At the End of the World

Coming of age

2017-02-21T20:39:00.001-05:00

"It's been noted that in western novels one finds oneself by leaving home, while in Native American storytelling one finds oneself by returning home."

— Gerry William (Spallumcheen Indian Band)

39,000 feet in the air

2016-08-09T23:34:00.004-04:00

When I'm on an airplane,

39,000 feet in the air,

reading the introduction

to a collection of poetry

by a transgender poet of color,

and in her foreword, she thanks me,

her reader, for simply

being alive, and I can't

stop crying, because I know

she means it with every ounce of her soul.

Because she's me. Because she

knows. Because she signs it "hugs".

I'll be the first person to drown

39,000 feet in the air.

...Go read Ryka Aoki. Now.

How to eat a wedge salad

2016-07-22T12:49:00.001-04:00

Decide to walk to the theater
by Fenway Park, because it's
nice outside, and there are sure to be
some Pokemon along the way.

Wear the frilly blue top with
the see-through ruffled shoulders you like
so much. Do your make-up, careful
to cover up the dark spot on
your lip where you burned

your mustache off with laser beams.
It feels like sunburn.

The Pokemon Go servers go down

the moment you step outside.
Take the T halfway until the servers
are back up. Catch a Spearow.

When the servers crash again, remember
to take another dose of Spiro.

Consider wearing a skirt next time.
It's summer, after all,
and you usually pass
as a cis girl now.

Enter the cool theater and buy a ticket,
trying not to think about how much
it costs or how much
your rent will be next month.

Wear your 3D glasses like a gangster.

Ghostbusters is good.

Giggle like a schoolgirl.
Scream like a grown ass lady.
Swoon like a baby dyke.

Fall a little in love
with Kate McKinnon. Then remember

that comedy sketch where she played
a British cis boy
who wanted a vagina.
Desperately try to sort out
how you feel about that.

Until she licks her proton gun.
Then decide it's probably okay.

When the movie gets out, the Pokemon Go servers
are still down, and the T is packed.

Walk two miles back home.

Think you should definitely get
a haircut with some more edge to it.
You need to cultivate your queerness
if you want to keep dating girls.

Your phone still has some battery left (and
this is very important), so you decide to stop
at a bar for dinner. Sit at the bar.

Get "ma'amed", and order a saison.

When the bartender asks for an ID, hand it
over to him, very casually,
like it's no big deal,
and go back to inspecting the food menu.

When the bartender is still looking at your ID,
with some suspicion now,
twisting it this way and that,
investigating how it diffracts light
in the sinking New England sunlight,

look up and smile softly
at him. Think, well,
it's an out-of-state ID.

Receive your ID when it's returned to you.
The bartender says nothing. Breathe out.

Mac and cheese sounds amazing, but you chose
sleep instead of your morning run today, so
a salad will have to do.

The Greek sounds good, but remember you haven't had
any protein yet today. And the Wedge has bacon.

Order the wedge salad.

When the bartender takes your order,
he says "sir."

Die a little inside.

Start questioning everything about your day.

Is my make-up off?
Are my breasts too manly?
Was everyone actually staring on the T?
Do I look like a drag queen like this?

When the wedge salad comes, there is one
thick, flaccid strip of bacon
draped over the lettuce
like a dead animal, and there is
absolutely nothing phallic about it.

Except you wonder
if it is a metaphor for the penis
tucked inside your panties.

Then the other bartender asks
"Would you like another beer, miss?"

And all is right with the world.

The feminist inside you cringes
at how reliant on male validation you've become.

The bacon isn't even very good.

But maybe you'll wear the skirt tomorrow
and watch Ghostbusters again.

(A Little) Rez NDN Dreamsong

2016-07-09T09:28:00.000-04:00

I'm tired.

We're driving nowhere now. I feel like year
by year, I say goodbye to more and more
family who I never know I had.
My friends and lovers, cousins, brothers, sisters,
are all lined up like candles in the night,
and I'm watching them go out one by one,
and I know this is not the dream we had.
How many funerals can dot the year?
They say you're not supposed to count the stars,
since once you start, you'll never stop, and I
tried counting once and lost myself. Now I'm
afraid some stars may fall at night, and so
I hold on tight as we are gunning through
the desert twilight, because holding on
is all that we can do. Someday we will
find a way to put this all behind while
still saying "I love you," "I love you", and
keeping everyone safe inside our hearts.

- "(A Little) Rez NDN Dreaming"

To Philando Castile.
To Alton Sterling.

To Edward Sotomayer, Jr.,
Stanley Almodovar III,
Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo,
Juan Ramon Guerrero,
and everyone at Pulse that night.

To Mercedes Successful.
To Reecey Walker.
To Keyonna Blakeney.
To Shante Thompson.
To Kourtney Yochum.
To Maya Young.
To Monica Loera.
To Jasmine Sierra.
To Kedarie Johnson.
To Demarkis Stansberry.
To Kayden Clarke.

Love.

Girls just wanna (be)

2016-06-28T19:14:00.001-04:00

Some boys take a beautiful girl
and hide her away from the rest of the world
I want to be the one to walk in the sun

Words to live by

2016-05-23T01:41:00.002-04:00

"Be careful who you hate. It might just be someone you love."

— Unknown

The Native Road to the Deep North IX

2015-06-15T15:15:00.003-04:00

June 25

In the morning, we’re loading the SUVs for our long journey back to Anchorage. It’s raining like it will never stop. We’re leaving one of our companions, Wai, here in Fairbanks. She will continue on a journey of her own, catch a ride back into the wilderness, and make camp in the mountains beyond this town. She will do geology field work in a part of the world so beautiful that I envy her new office at the top of the world from the top of my heart. I hope she finds good rocks. And so we smile, say our goodbyes, send up wishes that the rain will stop before she has to set up her tent, and then we are off.

Mourning skies
collecting cumulonimbus—
and holding back

Hours later, we are back in Anchorage, back at the beginning of the road we started down when we were born with this blood and first heard this song, as if awaking from a dream. We’re saying more goodbyes, as our party disperses back to homes hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Midnight children
in the sun-stained sky—
Alaska’s stars

* * *

They say home is where the heart is. And my heart, too, lies back there. It is beating
under the red soil in the American southwest, where the first mountains rise that begin the march of the Rocky Mountain range across this continent, finally ending here on the other end of the world, where I watch them sink back into the earth as the Brooks Range in the distant north, only to be erased by Alaska Range closer on the horizon. But I feel I am leaving a part of myself behind here: a shard of my heart that will keep dreaming of Alaska long after I have departed.

I fall asleep in the dark, late night of an Anchorage hotel. I know in the morning, when I wake, I will board a plane, and the geology of south-central Alaska — the Chugach Mountains, Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, and the Kenai Peninsula — will fall away under the clouds, and I will be gone. But the rhythm of the dream will remain.

