“Shh-h-h, Mama. There they are!” Our oldest child, Waurega, spoke from my right, and she blended scolding with surprise as she pointed.
“All right, I see them,” I whispered. “Go tell your papa and Ezra. They are beyond that rise. Or were. Hope and I will walk back and let the moo’a know. We will meet you three by the hollow cottonwood beside the creek. Just below that hawk’s beak rock, all right?”
She nodded and crept her way in front of me toward her father and brother, her pinafore dragging in the dust, flouncing over her well-worn moccasins. A beaded barrette held her dark hair that reached almost to her waist. I looked toward the rimrock, amazed that I once climbed it in the night.
The world was awash with golds and greens over greasewood and sage. Tiny purple shooting stars and blankets of the smallest yellow flowers covered the desert as far as I could see. We walked, my youngest and I, until Hope put her hands up to be lifted.
“You are such a big girl,” I told her. “I hope I can carry you all the way.”
“Hope can carry you,” she said and giggled, her dark blond sausage curls catching the air as she twisted and turned at my hip. She fingered an old, worn necklace of leather knots draped around her neck. “I see them, Mama! I do!”
“I know, Sweetgum. We’ll head that way as soon as we let the moo’a know. So they can come with us if they want.”
“Moo’a Lukwsh can’t wheel her way.”
“No, but she can ride with us on the horse if she wants.”
“You won’t make me miss the antelope?”
“No,” I said and touched her widow’s peak lightly, brushed dust from her face. “We’ll just tell them, then we’ll head back, see if Wuzzie wants to walk with us.”
The two old women sat in the shade of the wagon we had taken for our camping trip to the desert. Blankets made a pillow for their backs as they caught the shade. They stripped bark on willow sections Wuzzie had apparently cut for her and Lukwsh. An older Arrow panted in the shade, tied with a piece of cordage to the wheel of Lukwsh’s chair.
Only one day here remained. The next day we would begin the journey back to Warm Springs and the lives we had there: Shard still at the mill and at our growing ranch; me as a mother who spent some time at the Indian clinic, helped with healing, cooked with Lukwsh and Wuzzie at the church. Full lives, with the need to blend always old with new for strength.
Wuzzie stood and shaded her unpatched eye with her hand, recognized us, and shook Lukwsh’s shoulder and pointed.
Lukwsh’s arm swayed in the air, gentle as sweet rice grass arching into breeze. Arrow stood and barked. Hope waved back wildly from her perch on my hip, urging me, “Wave, Mama. Wave at Moo’a,” and I do, the joys of my life so like the welcoming waves of moo’as on a May morning.
“We’ve found them,” I said, depositing my youngest child at the old women’s feet. I stretched from the effort of carrying this squirmy girl.
“You cannot charm them,” Lukwsh said looking up at me, eyes shaded. “Not enough of you.”
“No, we just want to walk beside them, let the children see. Who knows when such a large herd will gather again?”
“It is a gift that you should find them on just a short trip here,” Lukwsh said.
“A namaka,” I said.
“That word has two meanings,” Lukwsh said, reminding me for just a moment of Thomas Crickett. “Did I tell you? It means ‘gift’ but it also means ‘to feed.’ ” She sat quietly stripping willows with her double-edged obsidian knife, and then she added words to nourish and water my soul, filling me with understanding of the way my life was fed. “To feed someone in the ways they need, their mind and body and their spirit too, that is a gift, na?”
“Perhaps the best of all,” I said.
She looked up at me and sighed. “It is like being young again, seeing this place. It does not leave bad dreams for you?”
I smiled and nodded my no.
“Do you want to walk with us, Wuzzie?” I asked.
The woman, spindly as a spider still, shook her head, pointed to Lukwsh with her chin.
“Oh, go if you want,” Lukwsh said. “I will sit here fine.” But Wuzzie nodded her head firmly, plopped back down, and began stripping bark.
