heads. Thanks for sending all those great links (some of which I required them to read/watch) and for enriching my class and this campus with an unusually strong burst of activism for justice.”
Not surprisingly, poetry also lent itself well to this teach-in topic, wrote Lesley Wheeler: “My seminar on 21stc poetry was finishing up several weeks of reading about the aftermath of Katrina as documented by poets Cynthia Hogue, Nicole Cooley, Natasha Trethewey, and others. They were just finishing Trethewey’s BEYOND KATRINA: A MEDITATION ON THE MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST. All of these books concern the relevance of race to U.S. history and contemporary culture and politics, and they’re all working through whatever the social role of literature might be. None of them have been banned in Tucson or elsewhere, to my knowledge, but the book banning intersected in several ways with what we’d been discussing, so we spent the first half of Wednesday’s session considering it. I showed them the list and we talked about whether a book should ever be banned from a high school curriculum (they made varied arguments), books that had offended or excited us, and whether there was such a thing as a good work of literature without an implicit agenda (we couldn’t think of any). “
And so the Teach-In About Tucson took place at Washington and Lee in English and American Literature, Environmental Studies, Sociology, Latin American Literature, Politics, Writing 100, Poverty, Philosophy and Spanish classes. English Professor Chris Gavaler and Rod Smith, editor of The Shenandoah Review, both published excellent blogs addressing the situation.
We were supported by our Leyburn Library colleagues, as well: Librarian Yolanda Merrill created a “Banned Book” display, and Librarian Dick Grefe ordered a handful of banned books we didn’t already own to round out the Leyburn collection – reminding us all, what’s a revolution without the librarians?
And this Teach-In was revolutionary. The messages this Teach-in carried made clear our faculty’s profound engagement with the critical thinking crucial to education. If we professors came to our classrooms without having read those banned books, W&L students’ education would be sadly lacking. The closing of MAS and removal of books in Tucson must be devastating for educators there who have dedicated their lives to teaching students with a critical pedagogy of empowerment.
W &L professors found ourselves recharged and rededicated to our vocations by the February 1st Teach-In About Tucson. A sense of alliance came out of our participation, a reminder that every day that we teach what we love, Arizona is not so far away. I am grateful to the intellectual, compassionate, critical thinkers who surround me at Washington and Lee, and awed by their willingness to participate in a Teach-In on such short notice, with such brilliant results. Harlan Beckley, Director of the Shepherd Poverty Program here, is currently working on bringing together a group of students for an on-going discussion of the issues in Tucson and has asked for my help; I’m very hopeful that a whole new area of study and activism is opening up for students in Lexington, and look forward to being a part of it.
As I finish writing this blog, it is Sunday, February 26th. The Librotraficante Caravan, “Book Traffickers” smuggling banned “wet books” back into Arizona, is prepping for an amazing march to Arizona with banned books and banned authors. They plan to arrive in Tucson on March 16th. Funded by various banned book authors and supporters, Librotraficante literally walks the walk. I feel that, thanks to our participation in the Teach-In, we are walking with them in spirit; www.librotraficante.com allows us to donate financially as well – yes, it takes money to fight censorship.
As we near the one month anniversary of our Teach-In, I will update my students about the events in Tucson, and urge my colleagues to continue this real-life exercise in critical thinking.
Someone once said that human beings are simply mobile containers designed by water in order to move itself from place to place.I like that image of us as walking water; it makes sense, since most of the human body is made up of H2O, and the surface of earth herself is about 74% water. Are we simply extensions of the earth, moving about independently, yet connected by the tether, or umbilical cord, of our shared composition?Of course, this analogy immediately presumes the earth as our mother, our origin, our parent, and we her wandering (and often wayward) offspring.
In one of my prose poems, "Lullabye," I try to imagine how being made of mostly water means having a deep relationship with the sea.
Lullaby
We belong to the sea. We are salt water walking on the land in soft containers called flesh. Chloride, sodium, sulfate swim in our veins, warm and elemental. Our bodies sway and swell in response to the tides of our oldest memory. The moon pulls the sea, the sea pulls us. So we are the sea, walking on two legs far away from the birthing waters. We travel wide plains, rest awhile beside icy streams, make shelters out of snow. Always, we seek water, wherever we go, look for lost relatives, pieces of our selves. We smell wetness beneath rock; we raise our faces to gray skies, mouths open; we welcome the fat drops with our thirst. We belong to the sea, we bear her dark green wishes and slippery strands of thought. Magnesium, calcium, potassium slide through our veins. We make love to each other, oceans aching to reunite; homesick, we ease our isolation with each other’s moist mouths, secret seeps, lonely seas meeting on our slick skins. We belong to the sea: she will make her claim on us again one day, demand our return, and this long separation will come to an end. She will ask us for her copper, her cobalt, her molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, iron, bicarbonate, bromide, strontium. We will leave our flesh behind us on the shore, husks that dry and turn to dust. We will slip back into the sea like a child going home, like boron to selenium, like blood finds its way back to blood.
