I just tried to be funny, okay, okay, okay?
But that angry Navajo woman didn’t laugh. She wanted none of it. She stood and left the room.
I regret that I did not directly and seriously challenge that other artist’s aesthetic—her working definition of indigenous art—with my own.
“What’s your clan? What’s your Indian name?” the Navajo woman had asked me.
So, please, let me properly answer her question now.
My name is Sherman Alexie.
Yes, I have an Indian name. But I ain’t going to share it with you. I learned a long time ago that the only way to keep something sacred is to keep it private. So, yeah, you might think I reveal everything, but I keep plenty of good and bad stuff all to myself.
On my mother’s side, I was born into the Clan of Busted Promises and Dynamite and White Man’s Hydroelectric Concrete.
On my father’s side, I was born into the Clan of Sniper and Head Shot and Posthumous Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
On my mother’s side, I was born into the Clan of Rivers Flowing with Wild Salmon Ghosts.
On my father’s side, I was born into the Clan of Bloody and Broken Lungs.
And all of us Spokanes and Coeur d’Alenes, after the Grand Coulee Dam, have been born into the Clan of Doing Our Best to Re-create and Replicate the Sacred Things That Were Brutally Stolen from Us.
My name is Sherman Alexie and I was born from loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss.
And loss.
47.
Apocalypse
There is a salmon swimming from star to star.
Some name it Comet. Some name it Distant Light.
There is a salmon returning to our sky.
Some name it Constellation. Some name it Moon.
There is a salmon swallowing the earth.
Some name it Black Hole. Some name it God.
48.
Creation Story
I catch the salmon
With my bare hands
And offer it
To my mother.
She opens the fish
And finds
A city of Indians
Living among the thin bones.
49.
The Loss Extends in All Directions
AFTER WE BURIED our mother, my big brother, little brother, and me and our cousins sat in the tribal longhouse and ate salmon.
“Hey,” my big brother said. “What’s the Spokane word for salmon?”
We all looked at one another and were embarrassed to realize none of us knew.
“Man,” my cousin said. “If there’s any Spokane word we should know, it’s the word for salmon.”
It wasn’t funny. But we laughed anyway.
50.
Revision
AT SOME POINT in my childhood—in my early teens—my mother, Lillian, told me the most painful secret of her life.
“Junior,” she said. “I am the daughter of a rape.”
“What?” I asked, unsure that I’d heard her correctly.
“A man raped my mother. And she got pregnant with me.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “When did this happen? Are you okay? Did he go to jail? Who was the rapist?”
My mother said his name. He was a man from another tribe who’d died years earlier. I’d never known him, but I knew his children and his grandchildren. They were tall kids. Unlike my siblings and parents, I was tall, too. I’d always wondered why I was so much taller than the rest of my family. Why I was darker. I’d sometimes worried that perhaps I wasn’t my father’s biological child. But I have the same widow’s-peak cowlick—a rebellious lock of black hair that defies styling—as my father. My biological older brother and my younger twin sisters have that cowlick, too. Plus, as I’ve aged from a skinny dark kid into a chubby paler man—having lived in sunless Seattle for twenty-three years—I have come to more strongly resemble my father and my siblings.
But not in height.
“The man who raped your mother,” I said. “Your father—”
“He’s not my father,” my mother said. She was understandably angry. “My father is James Cox, the man who raised me.”
I was always afraid of her anger. Everybody was afraid of Lillian’s anger. We were always trying to mollify her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The rapist. Was he tall?”
My mother immediately understood what I was asking.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s where you get your height.”
I didn’t ask my mother anything else. I didn’t have the emotional vocabulary. And I’m not sure she had the emotional vocabulary either. I would eventually talk about my mother’s story, but that would be years after I’d first learned of her violent conception.
Rape was common on my reservation. But it was rarely discussed. And even more rarely prosecuted. In that way, my reservation is sadly like the rest of the world. But I think there are specific cultural reasons for the injustice on my reservation. I would guess it has something to do with the strict social rules of a tribe. White folks love to think that Native American culture is progressive and liberal. But it is often repressive. Indians are quick to socially judge one another. And even quicker to publicly condemn and ostracize. I wouldn’t realize it until I read more widely in college, but living on an Indian reservation was like living inside an Edith Wharton novel—a place where good and bad manners were weaponized. One could choose to abide by social rules or flaunt them, but there would be serious repercussions for any social misstep. But why was this the case? For thousands of years, we Spokanes had endured and enjoyed subsistence lives. We’d lived communally. Every member of the tribe had a job. And each job was equally vital. So, inside a subsistence culture, a socially disruptive tribal member would have been mortally dangerous to everybody else.