Hello, goodbye,
yonder clouds and snow. . .
the vanishing mountains

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North VIII

2015-06-15T15:14:00.002-04:00

June 24

We leave Denali early in the morning and push further north to Fairbanks, our northernmost destination. In one big rush, we arrive by noon to speak to the rural native high school students here too. We eat lunch with them and learn their names and histories, growing up out here in the bush at the top of the world. Their past and present, and the here-now — seeing their bright minds and their glowing faces and imagining their shining futures is so invigorating. Soon, they go back to class; we say goodbye and wish them well on their journeys. And then finally, in the early afternoon, our messages delivered, we finally catch our breaths, our intentions fulfilled.

We check into our hotel, and at long last have a time to rest. Several of us drive up to Chena to warm and restore ourselves. At the hot springs there, we finally have a chance
to soak our aching bodies in its smoky waters. Nearing the end of our long journey, it is so good to soothe our stretched-out souls in the healing pools, and as the steam washes over us, our troubles melt away into the heat, the long miles wash into the clear, cleansing water, and evaporate into the mountain air. I sit on a big rock under the northern Alaska sky, my feet and ankles soaking in the spring, and a misty breeze in my hair. I lie back, close my eyes, and become a whale for a while.

Cold air
kissing the warm rocks:
Chena hot springs!

* * *

On the drive back to Fairbanks, two moose cross our path, appearing suddenly on the road in front of our car. One strolls casually across the road as we roll past and keeps going, back into the woods. The other glides around our SUV and waits, watching the driver’s side windows, peering at us, peering into us. Further along, a fox steals road kill and nibbles at it by the roadside as we watch. Other cars stop and stare with us. Despite the paved highway and the new flourishes of the twenty-first century, the street signs and the cement, this is still a wide, wild country, and nature is pushing back against the brunt of modernity. Truly, this is still their land.

This highway:
a river in the path
of a traveling moose

Back at the hotel, we shut the blinds on the unsetting sun. How bright it stays this far in the deep north! But we sleep in darkness for what feels like the first time in a long while.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North VII

2015-06-15T15:13:00.004-04:00

June 23

We enter the interior by bus. At the edge of the wild, a bridge spans the Savage River – the same river we crossed on foot last night – and on the far side of the gully sits a ranger station guarding six million acres of Alaskan wilderness. Our bus leaves contrails of dust as we go off the paved highway and begin our rumble up the gravel road through the mountains.

Flowing sunlight
caught in streams of stone:
Savage River

In the Denali wilderness, we slip into a new universe: a northern world built in a different scale. This is where the wild things are: a moose crosses our path, and we stop as it lumbers into the trees; caribou roam the vast expanse of hills, while a grizzly bear and cub wait in the brush higher up; and Dall sheep watch us from the steep cliffs above. Then we come upon a true wonder: a young grizzly is wandering right by the side of the road, and we hush as we pass it by. It ignores our intrusion and goes on eating, pausing only to scratch behind its ears.

The young bear:
his monastic vows –
a diet of grass

All robed in brown,
a young ascetic by the roadside:
the grizzly bear

Denali:
piles of clouds collapsing
into mountains

Golden eagle,
float into the azure sky. . .
with the sun – with us

* * *

During our drive through Denali, our guide tells us how this land is protected. The wildlife are protected. This is their land – not ours. And I can’t help but wonder about the Athabascans and the other peoples who were here long before this country even existed, who shared this land with each other, and with all of the other creatures here. What kind of animal has humankind become that so much of the world must be protected from us? What kind of violent King Midas curse has been cast upon our touch?

I am beginning to think that the only true morality is balance; the only ethics is equilibrium. I am reminded of a haiku by the master Bashō:

Between us
there also lives
the cherry blossom
(Bashō)

We live in a vast universe ruled by entropy, and why should matters of philosophy be any different? How can any ethical code be complete if it considers only humans? Our ancestors once lived in harmony with the environment and other natural beings. We, too, are a part of nature, no less than the earth and the rocks and the trees. Have we forgotten how to talk to the wind and the river? How can we reclaim that part of ourselves that remembers the land as our mother?

Beneath the brush,
soft moss on the tundra:
nature’s bosom

And yet we only build walls and more walls, and enshrine that to which we are too terrified to return. But if that is our path, then truly, this beauty must be protected from us. But I don’t think that is the only way, and I will continue to dream.

Inside us
there also lives
the grizzly bear

The undying sky
at night is also the sea –
when we become fish

When we return to camp, we have dinner: Ken’s famous pasta and campfire marinara sauce. This is our last night camping, and our last home cooked meal. After filling our stomachs, Bill sets the declination on his compass and we walk south again. This time we just look at the distant peaks, and try to name them. This land is so big.

* * *

I can’t sleep yet. An hour before midnight, I walk down to the river again, and sit down to read in the twilight. In 1689, the great haikai poet Matsuo Bashōset out by foot on a 2,450-kilometer journey through Japan to visit the places described by the poet masters of old. He wrote a book of prose and haiku poetry documenting his travels, titled “The Narrow Road to the Interior,” or, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” which would quickly become one of the seminal pieces of classic Japanese literature. It is from this famous collection that this travelogue also takes its title. Its first hokku is about change:

Even a thatched hut
may change with a new owner
into a doll’s house
(Bashō)

Before leaving on his journey, Bashō – who never had any children and was unsure whether he would return – sold his thatched house by the sea to a young family with small daughters. Children’s dolls had never lived in that house before, but they would be displayed in the coming weeks for the Peach Blossom festival. And so little by little, the world changes.

Russians come and go,
Americans come and stay. . .
Dena’ina continue

Grain by grain
mountain ranges are grown
in the blink of a star

As it nears midnight, the sky is clear and blue-gold. The sun is still shining bright behind the mountains, and I can see for miles and miles in every direction. Beside our campsite above me, five glistering new SUVs are parked. Our tents are made of space-age synthetic polyfibers, and I’m typing this on a touchscreen tablet with more computing power than the guidance systems that landed the Apollo astronauts on the moon nearly five decades ago.

The mountains crumbling
back into fragments of stardust
just like us

What would this journey have been like five hundred years ago? What will this land look like in five hundred years? In fifty years? How far will the glaciers retreat, and what will happen to the valleys and rivers they feed? What will happen to the bears and the moose and the eagles and all of the native peoples? For how long will our bones remember?

* * *

At midnight, the only sound left is the river flowing. It whispers a lullaby to me, but I don’t follow it. The sound of water flows from another time. I remember the whales and the porpoises dashing alongside our boat and the family of orcas we saw riding the distant waves. And I remember that other river the Zunis crossed at the beginning of the world, back when the earth was still soft. I remember the water creatures that are our lost children.

Mystic waters
rushing with my siblings –
soft-world dreams

In this world, the horizon is still brushed gold with strained sunlight. The only clouds remaining have moved behind the mountain ridges, and are painted pink and purple like flowers in an ebbing tide. It is still too much daylight to see any stars shining in the dim bright of night. The zenith is pale blue. The mountains to the west are drowning in the shadow of the sun. The mountains to the east are awash with what’s left of the day. Their brown-green slopes and their sparse trees and their veins of unmelting ice look the same as they did during the long morning. Soon, my fingers are freezing and my feet are cold. So with a last deep breath of Denali’s nighttime air, I walk back to camp to sleep.