Fragments of any place we live on for an extended period of time are transmitted into our flesh, blood, bones and teeth in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and these become the architecture that contains us. Our bodies record our relationship with place in several beautiful ways.Within that formula of H2O, we must remember that the mass of our human bodies is made up mostly of oxygen.
Our bones, for example, soak up the elements around us to renew themselves about every ten years; the isotopic oxygen ratios in the bone show the “signature” of where you’ve been. It’s a little like having your dog or cat “chipped” – a veterinarian with a scanner can tell at a glance where your pet belongs if it has somehow wandered off.
And our teeth are even better at chronicling our connection to the planet. Unlike bone, adult teeth never rebuild themselves; the elements present when they are initially formed stay in them for life, and so our teeth preserve the precise region in which we were born and raised. When Gloria Anzaldua says she travels from her homeplace “taking with me the land,” she isn’t speaking metaphorically. We carry particles from the place of our emergence deep in our bodies wherever we go, all of our lives.
Even our hair, whose growth is largely determined by the water we drink, tells the more recent stories. We drink water filtered through the geology of the place we live; each region’s water has its own unique oxygen isotope, and that geographic pattern braids itself into our hair as it grows.
All of this science is interesting to me not because of what it reveals, but because of what it confirms: the indigenous world view that human beings are not separate from the earth, from land and water but instead extensions of Earth. Different, yes; separate, no. The Earth is a living entity from which we are created through a process both pragmatic and mysterious. This is, I think, often interpreted as indigenous spirituality or religion, but a more accurate description might be that it is a world view, a way of ordering the world, the core of indigenous values, knowledge and ethics.
The diversity of indigenous cultures on the North American continent alone is staggering, yet this perception of human connection to the planet, to the earth, may be the one universal, pan-Indian commonality. The complex, intimate relationship between human and planet plays out in many ways through the images within indigenous poetry.
Ecological or eco-poetry is often defined as, ultimately, the loss of the individual self in favor of a network of inter-connected ecologies. Yet Native poetry celebrates all the same markers of humanity that other poetry does – falling in love, death, sensory and sensual experiences, grief, celebration, relationship. A Native world view allows for the difference between self and the elements that form us, but does not deny the deep connections between self and those same elements. What if we ARE Place?
Being able to hold both of these thoughts at once in one’s mind, and in one’s daily actions, is the work of thousands of years of indigenous experience. When North American was colonized by European powers, that world view took a severe beating; in many cases, whole tribes whose lives exemplified this way of knowing were killed, and in many more tribes, the bodies lived on without knowledge of these connections between earth and self. Many of us, ourselves, have forgotten how to be indigenous.
My strong tribal identity is tied to a specific place, California, and even more strongly to the Monterey Bay and Santa Barbara areas, where my grandparents were from. Over and over, my poems walk the landscape and geography of home, as if to visit with it, memorize it, talk with it. It seems so natural to me that I was surprised when my colleague Lesley said, “Place is kind of what you DO” – but immediately, that felt true. I think I’ve been re-learning how to be indigenous all of my life.
Perhaps this is where my poetic obsession with place comes from: my teeth; my bones. I used to be so embarrassed by my crooked “Indian” teeth, the result of an over-crowded mouth and poor dental care as a kid. Now I think of my teeth as my secret strength, a safe-deposit box, where I carry the essence of my homeland with me, always. In "Mnemonic," I think about what remains with us in our "bone memory" even as we travel far from our birthplaces.
I'd love to hear what other people/poets/writers/Indians are thinking about when they think of place and their relationship to it.
This essay owes inspiration to Lesley Wheeler's handout on Poetry of Place, as well as a blog by Amelia Montes
Mnemonic
I was born on the San Andreas Fault. I carry
that promise of violence and destruction down
the center of my body like a zig-zag of lightning.
Terry Tempest Williams asks, I came to finding my voice through the pain and suffering of those I love most - how do I deal with that? What do I do with that knowledge?
This is precisely the dilemma I faced from the very beginning, when writing about the California Missions became the focus of my work, both scholarly and poetic.
