My father died of alcoholism, a slow suicide.
At my father’s funeral, Jim played “Father and Farther,” and I wept harder than I ever have in my life.
After that, Jim and I would talk on the phone once or twice a year. I’d often bump into him when I was visiting Spokane.
We always promised to write a new song together.
To do another show.
To share the stage.
He and Shelly came to my mother’s funeral. And I was positive that he played a song in honor of my mother, but now I’m not sure if he did. My memory, often distorted by my storyteller’s impulse, is now also distorted by the aftereffects of my brain surgery and seizures.
Then, eleven months after my mother’s death, I received a text in the night from John Sirois, another Colville Indian and one of my best friends.
Jim was dead.
A week after Jim’s funeral, at the Bing Theater in Spokane, John Sirois sang one last honor song for Jim, and I improvised a eulogy.
I said, “Jim was so beautiful. He was so damn Indian-looking, too. He was like the Before Columbus Indian, and I am the After Columbus Indian.”
I said, “At my wedding, Jim was walking in the hotel in front of me in the lobby. And some little white kid, a stranger, looked at Jim and said, ‘Mom, that’s a real Indian.’ His embarrassed mother tried to shush her kid. But I said, ‘It’s okay, I’m an Indian, too,’ and that little shit white kid pointed at Jim and said, ‘But not Indian like him.’”
I said, “Jim was the first Indian man to ever tell me how much he liked my poems.”
I said, “I always figured Jim and I would get back onstage someday. Like we’d do an Honoring the Ancient Elders concert where we’d honor the ancient elders we’d become.”
I said, “Jim was a musician you could always trust onstage. And he was a person you could always trust offstage.”
I said, “I don’t have any regrets about my life with Jim. We didn’t get to share the stage one last time. But he and I made art together. And we had so many adventures on the road. We laughed so much.”
I said, “He and I were flying in a little plane together. Before nine-eleven. When you could see the pilots in the cockpit. When you could walk right up to them if you wanted. We were flying and hit some turbulence. And it felt like the plane almost flipped upside down. The plane was bumping up and down. It was scary. Jim and I were sitting across the aisle from each other. We looked at each other. Then we looked at the pilots. Those pilots looked at each other and laughed about the turbulence. So Jim and I looked at each other and laughed about the turbulence, too. And I guess that’s what I will always remember most about him. That will be my most lasting memory. My brother, Jim Boyd, laughing about turbulence.”
“Shelly Boyd called me,” I said to my wife. “She asked if I would perform at the tribute to Jim in Buffalo.”
“When?” my wife asked.
“In a month,” I said. “At the Native American Music Awards.”
My wife looked into my eyes. We’ve been in love for twenty-five years. We know the what of the what about each other.
“I can’t do it,” I said. “My brain. I will get too tired. I don’t want to get all exhausted and start having seizures again. I have to stay home. And I don’t want to fall over if Shelly is there. I’m not going to die, but think how much that would traumatize her.”
“I know,” she said. “You have to tell her you can’t go.”
But I didn’t want to hurt Shelly’s feelings, so I performed a highly sacred indigenous trick: I avoided making a final decision by avoiding the person who needed me to make my final decision. This didn’t work when Indian tribes tried to avoid signing treaties with the U.S. government, and it didn’t work when I tried to avoid Shelly.
A few days after she’d asked me to consider performing at the tribute, Shelly texted me: “If you and/or Diane have time, I’m in town till Wednesday morning if you want to meet for lunch or dinner. I’m visiting the Burke.”
Located on the University of Washington campus, the Burke Museum has a cool collection of Native American art and artifacts. I’m not always a big fan of Native American museums or the Native collections of larger museums. I feel like museums too often lock us Natives in the past, but the Burke does a good job of honoring contemporary Native Americans while honoring our past. Plus, they have an Egyptian mummy in private storage, and drawers filled with bird wings.
After I read Shelly’s message about the Burke, I called her.
“Hey, it’s Sherman,” I said. “You better watch out. You’re so Indian and beautiful, the Burke might catch you and put you in an exhibit.”
“I’ll be all right as long as they put me in a canoe,” Shelly said. “And feed me lots of salmon.”
“It’ll be good salmon, too,” I said. “Remember, they still have wild salmon on this side of the mountains.”
“That sounds better than how my life is going now,” she said. “I might do it.”
I could hear the grief in her voice. I didn’t want to disappoint her about the tribute. But I had to tell her the truth.
“Shelly,” I said. “I’m sorry. But I can’t do the show in Buffalo. I think it would cause me problems. I get so tired now. I would be too exhausted.”
“Oh, Sherman, I understand. But I’m sad. We were thinking we’d get some of Jim’s musician friends to learn one of the songs you and Jim did together. And then you’d perform it with his friends and that would be the tribute.”