A fire marble
rounding the horizon –
Denali’s night light

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North VI

2015-06-15T15:12:00.003-04:00

June 22

From Anchorage, we disembark again and begin the long journey up to Denali. At a stop by the side of the road, we catch our first view of its looming visage and the march of the Alaskan range across a sky obscured by clouds. Directly above us, a wide nimbus and the filigree of a rainbow surround the sun. They’re ice crystals, Ken tells us: a sign of high winds come to blow the clouds away. We wait and hold our breath.

Frozen rainbow—
a halo for the high one:
Denali

Indeed, within a few minutes of our stopping, the horizon begins to clear, and we can see its white, snow-capped peaks beyond the cloud cover. Refreshed, we eat our lunch to this majestic view before continuing northward

* * *

At Denali, we set up camp in a clearing between the evergreens. Our tents in place, we start walking south. The wilderness is vast here, and there is no trail where we’re going. The midnight sun and the twilight leave little sense of time, and no night will come to extinguish the sky. How easy it would be to lose oneself out here! The trees give way to a river below, and beyond that, vast rolling hills of green that run into mountains. We follow the river for a while, and then take off our shoes and roll up our pants and cross at a shallow spot. The cold water washes over our feet and rushes against our ankles up to our knees. The river stones are wet and smooth and slick. Moose tracks litter the mud. Back on dry land, we trek across overgrown hills, and the bush reaches higher and higher until it covers our heads and we’re forced to turn back. For dinner back at camp, we have Kim’s and Wai’s stir fry vegetables and reindeer sausage. We dry wood for fire. Finally, around midnight, we put the fire out and climb into our tents to sleep. The sun is still crawling across the world behind the mountains.

Lost inside
this deep wilderness—
a red heartbeat

Cold feet
from glacial waters warmed
by the summer sun

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North V

2015-06-15T15:10:00.005-04:00

June 21

Last night, it thunderstormed. It’s still raining when we set out in the morning to the college under dark and screaming skies. Today, we ferry nearly seventy native high school students to the Castle Mountain fault we visited yesterday, to set their fingers on this wide jutting teeth of rocks where the earth has cracked apart. This is where the earth has moved, swallowing itself like an ouroboros, and lain bare the parts of its body that didn’t want to go under.

The members of our party who can speak geology bring them out here to the fault and translate the land. They point at the granite boulders in the river below us and they point at the conglomerate of rocks in the fault, and they show us how this terrain has evolved since the raven delivered light to the people long ago, and how it will continue to change.

Rock whispers—
whose hot knives in the earth
cut out the continents?

Other members of our party stay at the buses and talk to the students about everything they can be and everything they can do if they only imagine it. We are here to share dreams, after all, and while theirs spill out before us in every part of the landscape and the living memory of this part of the world, we can only try to convey ours in the spoken tales we tell of science and technology and engineering and mathematics and that convoluted world of academics. It takes a strong heart to walk in two worlds, but I know, someday, it will put a smile on our faces to see them engineer an even better dream than what little glimpses we can show them.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North IV

2015-06-15T15:10:00.000-04:00

June 20

The Castle Mountain air is clear. We left Seward in the morning, and arrived in the Chugach mountains toward noon. We washed our fingers and faces in the river at Hatcher Pass, and then drove up the mountain. Now we stretch our legs and inhale deeply.

The breeze is fresh and cool. These mountainsides are deep green with foliage amidst the black rock peaks and the brown loamy soil. These are the colors of Alaska, and from this pallette is painted one of its masterpieces. Across the hazy horizon, more mountains reach up toward the sky, and glaciers creep between their snow-strewn slopes.

I remember the last time I was here, we’d come earlier in the year, and these mountainsides were still completely covered in snow and ice. Now the trees and bushes have sprouted, the grass has grown, and the bears are awake and moving. Up higher, the remaining snow is melting away, transmuting into streams to breathe more life into the valley below.

On green slopes,
a cozy summer home:
mother bear’s den

We drive back down the mountain into the valley, and hike along the river.

The calm stream:
a beaver swims across
engineering ripples

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North III

2015-06-15T15:07:00.005-04:00

July 19

The night raven
eclipsing the twilight sun
steals our food

We sleep and wake to the cry of ravens and magpies in the twilight. When the sun climbs again over the mountains, it glitters radiant on the water. Blue waves scatter into daylight. So we fill our bodies with coffee and good spirits. We stretch our legs and prepare them for the sea.

* * *

At Seward, we take a boat through Kenai fjords. We stand on the bow and face the sea spray as our captain drives us through the chop up to Northwestern fjord, where
the tidewater turns to ice. He navigates us through the frozen waters toward the glacial wall that extends before us. Even this has receded against the relentless onslaught of the world changing. It no longer stretches so far into the fjord as it did only a few years ago, Ken tells us. This is a member of an endangered species. Perhaps Edward Curtis was photographing the wrong vanishing race.

The captain shuts off our engine and we are adrift in the ice water. The passengers hush, and the glacier comes to life. The only sound is the creek of ice. It splinters, cracks, shakes, and shudders in the deep rumbling voice of a timeless giant. Now a thick sheet breaks off and crumbles and tumbles into the sea with a great crash of water smashing against itself in different forms. The wave spreads out. This is the sleep talk of a frozen titan raging against the dying of the light.

Icy war cry:
“No, I will not go extinct”—
the ancient glacier

No, no, Alaska will not go gentle into that good night. The captain restarts the engine.

* * *

And on the way back, as if to cheer our hearts, a humpback whale finds us and plays with us. It lies on its thick back in the ocean, waving its pectoral fins, and slapping them against the water, making a ruckus. I’m smiling. Twice, it breaches, emerging spectacularly from the water, before diving back down again. We have entered upon its road, and the unspoken question is “How do you pass your days, humpback whale, our daughter, our mother?” “Happily, my parents, my children,” the whale answers. It slaps the water again, and waves goodbye.

A humpback whale
playing hide and seek:
the world rebalanced

So today is a happy day. These whales, too, once slaughtered to near extinction, shall continue. Their children, too, will learn to sing the old songs. And as we return to shore, porpoises join our boat, and dart along the bow. A family of orcas swim in the distance. Their dorsal fins stand tall. The sunlight stays strong, and the rain passes swiftly. We sleep well in our tents tonight.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North II

2015-06-15T15:07:00.000-04:00

June 18

We head to Seward. On the road, we stop at Exit glacier. The hike to the base of the glacier is less than a mile, but along the way, we walk through time. We pass where it used to be centuries ago. Signs mark the path with dates from years long past, from when ice still covered the land here, and rinsed it fresh with water. But as the forest path gives way to a younger trail of rock and stone, the dates become too recent. Ken remembers when you could walk right up to the glacier hundreds of feet beneath the gray precipice on which we arrive and look down. Far below us, the glacial ice is melting, dripping, retreating little by little. What will happen to the rivers below when it disappears? This is a living behemoth of pleistocene memory, and like the memories of our human elders, it is slowly fading away. What happens to the memory of ice when it turns into water, I wonder? Does it remember, like blood and bones?