My “successes” in life (tenured teaching position, house, car, children’s college, health care, publications, the attention and respect of publishers, universities, other scholars and poets) have come about mostly through the fact that I write about and research California Indian history and experiences. And most of those histories and experiences are not pleasant “legends” or warm, fuzzy memories. Most of them are about death by horrible disease or murder, the fragmentation of family relationships, self-destructive responses to trauma, the abandonment of children, exile and/or homelessness, displacement, loss of language and culture – and more, all at the hands of another people whose blood also runs in my veins.
Is it any wonder that I am reluctant to claim any of my successes as such? That I am so careful to always look over my shoulder at what might be coming up behind me? That I dream about sleeping on a bed of bones carved with the words of another language? That I feel guilty for profiting from telling the stories of my ancestors in the missions? That I shrink from compliments about my writing? That this writing comes so hard, takes so much out of me?
So when I heard Terry Tempest William speak at Lee Chapel, on the Washington and Lee University campus, her questions about “voice” resonated down to my bones. She spoke about her new book, one that she had thought would be about voice, finding voice, and said those words: I came to finding my voice through the pain and suffering of those I love most - how do I deal with that? What do I do with that knowledge?
I went to bed that night thinking, it’s a responsibility. It’s a debt, this gift, and I must repay it by carrying the responsibility of giving voice to those who could not speak. Isn’t that the answer? Isn’t that the way to assuage my guilt at earning my living from the tortured cries of my beloved ancestors and relatives? To accept it as a charge, not a gift?
But I wasn’t satisfied. It felt, not wrong, but incomplete. Too easy. And not enough. I know that often in those liminal moments between wakefulness and sleeping, revelation slips in, so I asked (myself, the Universe, the Ancestors): but what more is it? and perhaps because Terry’s achingly honest vulnerability had created a receptivity and openness that hadn’t been there before, the response came back almost as if it had been waiting for me to ask:
It’s not that you’ve found your voice through the pain of others. It’s that their voices found you.
I opened my hand and put that thought inside it, closed my fist around the warmth of the truth, and slept.
When I woke up, I remembered a dream I’d had twenty years before. Early on in my adult writing life, when I was about thirty, soon after the poem “I Am Not a Witness” came to me, I dreamt that I was part of a group of Indian people being used in an experiment. We were locked up in a dark, crowded space together. Huge wooden doors slammed shut, and we beat our fists against them, splintering the wood into our flesh, but unable to escape. No windows, no light, just wives, sisters, brothers, husbands, uncles, babies, toddlers, small children, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, in-laws – trapped – while the scientists watched from one-way windows in their white lab coats. In the dream, I knew we were inside a mission; the experiment was to see how much of what our ancestors had experienced was stored in the cells of our bodies. In the dream, I opened my mouth. A scream came out. A horrible, broken scream came out of my throat. But it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t my scream. It was someone else’s scream, the scream of an ancestor, coming from my own throat.
When I awoke in the dark, damp with sweat and panic, I had not uttered a sound. But my throat hurt, scraped raw. My voice, when I tried to speak, was hoarse and dry; my vocal cords scratched and strained.
Not my voice. Her voice.
The voice of an ancestor, joining mine. Singing with mine – making a song, collaborating in a song for multiple voices.
I don’t mean this in some new-age, “channeling,” Seth-like explanation. I’m not sure how I mean it. But if time is, indeed, spiral and happening all around us all the time, then there must be places where people separated by chronology touch as the spiral curves inward. I know that my sister Louise is one of those people, one who dreams, who listens, and acts for the Ancestors. We are conduits, but not mindless, robotic tubes through which something is delivered. That would be possession. That would be someone else controlling me, dictating to me. And that is not what I feel happening as I write.
What I feel as I write is this: a door opens inside me, a door like one of those between hotel rooms, with locks on each side. I must unlock my side. Someone – the Ancestor wishing to speak – must unlock her side. We must both stand, willingly, in that threshold.
If I am afraid or unwilling or unable to unlock my side, then she will attempt to come as a dream. Of this I am certain. Once, during a time of denial about writing, I dreamt of a bear attempting to knock down the door to get into my bedroom! She was a beautiful bear, and I loved her rough brown fur and long claws and dark eyes even as I barricaded the door against her.
The stories I tell with this voice that is both mine and the voices of others are, in fact, a lot like bears. Beautiful and admirable, glossy and strong. Wild and unpredictable and full of fierceness, scarred, in pain.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always been a turtle. I have to be able to withdraw into a protective shell at times, rest, then stick my head back out for the next round. A turtle is a good form to have; a hard shell into which one may retreat is a necessary tool in this work.