“Oh, come, Moo’a.” Hope pleaded in her tiny voice and pulled on Lukwsh’s fingers. “Mama says we could put you on the horse or try to push the chair.”
“That old chair would make them curious, na? You go. I keep the dog here and this talkative woman beside me.”
She patted Wuzzie’s leg. Wuzzie smiled and motioned us back out to the desert. She used no words, had not these years. But I believed it was of her own choosing, not because she lived within a nightmare, all alone. And I carried hope that when she wished, she would speak to those who loved her, called her their own.
Hope and I made our way the short distance to the rise near a cottonwood, skirted around dried snakeskins shed in the sun. We met up with Ezra, now five, and Waurega, six, and their father.
“Ready?” he said, and the children nodded, seriously eager. “Remember what we practiced?” They nodded their heads.
Waurega stood a minute watching me step behind her father, put my hands on his hips, bend my head to his back.
“Ezra, you do the same to your sister, and Hope, you be the tail to him. Go ahead. Like Mama and Papa. Waurega will follow us, and when we stop, you can stand up slowly and see the pronghorns. You will hear them snort and sniff, but don’t talk or move too quickly. Ready?”
They quickly stood behind each other, bent, and like their parents, began to walk as one. Shard led us along the far side of the little rise until he was sure we were across from the herd, still downwind. Then with slow steps, dust barely lifted into the still air, his moccasins turned left, and we crested the little rise.
I twisted, looked back under my arm to see that the children followed, and they did, eyes glued to the ground. As I turned back, I saw the breadth and size of the herd, the fawn stripes of their necks, the deeper brown of their sides. They grazed slowly, their bodies like heat moving across the desert. Meadowlarks charmed us with their songs.
“Look,” Shard whispered, did not move quickly or point. “Stand still.” When our children came up behind us, we stood and motioned them to do the same.
Their mouths hung open. They were stunned by the size of the herd, by how closely they had walked as one, close to these several hundred antelope. We heard the animals snort, heard what sounded like the crackle of a low fire as they walked through the greasewood, broke sagebrush with their shoulders. The strong scent of sage and juniper drifted to us. A faint breeze brushed our faces, let us know we were downwind.
We stayed a long time watching. Black horns lifted and lowered as they grazed. They pulled at tender bunch grass dotting the desert while these children watched like church mice, quiet, bringing no attention to themselves. Birds chirped, a red-tailed hawk’s piercing call carried from the distance.
Who knows how long we stood breathing in this place.
“Turn back now,” Shard said quietly. “Still walk as one.”
Puffs of dust rose as we made our way back to Home Creek. I felt a grin rising up from somewhere deep inside, a joy that said I had not harmed a person by my walking in this way, did not earn what happened when I walked that way before.
“The tail of my animal is trying to direct the head,” Shard said as we moved farther from the herd where it seemed safe to talk. “I can feel it through your fingers.”
“Not directing. Just thinking, and my fingers hold on too tight.”
“What’s the thought, then?” he asked, twisting behind us to see the children.
“I am considering this, husband,” I told him as I stood up tall and turned with open arms to the three children, who now came running across the desert, scattering up sand like a desert mist. “That I am pleased I did not let the terrors of my future or the errors of my past keep me from this place.”
“Your
mind is like a grinding wheel,” he said, his kind eyes smiling.
I felt the rush of my children gathering themselves around my legs, my husband’s hands at my shoulders as he steadied me in the sand.
“Tell us the story again, Mama,” Waurega said breathless. “About the antelope and how you came to this place and found Papa.”
“How Papa found Mama,” Ezra corrected.
“Yes,” my husband said, smiling. “Tell us what you know from those years of tying knots.”