The old ice
reawakens and starts
to disappear

We walk back, and continue on the road to Seward. When we arrive, we set up camp, and after a dinner of Wai’s campfire fajitas and beans, we fall asleep under the night sunlight. In our dreams, the gray dusk finally fades to black, and the sun falls behind the mountains.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North I

2015-06-15T15:06:00.000-04:00

June 17

The midnight sun is a companion to the people. It rises and sets to the heartbeat of a different kind of time: one set by the creep of ice and the break of earth. The black mountains that rise from the roiling seas and turn green with grass and forests and white with snow caps before they etch themselves across the sky: these are the rhythms of a dream. Long have we sought to share this world dreamt and lived by our brothers and sisters in the deep north where all of us once tread, long ago, on our many long journeys home. Even for us, this sojourn is a kind of homecoming. Because this is their home: the Athabascans and the Yup’ik and the Tlingit and the Unangan and the Haida, and so many others. We are here to hear their stories and their readings of the land they’ve known since the beginning, in this time as the earth is changing, and its shape is still a vision waiting to be imagined.

Summer mountains breathe
time streams of ancient water—
Alaska’s children

We step into Alaska from the airport in Anchorage, and the road into that world stretches so deep and wide before us. We sleep in the city tonight, before heading into the wild.

(reblogged from here)

Words to live by

2014-05-15T01:01:00.001-04:00

". . . in western novels one finds oneself by leaving home, while in Native American storytelling one finds oneself by returning home."

— Gerry William (Spallumcheen Indian Band)

Words to live by

2014-05-12T08:29:00.000-04:00

" 'Even though they have never seen me, they will remember me. Their bodies will remember me down to the smallest structures of their flesh. You cannot know how well people's bodies remember their ancestors.' "

— Octavia Butler, Wild Seed

Haiku

2014-04-27T23:15:00.001-04:00

lone wolf
never really alone
speaks all night

Elegy

2014-01-23T15:14:00.001-05:00

The temperature was 9F. I'm surprised so many people came.

Every inch of my skin was cold before I arrived at the center of campus. My thighs were frozen as I walked. I didn't expect to see many people there in such weather, but it was like an exodus. People kept joining out of nowhere. Everyone walking in the same direction. No one said anything.

When I decided to go, I found a candle on my bookshelf, and tested it, but it was too old and the rim was too high and the wick was too short. I took out a knife and cut out the wax around the wick, so I could pull it out and light it, and then set the flame back inside. I found had no k'yawe a:we, so I took a pouch of tobacco I'd been given as a gift. Not my own tribe's tradition, but an offering close enough.

There were so many of us, so many more than I expected: probably a thousand or more, that even standing apart, I didn't feel the cold. I took off my gloves and lit the candle I'd brought.

They sang on the steps of Hovde, the administration building, in front of the engineering fountain. Probably Christian songs. I couldn't hear. But that's okay. So many people stood together. The specifics didn't matter.

When it was over, I sprinkled the tobacco over the flame. I made a fist and breathed in the breath of those who were there who couldn't be seen, like I was taught to do by tradition, even if my offering was wrong.

The provost said it was over. Told us good night. And thank you. And the people dispersed. I walked to the electrical engineering building. EE was still surrounded by police. Flashing red and blue lights. I walked as close as I dared to one of the other entrances, and saw even there, someone stood guard inside.

So I approached a planter, and set my candle down there on its cement rim. And left.

A black woman with big hair approached me with a white man with a bigger camera.

"I saw you," she said, "with the candle. What did you think of the vigil?"

"It was... nice."

"Did you know either—"

"No," I said.

I walked away.

I broke deshkwi. When we Zuni aren't supposed to buy or sell. I stopped at a bar on the way home and ordered several beers after another. Before coming back home and posting this.

Is it a big deal? Maybe it isn't a big deal. Compared to other things. Maybe it isn't. Lots of other, much bigger atrocities happen. Every day. But maybe it should be a big deal. Maybe it should be a big deal. If we don't make it a big deal, what does that mean? It deserves to be a big deal.

Not because I condemn the shooter. Not because it's another shooting on a college campus in America. Not because it's just the latest news story.

Because the world deserves a little less hopelessness.

Because it was so much warmer, standing there, than I expected, in the middle of the freezing cold. All of us standing, come together, for the sake of someone so many of us didn't know. Because even in the cold, cold, dark of the night, in the icy snow, in the below-freezing temperature, so many people came, and stayed, and stood.

So somehow, despite the last 24 hours, I feel a little bit more hopeful. So I say, Andrew, you didn't die in vain.

And you definitely
didn't die alone.

Godspeed.

21st Century Folktales

2013-07-24T02:53:00.003-04:00

About a year ago, I posted my thoughts on magic realism.

Through the course of several recent and not-so-recent conversations, my perspective on the genre has evolved, and I've developed a new way of thinking about magic realism that I think answers some of the lingering questions I've long since had on the genre.

The seed for this post came from a discussion about story conventions from different cultures. A poster mentioned that folktales from lots of cultures around the world seem to have elements of magic realism in them, and I wondered if maybe this was backward: that magic realism tends to have elements of folktales in it. After all, aren't folk tales far older than the relatively more modern concept of "magic realism" as a literary genre?

I posted:

"In thinking about it, that does suggest an interesting conclusion to me. Any supernatural fiction arising from cultures for whom folk beliefs are deeply ingrained and interwoven into the culture will probably resemble magic realism when viewed through a Western lens. Take myths from any culture around the world and re-tell it in a modern voice, and it'll probably look like magic realism. This includes Christianity. To this extent, we can use this to develop a definition of magic realism as a genre of modern-day folklore, which—as a magic realism author—I find to be a fascinating and curiously appropriate definition.

"In fact, I think one could say the demarcation of the speculative fiction genres in general may only make sense at all when viewed from a secular, Western perspective. To a person who believes in ghosts and witches, a story that involves ghosts and witches isn't a "fantasy" or "magic realism" story. It's simply a story."

Between my recent musings about magical girl monomyths, and increasingly drawing from Zuni and Japanese folklore for inspiration in my writing, I've been thinking a lot about the role of myths and legends and folktales in literature. Surely many literary genres—fantasy in particular comes to mind—draw inspiration heavily from mythology. But what genre would myth, legend, and folktale fall under?

Although all are related as traditional stories, my discussion will primarily consider folklore, so as not to be burdened with the sacred narrative nature of mythology. The Wikipedia page (forgive the source) describes folklore thusly:

"... folklore can be used to accurately describe a figurative narrative, which has no sacred or religious content. In the Jungian view... it may instead pertain to unconscious psychological patterns, instincts or archetypes of the mind. This may or may not have components of the fantastic (such as magic, ethereal beings or the personification of inanimate objects). These folktales... speak to deep psychological issues."

While folktales and fairy tales may often share many of the outward traits of the fantasy genre, such as trolls and dwarves and magic spells, it doesn't feel quite right to call them "fantasy," does it? Why? A telling trait of fantasy and science fiction—to me—is an implicit admission or recognition that the fantastical, supernatural, or futuristic elements aren't real. These elements in fantasy and science fiction are deliberate fabrications, consciously departing from a scientific, rational understanding of reality (or the reality of what is possible at the time of writing, for science fiction). While folklore differs from mythology in that it is not usually part of a sacred narrative, it does reflect a particular cultural understanding of the world, a particular perspective of reality.