“Oh, God,” I said, and cried into the phone, fully understanding for the first time that Jim and I would never again perform together. I felt the full force of my grief.
“Oh, Shelly,” I said, barely getting out the words. “I don’t think I could even make it through the first few bars of the song. I don’t think I’d be able to talk.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” Shelly said. “Sometimes I can barely talk about Jim.”
“The sadness snuck up on me there,” I said. “It hit me hard like a storm.”
I realized at that moment that I’d have to stop listening to Jim’s music for a while. In my family, we cut our hair to grieve death. In 2003, I’d scissored off my ponytail after my father died. And I never grew it back. I became a short-haired Indian. For my mother’s death, I had no hair to cut. But I am writing this book about her. For Jim’s death, I would have to put away the music he and I wrote together. I didn’t know when I would be able to listen to it again.
“I miss Jim,” I said to Shelly. “I am always going to miss him.”
“I am going to miss him forever, too,” she said. “You and I are alike. Because I am going to miss your mom forever, too.”
I knew that Shelly and my mother had grown closer over the years. But I hadn’t realized how close. I also knew that Shelly had, for personal and spiritual reasons, decided to learn how to speak her tribal language. My mother was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language, a dialect related to Shelly’s language. Some words are the same or similar. Most are not.
“Your mom was so supportive of us learning our language,” Shelly said. “She encouraged us so much. I always wished she lived in Inchelium so we could hear her talk all the time. It’s a different language, I know, but we wanted to hear your mother speak it. We wanted to hear her fluency. We learn the language now, and we know phrases and we can talk to each other. But not like your mom. I told her she should come talk to us in her language. I told her she could talk about cutting her toenails and it would be beautiful to us.”
“She never taught us how to speak the language,” I said.
And Shelly said, “She didn’t teach you because she loved you.”
That made me weep again. I couldn’t talk for ten or fifteen seconds. And then I said, “Oh, Shelly, I have never heard it that clear.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “you don’t know something is true until you hear it for the first time.”
And I understood that Shelly
, in learning to speak her tribal language, had tapped into something ancient and powerful. In reclaiming her language, Shelly now understood something beautiful and painful about the loss of language. And she had just taught me what she had learned. She had said it in English, but it spoke to my soul in the old way.
I realized that my mother had not taught us the tribal language because she knew her children would not be strong enough to carry the responsibility of being the last fluent speakers. She protected us from that spiritual burden. She protected us from that loneliness.
During my teen years, my mother sometimes said to me, “Junior, English will be your best weapon.” I had always understood that as a motivational sentence, but I now realize it was also about love. And how psychic was my mother about my relationship with English? At the very least, she perfectly predicted my eventual job description.
“Before your mom got really sick,” Shelly said, “she was supposed to come to Inchelium and talk in Spokane to us. She was going to tell us stories. And then a big snowstorm hit. And closed us off from the east, west, and south. But the north was open. Isn’t that funny? A big snowstorm but the north was open.”
I cried as I listened to Shelly speak.
“Your mom called me and cried,” Shelly continued. “She couldn’t get through the snow. She was so sad. You know, Sherman, I get so mad at some of the people in your tribe. Your mom knew all the words, and those people wouldn’t use your mother’s knowledge. They wouldn’t let her teach anywhere.”
I thought of how difficult my mother had been over the years. About how many enemies she made within our tribe. And then I thought about how my mother and I had stopped fighting but had never truly reconciled. I thought about my poor, poor mother trying to reconcile with our tribe—with her enemies—and being turned away.
“Shelly,” I said. “Mom and I struggled with each other over the years.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I know.”
I sobbed again.
“Is this who you’re going to be now?” I asked. “Are you going to call up Indian men and make them cry?”
“That might be good,” Shelly said. “It might be fun to become an old Indian heartbreaker.”
We laughed.
“Your mother knew things that no other Spokane Indian knew,” Shelly said. “Words. Ideas. Stories. Songs. History. It’s all gone now. Buried with your mother.”
I suddenly understood that Shelly had become my teacher. And, maybe, by loving my mother so much and being so loved by my mother in return, Shelly was also my mother’s messenger.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “You are saying amazing things.”
“Oh, I’m just talking,” Shelly said. “Just talking.”
I felt blessed by her words.
“You know,” she said. “Our languages are amazing. Our languages do things that English just can’t do. There’s a word we use in Inchelium. And a word used in Wellpinit, too.”
Shelly said a word in Salish that I did not recognize, but I didn’t ask her to repeat it because I wanted her to keep telling the stories I did understand.
“That word means ‘earth-dream.’ And, depending on how you use it, it means we, the people, are dreaming the earth into being. And it also means the earth is dreaming us, the people, into being. We are dreaming each other. And making each other real. And it means other things, too, that I don’t understand. That I might never understand. But I am going to keep learning.”