“That my life is like a burden basket filled with nourishing seeds,” I said. “And best of all,” I added, laughing, almost shouting over my shoulder as I embraced each child in turn, “I know my Spirit still walks with me and loves me as I am.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although I wrote this book after A Sweetness to the Soul, in many ways it is a prequel to that first novel in the Dreamcatcher collection. I first heard this story in 1975 from my future mother-in-law, Zelma Waurega Kirkpatrick, the day my future husband took me home to meet her. A descendant of the Choctaw nation on both her mother’s and father’s sides, she told the story of her grandmother, a white child who was separated from her family, found by Indians, and raised by them until she was about thirteen. Then something went wrong in the tribe and she was held to be the reason, so she was to be burned to death in sacrifice. But a young man had befriended her and told her as she gathered up her wood for the fire that would take her life, that each time she was to “go out farther, stay out longer” until he signaled her, and then she was to go out and never come back.
The family story included her difficult journey back to the white society, hiding in a tree trunk while her searchers talked of her, living off berries and chewing the rawhide that had been her dress. And she told of God’s faithfulness in bringing her to a family who cared for her, giving her a life with a doctor she married, and included the dramatic story of her reunion with her tribe and the young man who had risked his own life to save hers. That family story intertwined with my own curiosity as to how the Paiute tribe of eastern Oregon found itself attached to the Wasco and Warm Springs tribes of central Oregon, a confederation for which I worked. Together these seeds of interest grew into the exploration of belonging, of finding family and home.
—Jane Kirkpatrick, March 2008
Love to Water My Soul is the second in a series about frontier people seeking dreams. It is a work of fiction woven with two strands of fact.
The first strand chronicles the Wadaduka people (also known as Wada’Tika), “seed eaters” of southeastern Oregon, who lived in harmony with mountains and marshes, deserts and lakes. The people moved in small family clusters across a wide expanse of Great Basin land in northern Nevada and southeastern Oregon, seeking seeds, joining with elk eaters and salmon eaters, sometimes traveling farther south to gather cattails near Stillwater Marsh or trade with Klamath, Modoc, and Umatillas, perhaps gather roots near the Cascades. The legacy of the Wadaduka band as portrayed in this story follows historical accounts of the seasons of their years and the impact of non-Indians on their lives and traditions, including the formation in 1872 of one of the largest Indian reservations in the country, setting aside 1.8 million acres. The promise of its development was never kept.
The Wadaduka stories are centered in the Steens Mountain area, in the high desert near Home Creek, near the marshes at what is now part of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the ancient lakes fed by the Silvies and Malheur Rivers, close to the present towns of Burns, Oregon, and north, near Canyon City, and south to the small town of Frenchglen. The portrayal of the way in which contact with non-Indians changed them, of the destruction as well as individual kindnesses brought by Indian agents and soldiers, and of the war that took the people from their homeland and force-marched them five hundred miles across two mountain ranges in the dead of winter to a prison in Washington Territory is also based on tragic fact. So are the controversial role of Sarah Winnemucca and the sinister acts of Agent Rhinehart. Also taken from history are Agent Parrish and his wife, Mary, and the blacksmith named Johnson and their efforts to retain dignity and worth and to preserve a sense of place for people whose language has no word for good-bye.
The Paiute language used in this book reflects the dialect and spelling of those now living at Warm Springs. Some Paiute words—for which no equivalent could be found at Warm Springs—are from the Walker River and Stillwater Marsh areas.
Efforts were made to accurately portray life in the 1800s. Evidence supports the daily routines that consumed both frontier and Wadaduka peoples’ lives, the nature of the antelope and rabbit hunts, the place of dogs as duck hunters and friends, the earthquake of December 1872 and tremors that preceded it, the spirituality and the variety of Christian influences, as well as the role of the Ghost Dance religion as early as the 1870s in the Northwest. The newspaper accounts that open several chapters are authentic from the 1800s. The Oregon Insane Asylum did exist and attempted to incorporate “advanced” therapies, such as using animals and different kinds of foods first introduced by the Grahamites (Sylvester Graham of Graham cracker fame) to cure the “foolish and feeble-minded.” And while there was no Wuzzie in actuality, there is an account of such a person’s life choice in a Northwest journal dated 1811. Jane and Joseph Sherar; Indian Peter and his wife, Mary; and Crickett, whose experiences at Sherar’s Bridge were first introduced in A Sweetness to the Soul, are also people of reality.