Perhaps this is why the stories of folklore so often resemble magic realism when viewed through a scientific, Western perspective, and why writers from non-Western cultures where folk beliefs still run deep (or writers who are deeply influenced by such cultures) produce stories that are so commonly called "magic realism."

This brings me to another characteristic that I think is a marker of magic realism (and probably surrealism to an extent as well), which is that in magic realism, there exists a profound belief that the "magic" in the story is an accurate reflection of reality.

This belief may not be true on a literal level, and is often true instead on a symbolic or metaphoric level.

Another way of thinking about this is that while the fantastic elements in fantasy and the futuristic elements in science fiction exist as a deliberate departure from current reality or present-time possibilities, the "magic" in magic realism and the "surreal" in surrealism are used to evoke an experienced reality that is more "true" than could be evoked without their use.

This interpretation is evident in the very term itself, as "magic realism" is fundamentally a form of realism that is not limited by a scientific, rational, Western, linear understanding of the world. This goes back to the interesting, initial observation that the discussion of magic realism as a literary genre is only really meaningful in the context of Western scientific thought. While much of the Western world follows an Abrahamic religion, the role of its more fantastical mythology and folklore has largely been relegated to matters of the afterlife, and not an understanding of the day-to-day life affairs with which magic realism tends concern itself.

Mythology as a sacred narrative examines the world and tries to explain its reality, often through the use of the magical and supernatural. Similarly, folklore uses the same traditional, mythological understanding of world to examine psychological experiences and common themes and motifs of the human experience.

But is that not so unlike magic realism? On the other hand, is that not so unlike much of fantasy as well?

It is here, where the magical merges with one's understanding of reality, where the differences between the two genres dissolve. It seems to me that one's conception and understanding of "reality" is key to distinguishing the speculative genres, if they are to be distinguished at all (from both each other and from straight realism). Much like in Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," context is the key to the interpretation of a text. The nature of reality, how one perceives it, and how the reader perceives it, can all drastically change the interpretation of a story and even its very genre. If one writes a science fiction narrative, and all the technologies are then invented, what is left that makes the work science fiction? If a writer or reader believes in the experienced reality described by a story—literally or metaphorically—what makes it speculative anymore?

A final thought is to consider what kind of questions motivate the different forms of stories: if fantasy and science fiction answer "what if," and myth and legend answer "why" or "how," then magic realism and surrealism answer "how does it feel?"

In the end, magic realism are just mundane stories that happen to be magical.

Or perhaps more simply, and more magically, magic realism are just mundane stories told by people who (still) happen to believe in magic.

And maybe I just like to tell fairy tales.

The Mahou Shoujo Monomyth

2013-07-24T00:05:00.001-04:00

(actually posted on May 21; reposted from here)

I'm suddenly tempted to write a treatise proposing the steps for a heroine's journey by analyzing the structure of various magical girl anime.

I posted that here on December 22, 2012, the day after the world ended. Half a year later, I decided "Okay, I'm going to actually do this." This is the result.

While the Hero's Journey actually works perfectly well for a female hero, I do see lots of major deviations from it in works that I would consider prototypical of a "Heroine's Journey". It's hard to make conclusions about what constitutes a "man's journey" versus a "woman's journey" without falling neck-deep in gender biases and stereotypical gender roles, but I'm going to try. I'm not nearly as well-read on classical texts as many people I know, so for better or worse, I'm building off of modern examples.

In particular, as I mentioned, I am thinking of the genre of magical girl anime, and series like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, and Magical Girl Madoka Magica. I am also considering Western shows likeBuffy the Vampire Slayer, which I think can basically be considered a Western take on the magical girl genre.

I'm just going to go through the steps of the monomyth as given on Wikipedia and give some of my thoughts on them...

In the very first steps in the Hero's Journey, you have the Call to Adventure and Refusal of the Call. But in works I consider Heroine's Journeys, it usually goes the opposite way. The heroine seeks adventure, but her desire is refused, often by society or some other artificial hindrance. Or, there is a call, but she doesn't refuse it. There is often less internal conflict over whether to accept the call in a Heroine's Journey, and more external conflict due to outside forces that make acceptance of the call difficult for the heroine.

I think Supernatural Aid is a rather gender-neutral step, and I'd leave this one alone, as I think it works basically the same in both.

Then you have Crossing of the First Threshold and the Belly of the Whale. Here I think is where the Heroine's Journey begins to deviate further from the classical Hero's Journey. In the male version, there is a departure from the hero's familiar world, and a journey into an unfamiliar world which is new and different from the old. I think it works differently for heroines. Rather than a departure, there is often a revelation that the familiar world is different than it appears, and there is the discovery of new and unfamiliar things in the same world. The post above me mentions a "Secret World" as a possible step in the Heroine's Journey, and I think that fits this idea perfectly. I think the Belly of the Whale works sort of the same as in the Hero's Journey, but represents a different kind of separation from the old self, since in the heroine's journey, the two worlds are actually the same. For a heroine, this could represent an acceptance that the Secret World is the real one, and the familiar world is a facade, for example. These steps are exemplified by the revelation that vampires and demons exist and slayers are born to fight them, that witches exist and magical girls exist to fight them, and that there are secret duels and a floating castle above Ohtori Academy.

I'd add a step before the Road of Trials, called something like Collection of Companions. The male monomyth is very much about a lone hero, and even though in many versions there are companions, there is not nearly as much emphasis placed on the idea of friends and companions, but I think it's emphasized much more explicitly in the stories I'm considering Heroine's Journeys.

I think the Road of Trials can fit into the Heroine's Journey in some ways, but I'll introduce one way it doesn't fit, which I think is a key difference in how I think the Heroine's Journey differs from the Hero's Journey: the goal. The male monomyth is extremely goal-oriented, even if that goal is an arbitrary MacGuffin to justify the adventure in the first place. The Hero's Journey is thoroughly and essentially quest-like. The Heroine's Journey is antithetical to this. Maybe a short-term goal of defeating the Big Bad is introduced, but that's rarely ever the main goal, and the "goal" in a Heroine's Journey tend to be much more abstract. Buffy must slay vampires and protect the world. The magical girls in Madoka must fight witches to protect the world. Utena wants to become a prince and protect Anthy. In a Hero's Journey, the Road of Trails is a path toward the goal at the end of the quest. In a Heroine's Journey, it's often part of a never-ending struggle.

Now we get to some of the really problematic ones. The Meeting with the Goddess, the Woman as Temptress, and Atonement with the Father.

I don't think it's as simple as replacing the Meeting with the Goddess with a God, and since love and companionship is often emphasized from the beginning with a Heroine's Journey, the encounter of love doesn't fully fit. There are examples of it, but I don't think it's a necessary step in a Heroine's Journey. I would replace it with maybe something like Testing of Friendships.