Shelly and I said our good-byes and made plans to see each other in person. I told her that I would need to talk to her because of Jim and because of Lillian. I realized that Shelly would become my mother’s voice, at least my mother’s Salish voice. And I realized that my mother, Lillian, had dreamed me into being. And that I had dreamed her, my mother, into being. And that she and I would keep dreaming each other into being.
I don’t know the Spokane word or words that mean “The son dreams the mother as the mother dreams the son.” But I know how to say it in English. I know how to spell it. I know how to put it in a book. And that will make it magic enough for me.
148.
Epigraphs for My Tombstone
1.
You shouldn’t worry
If you haven’t lately heard me
Tell a joke about death.
I’m just catching my breath.
2.
I’m buried
Two hundred and seventy-nine miles
From the graves
Of my mother and father.
That seems perfect.
No closer.
No farther.
3.
If I died
As an elderly man
In his unarmored sleep,
Then count
My quiet departure
As an indigenous victory.
4.
Oh, shit!
Crank the pulleys
And lift me into the endless span.
I hope to be remembered
As the kind and generous man
Who always fought the bullies.
5.
I’m sorry
If I sneeze myself dumb.
But I’m allergic
To 78 percent of the dust,
Ashes, pollen, and plants
That I’ve become.
149.
After Brain Surgery
I forget what I was trying to say.
One word or another gets in the way
Of the word I meant to use. Nothing stays.
I forget what I was trying to say,
So I say something else. I compensate.
Like a broken horse, I’ve learned a new gait.
But wait! Are these the words I meant to say?
I think these rhymes help me to map the way.
I think these rhymes help me to map the way.
But wait! Are these the words I meant to say?
Am I a broken horse? Is this my new gait?
Damn! I’ve lost the path, so I’ll compensate
By repeating the words I meant to say.
But these words migrate. They refuse to stay
In place. This is my new life. My new way.
I forget what I was trying to say.
150.
Fluent
MY FRIEND SHELLY BOYD, a Colville Indian and dear friend of my late mother’s, made an observation during a dinner that keeps echoing in my head.
She pointed out that my siblings and I might be the youngest people who were raised in a household with two fluent Salish speakers—with a mother and father who were raised in households where they were fluent in Salish before they were fluent in English.
Shelly said, “Both of your parents thought in Salish. They dreamed in Salish.”
But, as I told Shelly, I don’t even think of my late father as being a fluent speaker because he so rarely spoke the language. In my lifetime, I heard him say Salish words maybe ten times.
Sometimes, when she was very angry, my mother yelled at my father in Salish, in the Spokane dialect, and my father listened and listened and listened. And then, maybe two or three times in all those years, he snapped a word or two back at her in Salish, something so powerful and shocking in the Spokane or Coeur d’Alene dialects that it would cause my mother to turn and immediately leave the room.
And yet my siblings and I are not fluent. My brothers and sisters, having lived on the reservation their entire lives, know far more words than me now. Growing up together, we shared the same limited vocabulary. But now, twenty-six years after I last lived on my rez, I can barely count to ten in Spokane.
Our parents did not teach us our tribal language. And that was mostly because of shame. The white government, white military, and white church worked together to shame indigenous people for being indigenous—for speaking the language.
But I also think our parents and grandparents hoarded the language. In a real sense, the original Salish language, in all of its dialects, was the most valuable t
reasure that any dispossessed Indian could hide—could keep for themselves.
Being fluent is perhaps the last and best defense against American colonialism.
So I think it was a combination of shame and possessiveness that prevented our parents from teaching us to be fluent.
But Shelly also made this observation: “Sherman, I have known you for almost thirty years and you have always been mysterious to me. I don’t understand how your brain works—how you see the world as you do. But I was thinking about you the other day, about being raised by two people with Salish brains. Who always thought first in Salish. Who, since birth and until their death, watched the world with Salish eyes. And so I think that, even though you and your brothers and sisters don’t speak Spokane fluently, maybe all of you have these Salish/English brains that nobody else has. Sherman, I think maybe your English has Salish hidden inside of it.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I have serious doubts that it’s true. But my siblings and I do have a unique relationship with the Salish language, and with its tragic history of destruction, self-destruction, near-disappearance, and recent resurgence.
But the new Salish language is not the same as the old Salish language.
“When a fluent elder dies,” Shelly said, “it’s like a river has disappeared. And inside the disappeared river are Salish words—Salish concepts—that have also disappeared.”
My siblings and I could have been taught that old language. We could have learned how to navigate all of those ancient rivers of words and concepts.
My siblings and I could have become the last guardians of the old Spokane language.
But we are not.
My siblings are everyday citizens of our reservation. They speak only English. And I, crazily enough, have turned English into my only vocation and greatest avocation.