Am I constructing a story that lets me off the hook of survivor’s guilt? Perhaps. But what I like about the “revelation” I had the night after Terry Tempest Williams’ talk is not that it somehow removes the responsibility of bearing witness for my Ancestors, because it does not - I owe my very existence to their tenacity, their willingness to be Bad Indians rather than Dead Indians. What I like is how I see that the Ancestors are undefeated after all: not dead and silent in the ground, under pavement, in museums. No. The Ancestors are alive and kicking – kicking that door down, insisting on telling their stories, still making songs, still bearing witness themselves. They are not victims, needing my help. If anything, I am the needy one! I am in dire need of their wisdom, their direction, their Coyotismo, their survivance.
What I like is that they share their stories, still tell me how to live, allow me to write it down; what I like is that they are still teaching us how to survive.
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.
When Turtles Fly is proud to announce the winners of the first ever "Codename: Geronimo" poetry contest. Please see the previous blog entry for the contest's inspiration.
I've chosen 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and honorable mention.
Each of these poems approaches the topic from different angles, yet each also participates in one of Native American literature's signature acts: that of rewriting, or correcting, the historical record. Whether it is Anita Endrezze's conflation of colonization and Middle Eastern war, soldiers with "boots heavy as centuries," or Kim Shuck's ageless "debate over the bones," or Kimberlee Lee's warning to hate-mongers of any era, "We see you in your darkness/it's where you always go," or Tiffany Midge's haunting question, "How many times should they kill Geronimo?" these writers understand and point out the terrible genealogy of racism and oppression. And, these writers know that to correct and reconstruct history from a Native perspective is to directly engage with lies - those fierce guardians of "history"- that are deeply embedded in the mythology of the United States. Each of those poets goes singing into that conflict, understanding the necessity of their intervention.
I'm honored to have their words grace this blog, and my life! Thank you, poets!
And here they are.
FIRST PRIZE
A Rogue Wind Over Fort Sill Spring Song for Goyathlay 2011
Windows are such lonely things the Dry of Turkey Creek the humidity of Osrash the debate over the bones these Threads these words that stretch that Call a handful of dirt this invocation that might be a Cure for unhealing wounds for the lack of a Scapula an ulna or an ingredient in an amulet for Hiding in hills unfound the Invisible blamed or blameless the Lost in the crevices those Folded, sequestered words kept In a box at someone’s throat or carved into a Gemstone a word learned Silently this cure this Contact poison this New connection
by Kim Shuck
SECOND PRIZE
K.I.A
“We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.” Geronimo (Goyathlay, or “one who yawns”)
The sun
is a prairie of light.
The darkness
listens to us
as we wonder
if it is separate
from ourselves.
The prairie moon
is yellow grass
and river stones.
The People sing,
their voices
lost in the vastness.
Then comes the soldiers,
with orders that march on
boots heavy as centuries.
The silence of light
clouds of blasted light
as Time passes from enemy
to enemy. Whose hands
are clean from the ashes
of the dead?
The earth turns
red.
Tail winds of bombs,
bullets cracking
the sky
into our bones
your bones,
all the bones of the sky
breaking dawn
into splinters
of death.
by Anita Endrezze
THIRD PRIZE
Name Game
It’s not as if we didn’t know
The politics of Indian hating live
On in your war machine red with blood
Driven by fear hidden in code.
We see you in your darkness.
We know the places you go
Always repeating yourself in patterns
Too familiar, too loud, too slow
Foolish in your pride, you don’t think
We notice; you are wrong
That man was no Geronimo
We see you in your darkness
It’s the place you always go.
by Kimberli Lee
HONORABLE MENTION
Codename Geronimo
In 2011 someone made an order, kill Geronimo; soldiers dispatched by jet, by car, with orders to kill Geronimo.
The Brits had a new princess and Fergie’s daughters had silly hats but the Royal wedding was eclipsed by the killing of Geronimo.
I heard about it on the radio; bin Laden’s been ratted out living in a pleasant Pakistani suburb, KIA Geronimo.
He used his wives as shields; there is nothing about that fact to cheer yet some did after killing Geronimo.
For tribal nations the namesake’s a hero, little doubt occupy their minds as to the military’s code KIA Geronimo.
It’s just another cry for war without restraint. Our hero wasn’t a terrorist, the real Geronimo
fought to protect homelands, way of life, I’d say devout, feared perhaps but how many times should they kill Geronimo?