The Woman as Temptress obviously doesn't work, and I don't think the whole step really works in a Heroine's Journey at all, even if you replace the woman with a man, or just consider it in terms of a false and seductively easy answer to troubles. That doesn't really happen in the stories I consider Heroine's Journeys. Rather, there's often a Rejection of the Burden. This isn't quite like refusal of the call. Instead, it's the heroine's struggle with the endless nature of her struggle, questioning whether it will in fact ever end, or if it's even possible, or if it was a good idea in the first place.

Likewise, for Atonement with the Father, I don't think you can just replace the father with a mother, though again there examples of that being used. Since the essence of this step is essentially about being initiated by a figure of ultimate power over the hero's life, I don't think it fits with the Heroine's Journey at all. I think the Heroine's Journey rejects that, and instead I'd replace it with Acceptance of the Self. This is the step after the heroine overcomes Rejection of the Burden, when she decides to believe in herself as a heroine. It's about believing in her own heroism.

Like Supernatural Aid, I think Apotheosis is pretty gender-neutral, and works perfectly fine in the Heroine's Journey.

Finally, I don't think the Ultimate Boon has any place in the Heroine's Journey at all. The Heroine's Journey isn't quest-oriented in the first place, and so there's no point to the step. The Heroine's Journey will never end as long as the world remains the same.

Which brings us to...

Revolutionize the World!

I'm just going to group together all of the "Return"-type steps, since they're basically just alternate endings to the Hero's Journey, and rarely do they all occur in the same story, unlike the other steps. However, they all carry the same theme in the hero making some kind of peace between his old, familiar world, and the new world he has encountered on the adventure. This doesn't work at all in the Heroine's Journey, because part of the inherent difference I've suggested is that these worlds are different faces of the same world. The Secret World completely overlaps with the heroine's previous, familiar world. So how is this handled in the Heroine's Journey? I think the Heroine's Journey tends to end by rejecting the system itself. The heroine always picks a third option.

That's why the final step is Revolutionize the World. In believing in her own heroism, the heroine develops the power to overcome the endless struggle by changing the rules themselves. The heroine neither stays in the Secret World, nor does the heroine return to her previous world (which would in fact be possible anyway, because you can't un-see the Masquerade). Rather the heroine changes the world itself, and leaves both her original world and the Secret World behind.

(spoilers abound below)

Utena destroys the castle and leaves Ohtori Academy, freeing Anthy from her burden. In the movie version, Utena and Anthy leave for the real world together. Nanoha rejects that her enemies are enemies at all, and in defeating them, she "befriends" them, and turns them into her companions. Madoka uses her power to rewrite the laws of the universe so that magical girls don't become witches, finally ending the cycle of despair, and becomes a god who exists outside of time. Buffy rejects that she is a lone heroine (incidentally, a rule initiated by men who must have subscribed to the Hero's Journey) and awakens slayer powers in every potential; then she finally takes the fight to Hell itself, destroys the Hellmouth once and for all, and leaves Sunnydale.

(end spoilers)

I'd love to hear what everyone thinks of this potential model of the Heroine's Journey. I think I've done my best to avoid ingraining any inherent gender biases or gender roles into it, and instead build the steps from the stories I love most about heroines and the common motifs they exhibit. I also think it can work perfectly well for a male character (and can think of at least one anime example that does follow this pattern with a male hero). But this is my idea of a woman taking a woman's journey, a Heroine's Journey.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone Final – And of the Native American Dream…

2012-09-17T16:06:00.002-04:00

(actually covers June 18-21 and August 23; reposted from here)

We went to Yellowstone. We did.

But I won’t bore you with the details of that, because they’re details you could find in any tourist guide or travel book, and that’s not what’s important here.

The point is we went searching for the Native American dream, and to understand the way this twisted world and our machinations and industry on the body of the earth have changed and corrupted and re-inspired it, and where it lies today, and a path toward hope. We came looking for a glimpse of a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, and somewhere along the way, dizzy, dirty, and overwhelmed, we lost track of it.

While we were doing things like looking for fossils of ancient, esoteric sea creatures in the rugged, rocky hills on the road to Cody (and ending up chasing horny toads instead) where the sleek, brown teeth of prehistoric squid lay sprawled across the pebbles like so many seashells, or while we were standing dangerously on the edges of cliffs at Devil’s Kitchen (or Devil’s Lunchbox as Patrick often called it) where the painted canyon below us spilled out in an overflow of pastel colors and wild, jagged formations that looked like a madman’s map of Mordor, or while we were looking at waterfalls and massive, man-made dams at the edge of Yellowstone and climbing hills we weren’t supposed to, to look down at the great crowd of students we were supposed to be watching, or while we were shivering and wrapped in sleeping bags on the icy, windy shores of this great, ocean-sized lake that appears out of nowhere in the center of the caldera that is Yellowstone and greets you like the arctic sea, while we were walking amidst the hot springs and geysers that funnel boiling water from under the earth and reek of sulfur and cover the blue sky in thick, gray steam, while we were waiting for the bison we’ve been looking for for so long to cross the roads while tourists took tens of hundreds of pictures, while we were hiking along the circumference of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and gazing in awe at its walls of yellow stone for which Yellowstone wasn’t named, while we were chasing bears and hitting antelopes and herding high schoolers…

The truth is I left Yellowstone more than a month ago. We drove down to Salt Lake City in the long, restless PM, and took a plane out the next morning, and finally returned home to Indianapolis, red-eyed and sleepless, after an eight hour layover in Denver. The journey was finished, but the story wasn’t over yet. Something was missing.

So here I am, sitting in my cool, air-conditioned apartment in West Lafayette, on the third day of classes re-starting, sipping green tea and listening to music from the stereo speakers attached to my HDTV, staring at an article about how 2,000 acres of land in the Black Hills called Pe’ Sla, an area sacred to the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arikara, and Arapahoe, is about to be auctioned off by a private owner to the highest bidder. The tribes have raised money in hopes of buying back the land once taken from them and still sacred to them, but the “property” is expected to sell for approximately eight times the value they’ve raised. The state of South Dakota will likely put a road directly through the sacred areas, and open the land for private development.

This is not the Native American dream.

On our last nights out there, in our cabins in West Yellowstone, we sat and talked in hushed tones about all the things we’d seen. The sadness. The greed. The hopelessness. The false hope. The despair. The futility. The beauty. The reaping and weeping.

We talked about Leon, the Lakota small business owner we met on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, who owns a small but popular coffee shop. He’d talked to us about his struggles on and off the reservation. His attempts to do things that weren’t designed to be done, here and elsewhere. His return to the reservation. His opening of the coffee shop. Today, he is successful. He’s writing a book. There is a glimmer of the dream.

I wonder if he knows about this auction. I wonder if he’s tried to do anything. I wonder if there’s anything he can do. (I know he can make a damn good cup of coffee.)

The stars on those nights out there were clear, but the future they foretold was not.

As I sat there, listening to my friends and compatriots on the journey, I began to wonder if we weren’t misguided from the very beginning. We came this way in search of answers, but we’ve found only scars and scar tissue and more unanswered questions. We’ve learned so many things, but we still don’t understand what they mean. We don’t understand a thing. The things we’ve learned along the way are the smoke of a distant signal fire, but where does it lead? It’s dim, and there’s a storm in the distance and a flood at our backs, but though the rain will muddy and obscure the little trail we’re on, it’s what’s needed to invigorate the earth beneath our feet. The smoke and the distant fire we see is a sign that though the path we tread may be a lonely one, there have been others on it before us, and we are not alone. We are never alone. And we need to get there, to tend the fire at the other end of this rocky path, and keep it lit, and kindle it to burn brighter for those that follow us. The people we’ve talked to are waiting for us. The dreams of so many are waiting on us.