The return of many of the Wadaduka to the Seekseequa Creek area of the Warm Springs Reservation and their roles as ranchers and blacksmiths and seamstresses and millwrights are also based on historical accounts. The Seekseequa Church, once Presbyterian, still stands. And a descendant of headman and later chief We-ah-wee-wah, Wilson Wewa, serves as the current director of the Culture and Heritage Department at Warm Springs.
History also relates the unfortunate fact that the Malheur Reservation was not retained for the Wadaduka people to return to after their imprisonment. In 1883, while the people still wallowed in slave-like conditions in Washington prisons, building canals by hand, all but a small amount of the rich bottom land of Harney Valley was returned to the public domain since “there weren’t any Indians living on the reservation.” Title to the current 771 acres, but a tiny portion of the original 1.8 million-acre reserve now known as the Burns-Paiute Reservation, was not received until 1972. Most descendants of this Wadaduka band live now near the Oregon town of Burns on the Burns-Paiute Reservation and on the Warm Springs Reservation in Central Oregon where the Paiute tribe is one of three within the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Efforts to increase the Paiute language and retain the ways of the Wadaduka people are underway through the Culture and Heritage Departments and with the support of tribal councils.
The second strand of fact is the story of Asiam. While accounts of captivity of non-Indians by native peoples abound in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, they are often based on stories of white people held against their will by native peoples. The story portrayed of Alice M, or Asiam, is quite different and is based on truth.
In Love to Water My Soul, these two fibers of fact are woven together as fiction meant to encourage and entertain. Like Shell Flower’s string of knots, this is a memory told many times. It is a memory I hope has touched your heart.
Visit www.jkbooks.com and click on the cover of Love to Water My Soul to explore more about the Wadaduka band and the Malheur waterfowl refuge in eastern Oregon that was their homeland for many years.
READERS GUIDE
1. In this story of separation and seeking home, how did the author connect Shell Flower’s journey with our own journeys to belong? Or did she?
2. What was significant about the selection of Asiam by Lukwsh (pronounced LOOK shh)? What did Lukwsh risk by offering to assist the outsider? What did she gain by her generosity? What role did Wuzzie play in this story of family and belonging?
3. What part did Wren’s illness play in this story? H
ow does a child with an illness affect family relationships? As this story was told through Asiam/Shell Flower/Alice M’s eyes, we don’t know how Wren felt about having Asiam in the family. How do you imagine she felt? Why?
4. Many young adults (middle and high school) who have read this book created their own memory knot necklaces. What four or five knots representing life-changing events or personal insights would you put into such a necklace?
5. Does Shard’s instruction to “go out farther, stay out longer” have a meaning beyond his hope for his friend’s survival? What hope might it give us when we are in a wilderness place, where we don’t know what the future holds?
6. In the chapter that discusses the antelope charming, a practice described in Sarah Winnemucca’s biography, what allowed the animals to be mesmerized? What kept them from leaving the makeshift corrals that had wide openings between the piles of greasewood and sage? Have there been times in your life when you thought you had no escape but found that if you looked with new eyes, you were not held hostage after all? What or who allowed you to find a new direction?
7. In the second half of the book when Alice has joined the Sherar family, the author uses actual newspaper articles from the region. How would you characterize these accounts? Does their vehemence surprise you? What would it have been like for Alice to read these, knowing they spoke of “her people” and of her own experience in such demeaning ways?
8. According to the author, what is the source for “love to water” our souls?
9. Why did the author show Alice hesitating when she met Shard years later? Are the two likely to have difficulty in their years ahead? What resources do they have to overcome these challenges?
10. The word for family comes from the Latin word famalus, meaning “servant.” Who was Alice’s family? Who served her? Whom did she serve? Who is your family?