But there is a logical problem with that, isn’t there? First of all, we were living in the twentieth century and not the fourteenth or fifteenth. And if that were still true—if socially disruptive tribal members were traditionally punished, no matter the century—then wouldn’t it make more sense for the tribe to ostracize and even expel rapists? Not if the rapist was a culturally significant figure. Not if the rapist, however economically poor, was socially rich and powerful. Not if the rapist could put on an eagle-feather headdress and make a beautiful and powerful entrance into the powwow arena.
In many ways, a powerful Native American leader can operate inside his tribe and reservation like the repressive dictator of a Third World country.
And, in any case, what would happen inside a small tribe if every minor or major crime, if every small or large transgression, was made public? Could a small tribe survive that unveiling of secrets? What if we Natives practiced the same kind of justice inside our own communities as the justice that we demand from white society? Of course, centuries of genocidal acts by white Americans have certainly helped teach us Natives how to commit genocidal acts against one another. But at what point do we Native American victims start demanding more justice and freedom from our Native American oppressors?
And what happens if those indigenous oppressors happen to be our fathers and mothers?
51.
Bullet Point
I JOKE THAT I could be blindfolded in a room filled with strangers and I’d still be able to sniff out the people who have the same mental, emotional, and physical ailments as I do.
“Bad-back people smell like hot ointments,” I say. “Bipolar people smell like that grease they put on the wheels of roller-coaster cars.”
It’s not true. At least, I don’t think it’s true. Well, bad-back people certainly smell of liniment, but bipolar people smell like every other person—that same bouquet of hairless groomed primate. But, then again, each of us has our own scent, right?
“If you hung forty dirty shirts on a line,” my sister said once, “I could smell which ones had been worn by my brothers and sisters and m
other and father. By everybody I love.”
“That’s a fairly useless superhero skill,” I said.
My sister laughed.
“Might be useless in saving the world,” she said. “But it means I know my people are close before they turn the corner.”
“Your superhero name is Psychic Nose,” I said.
“Or maybe,” my sister said. “Maybe it just means you guys don’t use enough soap.”
I don’t think I could recognize my friends by scent, not even the dudes I have played basketball with for two decades. Not even though I’ve been heavily marked by their sweat. I have arrived home in hoops gear smelling so heavily of athletic endeavor—like an odiferous sonnet of fourteen men—that I’ve undressed on the front porch and left my shirt and trunks draped over a railing. Maybe you think that’s sexy—and I suppose it would be for folks with a very particular kink—but, for me, it’s just the smelliest part of the game.
But could I find my wife and sons in a crowded room using only my nose? Yes, yes, I believe I could perform that trick.
But that’s all subterranean, right? That is all about the animals we truly are and not the civilized people we pretend to be, correct?
Do we choose our friends based on primal shit we don’t even understand?
I knew a woman who smelled exactly like Campbell’s vegetable soup. It was hilarious and maddeningly erotic. I couldn’t stand next to her for any longer than a few moments before I went dumb with sexual arousal. So, yeah, that meant I was always walking away from that platonic friend. She probably thought I didn’t like her. I haven’t seen her in fifteen years. I am okay with that.
Or, hey, let’s get really weird. Do I choose my friends because they smell like my mother or father? Have I chosen friends because they smell like absence?
More specifically, do I choose female friends who are like my mother? Or do I choose women who are the opposite of my mother? Do I choose the anti-mothers?
I asked some of my friends to write about their mother—to let me publish their words and my responses. A highly unscientific experiment. “Tell me about your mother,” I said. “Good or bad memories. Just tell me what you remember most. Tell me something that you think defines your mother. Curate your memories.”
I also told my friends that I’d keep them anonymous. I told them that I hoped I’d gain some deeper insight into the process by which I have chosen friends.
“Maybe it will bring us closer,” I e-mailed one friend.
“Or maybe it will drive us apart,” he wrote back.
“You pessimistic fucker,” I wrote.
“I talk pessimism,” he wrote. “You live pessimism.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too.”
“We need to get coffee soon,” I wrote. “You fucker.”
“Not until school starts back up,” he wrote. “Summer is fucked for parents of young kids. I love my kids, but sometimes I just go sit in my car in the driveway, turn on the air conditioner, and take a nap.”
“Okay, see you in September, October, or November,” I wrote. “Or never.”
But, wait, I got distracted. That busy dude is funny—and was too harried to send me a memory of his mother. And I had been wondering if I have chosen my female friends based on how much they subconsciously remind me of my mother. And it would have to be subconscious because I have never met a person who reminded me of my mother. Well, that’s not exactly true. I had a therapist for six years who distinctly reminded me of my mother. But that therapist wasn’t my friend. She was a mental health professional who helped me understand some of my behavior.
“I don’t know that I’m like your mother,” my therapist said. “Or if I’m just a woman of your mother’s age who pays close attention to you.”