I think maybe we were wrong — maybe I was wrong — to think that we’d find a dream of any kind out there. What we found were memories. Or maybe prayers. But maybe we needed to go out there to find the dream within us. Maybe I needed to go.

To learn what needs to be done. To learn what should not be done. To learn from the successes and failures and mistakes. To learn from the tears shed and the stories behind them. To rediscover things forgotten, but never lost. That some things we can never buy back, but some things we can change. That you can sell your soul, but never your heart.

I hope one day to return to the Black Hills and walk in Pe’ Sla, as I walked up Bear Butte, on its stony paths lined with trees with branches tied by ribbons of prayer, where no wars were ever fought and no battles ever joined, where people went for peace, and where all tribes could go to talk to the wind and the earth. I hope I can bring my children to a place that isn’t a parking lot, where we don’t need water slides to feel the rush of energy, and the stars are clear and the future is bright.

I don’t know what will happen, but I can hope.

But we know it’s not enough to keep hoping.

So we will keep working. There is a dream to be tended. Our friends are waiting.

Update: Two days after the writing of this post, the auction of Pe' Sla was cancelled by the owners for reasons they declined to make public; the sacred land remains private property, publicly listed, and its ultimate fate remains uncertain.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 5 – The Ancients Speak to Us in So Many Bones and Stones and Easily-Squandered Gifts and We Understand Hardly Any of It (i.e. the Dinosaurs, the Hot Springs, the Petroglyphs, and the Oil)

2012-09-17T16:01:00.000-04:00

(actually covers June 17; reposted from here)

We awake to one of the high schooler’s handlers — I shouldn’t call them that — one of their counselors shaking our tents awake. We’re leaving soon, it seems, so we all get up and break camp and eat breakfast. Two hours later, we’re waiting around, wondering when we’re getting started. These kids move like sloths on PCP, but so did all of us at their little urchin age of testing limits, manufacturing headaches, and practicing stupidity. It’s all part of the fun. A necessary development process perfected by a million years of evolution.

After a few eons, we move out in a great caravan of cars five thousand feet long, and head to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Inside the museum, the fossilized skeletons of millions-of-years-old beasts stand in imitation of how they stood in life, delicately placed in their poses by practiced paleological hands. Most of these are the real deal, too, and only the biggest and heaviest of them are built from casts, which is mildly mind-blowing.

Then they bus us out to the dig site. The Morrison formation, they call it, where all these sauropods and therapods are being found. It’s hot as hell, and we quickly get under the tarped, tent-like “permanent structure” that houses the dig site. It’s still technically active, but no one digs here anymore, because they want to preserve the fossilized footprints and keep a snapshot of in-process unearthing intact for education and future generations. This has more to do tangentially with just geology than Native Americans, but it’s still a pretty wild mind-screw. Under our feet here are the shadows of the bones of sixty-five-plus-million-year-old creatures who once walked right here. Only the shadows of bones, I say, because what we find is mostly rock. I wonder if we will ever be found like this, in the earth and rock, and if the future generations who find us will be able to figure out what killed us and avoid the same fate. If the dinosaurs knew what was coming, would they have tried to stop it, or would they have raced headlong toward their destruction while embracing the methods of their demise, like we so often seem to do?

I give up on that thought, and we drive to the next sites, to which I can connect more.

We drive to the hot springs. Warm water bubbles up from the earth, tired and weary, but blessed with fire, after its long journey down from the mountains we just drove over, after diving for miles and miles underground through the hot rock, before finally being forced back up here, at the Smoking Waters.

This place has strong medicine, but you wouldn’t know it from the water slides and parking lots.

“Smoking Waters” is what the Shoshone people call this place. People from all over came and come to bathe in her healing springs. But eventually, like so many of the rest of us, the Shoshone had no choice but to sign away this land in a government treaty. Unlike so many of the rest of us, they foresaw the possible future — the inevitable future. It’s the same trick that the Three Affiliated tribes are learning up in the badlands: how to see everything under the sign of the almighty dollar. The Shoshone stipulated that the springs must be open and free to the public.

Today, you can bathe in the hot springs at Thermopolis for free. As long as you limit yourself to twenty minutes in the State Bath House. The private water parks? The water slides? The sprawl of parking lots and the man-made ponds? They’re just progress. They’re just capitalism and the free market, those great bastions of democracy. They’re just civilization and the way forward. And so we stand on the great steel suspension bridge over the Bighorn River, staring at the formations of travertine and the rumbling, warm river below us, and a snake of plastic twists its way through the water park in the background, beside the mountains we just came down. And the sickening feeling in my stomach is that no one else seems to notice anything wrong with this.

But we must move on. And we do — to Legend Rock.

At Legend Rock, the ancients are still as powerful as ever. This is where we’ve come to see the petroglyphs. There is nothing else here but horses that may not be horses, and may be something else. Patrick talks to the students about sacred sites, and then we venture down, to the narrow path of unkempt dirt in the shadow of the mighty red stone wall tattooed in light by the spirits on the other end of time.

Shapes of animals and humans, four-fingered and five-fingered, long-limbed and short-limbed, horned and winged, and all interconnected and intertwining are etched into the rock. The students are curious. My friends are uneasy. But I am at peace here.

The Navajos won’t even come here. The place is too powerful and too old. There is a nervousness and a creeping current in the atmosphere, but I don’t feel unwanted. A certain restlessness pervades the air and energy seeps from the cracks in the rocks, as if we stand at the intersection of two worlds or twin dimensions, and it would be all too easy to slip into a different existence. But in these pictures, I see the shapes of familiar spirits. Similar shapes adorn the walls of El Moro near Zuni. The thick presence in the wind is not unlike the feeling during the Night Dances and Shalako.

On the way back to the vehicles, the horses are still watching us, before disappearing.
Our one last stop for the day is as fitting as it is ugly: a pumpjack. One of those great, steal, black beasts with its long black mechanical arm, pumping oil from the ground beneath our feet. We are supposed to learn about this, but I can only think how it looks like a pimple, or a blemish, or a blackhead.

Round and round it goes, pumping, and we can see it all go full circle. The bones of the dinosaurs and their flesh and all the organic compounds of all the plants from those hundreds of millions of years of history, compressed and bound by pressure. Their gift to us is this black tea. Our mammoth caravan of dirt-shined SUVs runs on this stuff.

The first time I gave blood, I’d forgotten to eat all day. My blood sugar must have been low. The nurse had a hard time finding a blood vessel in my arm and must have pricked me a half dozen times. Finally, she got it, and the bag began to fill with my deep, red blood, the same kind my heart pushes around my body and lets me live and breathe. When we were done, I got up and started walking to leave when my vision started to fade to black, and my legs went out from beneath my body. My head filled with storm clouds and a pressure vacuum, like in the deepest parts of space. I lay down, blacked out, and waited for life to return to me. I wonder if that’s how the earth feels.

I wonder what the ancients must think of us. Are they laughing? Are they weeping?

We return to camp. We go to Yellowstone tomorrow.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 4 – Into and Over the Bighorns: Nostalgia at Crow Agency (They Have Pickles!!!), and a Playful Stop by the Roadside Where We Remember Youth and Rejuvenate in the Mountain Snow

2012-06-28T16:58:00.002-04:00

(actually covers June 16; reposted from here)

We stop by the college in Crow Agency. There is no one here because it’s Saturday and summer, and the tribal college looks small and humble, but it also looks colorful and good. There are horses running free and a big tree that towers over the central, circular meeting place made of wooden beams and rusted steel that looks perfect for a powwow. We lie in the grass and feel the sun and let it soak into our skin.

Like all of the others, this reservation is also poor. The streets are lined with wooden shacks peeling blue paint, and there are little brown children playing in one of them. Two boys beat the hell out of each other in good fun like young brothers and laugh about it afterward. This place feels like home.

We stop at the gas station on the way out and it’s just like the gas stations back in Zuni. My Navajo sisters (my relatives in Zuni must never hear of this!) squeal in delight at some nostalgic sight and Holy Sweet Mother of — they have big pickles and ziplock bags and red Icees and shredded jerky and . . .

Zuni is where I grew up part-time, home away from home during summers and about every other spring and winter break as a little, spoiled, know-nothing brat from the suburbs of Indianapolis. We always stayed with my aunt, but now we always stay with my brother. The greatest thing in the world was and is the smell of the desert after it rains there. The sand and the sage and all the plants mix together and fill the air with sweet incense and all the dust falls away. We have rez dogs there, too, and so much dust. And satellite dishes. And gas stations like these. I remember the briny smell of great barrel pickle jars being uncorked by another aunt and eating the juicy goodness all wrapped up in plastic sandwich bags. And I remember my brother always getting Icees when we were driving. And all the perfect, bone-dry jerky of all kinds imaginable . . .

But Zuni is another story.

Because then we depart the little heart-tug gas station (only to return when Hailey realizes she’s forgot her phone again and we have to set out all over again, of course) and head up, up, and up into the Bighorn Mountains.

We climb and climb and pull over at an unpromising site for unpromising photos only to realize this place is amazing. There is no grand vista, but tiny blue mountain flowers sprout from every inhospitable crevice and crack. Purple blossoms spot the ground.Rocks in the distance call our name and we answer, running and bounding, and lo! snow just over the rocks, and more rocks and more rocks to climb.

The air is thin and fresh and tastes like ambrosia. I scale rocks. I walk in the snow. I inhale and exhale. I grow five years younger. Close your eyes. Breathe deep and feel the mountain air in every porous inch of skin and lungs. Cool and clean. I throw a snowball at Hailey. She tries to make a snow angel. Snow gets in her pants. I take a picture of Patrick taking a picture. There are antelope and elk and bighorn sheep in the distance. There are — there are — there are . . .

A perfect wind blows. Let’s never leave.

But instead we roll on down the Bighorns to the hot springs of Thermopolis and sleep among a million high schoolers.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 3 – Down and Up at Devil’s Tower, Fear and Loathing at Little Bighorn, and Finding Hope in the Lakota Land

2012-06-28T16:56:00.004-04:00

(actually covers June 15; reposted from here)

We’re up in the AM and moving out of Lakota land up toward Yellowstone again, but first we have a few more stops to make.

First we find ourselves mock-hitchhiking to that Great Gray Tooth jutting from the desert. It looks like a molar rising from the gums of the land in the distance from where we take out first pictures and stick our thumbs out like idiots. It wasn’t my idea. Someone thought it would make a good picture. No one stops, just like they wouldn’t have if and when we’d have been serious in this in those days long ago when we would have been without cell phones — that blessed, hellish, blissful existence I can’t imagine.

We get there and all of a sudden it’s massive and looming and we’re in its never-endingshadow. It’s a castle. A keep. A fortress. . . A tower! Devil’s Tower, they call it. Bear Den. This whole big intrusion of igneous rock that’s fought through sediment and erosion and still stands so tall and imposing. Terrifying crevices creep down its side. They’re scars on its bony flesh clawed out by a great, ancient, and horrifying bear as tall as clouds with a roar like thunderstorms. It has an awesome power that trembles you to your soul, like that intense prayer wind that permeated Bear Butte, but there are more people here, and it’s almost like they don’t quite realize it. What’s before them. What’s above them. They sense it, sense something. They see it, but they don’t see it, like so many of these places. We walk around it, and it eyes us the whole way, and we’re always in its shadow.

Then we set out for the throbbing center of the scar tissue of this land: the rolling hills called Little Bighorn, where it all went down, and dreams flickered like fire on ice.

There is a visitors’ center and little gravel paths with gravestones all marked along their ways and a sprawling cemetery that takes up so much of the land. We don’t go to the cemetery with all its whale-white markers. Instead, we walk up the hill.

I walk up the hill.

The hill is split down its heart by a black paved road.

On one side, there is a bleached monument of pale gray stone and names of US soldiers. It stands in the center of a small square of bright green grass roped off from the rest of the world. The whole thing is foreign and barbaric and looks nothing like these hills.

On the other side, there is a mound of earth. This earth. Brush and grass live on it. Through the mound are circular walls of rock inset with great metallic plaques of the indigenous peoples who fought and hoped and died here for the lives and the ways of the lives of their peoples. In a window in the earth are sculpted outlines in metal and wire of the warriors on their horses, and behind them the great plains and the green-brown hills go on and on. The air is heavy with them — with the breath of the Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Sioux and Arikara who bled here.The Indian memorial gives me hope.

And my heart goes out to the white mothers of the uniformed sons who died here under the command of that black-souled man named Custard, but though their names are written here, I feel none of their presence in this place. Because this is not their home. And I can only hope they have found their way back, and are forever freed.

But of the Indians who fell here . . . they are more than just sculptures and metal outlines. More than just a memorial. They are here. They are here in every fiber of the earth and sky. If you look closely in the dust and the brush, you can see them riding. If you listen closely in the whisper of the wind, you can hear them singing. Put your ear to the ground and the heartbeat is earth and mother and horses’ hooves and drums and prayer. Their breath is strong and good in the air.

I watch the families file past the stones marking the places where soldiers fell. I can only wonder how they feel and what they think. Are they sad? Do they feel guilty? Proud? What is in their hearts in this violent, pacific, Pyrrhic place? Do they feel what their country lost here? Do they feel what we failed to win?

I remember what was said at a little coffee shop on the Pine Ridge reservation. They took our children. Kill the Indian and save the man, they said.

There are little children here. Do they know I’m Indian? Do they know what it means to kill an Indian? Do they know what this place means? What really happened?

And here am I. Am I an Indian? Am I a man?

I turn back and close my eyes and try to listen to the whispers in the wind of the people who were here long before I. I can only imagine that in that spirit world where they must reside, they are riding now, and the buffalo are back, and they number greater than ever.