So I wrote a female friend. I will call her Miss Orange. I already knew she’d had a difficult relationship with her mother, but I was surprised by her e-mail back to me:
Sherman,
I used to let my dad off the hook for being a drunk,
for raging, for forgetting to come home and leaving
me and my brother with no electricity or burst
pipes. I can’t let my mom off the hook for her focused
cruelty.
Miss Orange’s e-mail spun me around in my chair. Oh, shit, I have done that, too!
My father was a failure. Worse, he was a brilliant boy—a star athlete, classical pianist, and jitterbug dance champion—who turned into an inert man—into inertia itself. He died broke. He died young, at age sixty-four of alcoholism. He hadn’t had a job in thirty years or more. He couldn’t keep a job. He once pretended to have a job. He’d pack a lunch in the morning and walk to his road crew job—to the garage a half mile away, where he’d meet up with his co-workers to take care of the reservation highways and byways. Then, at five, he’d walk home and let me eat whatever was left of his lunch. I loved those half-sandwiches more than any food I’ve ever had in my entire life. I mean—my father finally had a job. I was ecstatic at the thought of my father’s regular paycheck. We’d have cash at predictable intervals. Glory! Glory! Those partly eaten baloney sandwiches and that half-filled coffee thermos became my Eucharist. And, yes, my dad did work that job for maybe a week but then quit and pretended to go to work for another two weeks. So what did he do with all that real time spent at his imaginary job? He’d sit in one of the permanently broken trucks near the road crew garage and...do nothing.
Of course, I can now amateur-ass diagnose my father as being incredibly fucking depressed. When sober, that depressed man sat in his bedroom watching TV for eighteen hours a day. Then, at predictable intervals, he’d leave the house for days or weeks on drinking binges and leave his family—his young children—scrambling for money and food.
When he was gone on his drinking binges, I would sometimes cry myself, dehydrated and irrational, into the emergency room. When he was drunk, my father would drive and get arrested. He was once court-ordered into a ninety-day residential treatment program. Nine or ten years old, I was a useless wreck—a car fire—for three months. If my father had served his time during the academic year, I would have probably flunked out of grade school. Or maybe I could have anesthetized myself with homework and extra credit and binge-reading. In any case, I made it through those ninety days of loneliness and celebrated as I waited with my mother and siblings in the hospital parking lot. There’s a photograph of me throwing a fake karate punch at the camera. Yeah, I was star student of the Dragon Dojo of Indian Boys Who Don’t Know Fuck-All About Martial Arts. I had crooked poverty teeth. I wore government glasses. My hair was uncombed and unwashed. I was ecstatic.
My father was coming home! My father was going to be sober! My father was going to get a job and take care of us!
My mother had packed a celebratory picnic of baloney sandwiches, potato chips, and Pepsi. She’d been a single mother for three months. She had good reason to celebrate.
My big brother and little sisters and I played on the grass.
We were almost a normal family.
But then, only moments after that photo of me was taken, we learned that our father would have to spend another thirty days in treatment.
We were crushed. We wept. Our beleaguered mother drove us back to the reservation. Along the way, we kids ate those sandwiches and chips. And drank those Pepsis. No matter how sad we were. No matter how much we just wanted to cry. We were too poor to waste the food. And we’d gone without meals enough times to learn that you absolutely devour any food placed before you. That’s one of the ways in which hunger and loneliness can become inextricably linked.
Along the way, I also screamed at my mother.
I blamed her for my father’s alcoholism.
I blamed her for our poverty.
I blamed her for everything wrong in our world.
Other days, she would have fought back. But, on that day, she remained silent as she drove us home. That day, she absorbed my rage and didn’t respo
nd with any rage of her own.
Throughout our lives, our mother had been the dependable one. After I was seven, she never went on drinking binges. She never opened up a canyon in her soul and silently disappeared into the dark recesses. She was always present for us. She made money by selling her handmade quilts and blankets. She worked regular jobs, too. Youth counselor, senior-citizen companion, trading post cashier, drug and alcohol treatment therapist. She rarely broke the material promises she made to us. She was industrious.
And yet, I have spent my literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father. I have, in a spectacular show of hypocrisy, let my father off the hook for his lifetime of carelessness.
That is completely unfair to my mother. I know it is. And it must have caused her pain. But she never said anything. She never asked me why I didn’t write much about her. And if she had asked, I’m sure I would have evaded the question.
But I can answer it now.
I wrote so many loving poems and stories about my father because I never once doubted his love for me. He rarely expressed his love. He was not affectionate. But he was shy and soft-spoken and obviously wounded and childlike and exuded kindness. He was never mean, not once, not to me or my siblings, and not directly to anyone else on the planet. You will not find a person who remembers a negative interaction with my father.
I know that my unreliable father loved me. I can say that without the need to present you with further evidence.