Before I met my wife, a Hidatsa/Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi Indian, I had never, as an adult, been romantically loved by any other Native woman. But don’t feel too bad for me. Growing up on the rez, as a preteen, I kissed four girls.
In kindergarten, I grew so dizzy while sitting on a spinning merry-go-round that I laid my head back on the metal and closed my eyes. A few moments later, I opened my eyes and was startled to see a girl staring down at me. Then I was even more startled when she kissed me, jumped off the merry-go-round, and never kissed me again.
That merry-go-round kisser was a white girl, the daughter of white parents who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I kissed a girl for the second time in fourth grade when I leaned through her open basement-bedroom window and smashed my mouth into hers. She was a white girl, and she fell laughing back onto her bed next to her best friend, an Indian girl, who asked, “What was it like?”
“He tastes like salt,” the white girl said.
They laughed together. I ran away, fearing something was wrong with my mouth. Only much later in life, after I had kissed other girls, did I realize that the taste of salt can make a kiss pretty damn spectacular.
In fifth grade, I kissed a white girl who was a little bit Indian. Or maybe she was an Indian girl who was mostly white. In any case, on the rez, she was treated and mistreated like she was a white girl, no matter how Indian she was or was not.
I think she was the first girl I loved.
One day, at recess, she gave me a necklace. A silver cross. Then she kissed me. I realized that I had always wanted her to kiss me. That’s a powerful feeling at any point in one’s life, but it’s a naked Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil of the soul the first time you feel it.
I lived across the road from the tribal school, so I immediately ran home and asked my mother if she had a necklace I could give to my first love.
And my mother smiled, said yes, and gave me a silver necklace with a pendant-coin that featured an embossed buffalo on one side and an Indian head on the other.
That piece of jewelry was not exactly romantic, but I didn’t know any better. I guess my mother didn’t know any better either. And, despite my mother’s other major and minor crimes against me, I absolutely refuse to believe that she deliberately sabotaged her young son’s courtship effort.
Proudly swinging that half-Indian/half-buffalo necklace, I ran back to school and presented it to that mostly white girl. She accepted the gift but with a look of such obvious disdain that I turned and ran. And, as I ran, I heard her laughing with other girls, the mostly and fully Indian girls who had often laughed at me, at my thick government-provided eyeglasses, at my large hydrocephalic skull, at my epically crooked teeth, at my stutter and lisp.
I was a special-needs kid before needs were considered special. I was a kid Somewhere on the Spectrum when the spectrum was only “normal” or “not normal.” I was the Official Tribal Fool living one hundred years after fools were last thought to be holy. I was a mess, a mysterious casserole slowly going bad in a half-assed freezer. I was social carrion. I was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. I was uncorrected and uncorrectable. I was the Boy Who Cannot Contain His Emotions. I was the kid who could not run fast or jump high. I was the kid scared of heights on a reservation that is essentially an endless pine forest. I was the Indian who didn’t know how to swim on a reservation bordered on two sides by one great river and one damn good river. I was the Runt of the Rez.
I stole my fourth and last reservation kiss from another white girl. I was in sixth grade. She was an older woman. An eighth-grader. She was the white daughter of white teachers. And I saw her sitting on a big rock on the playground. Her eyes were closed. Her face was turned toward the October sun. I quietly climbed the rock, leaned toward her, and kissed her. She slowly opened her eyes, not surprised at all, as if she’d expected to be kissed by somebody, and said, “Never do that again.”
She was absolutely justified in judging and rebuffing me that way.
Later that same school year, I was sitting on a second flight of interior school stairs while two Indian girls sat talking on the first flight of stairs. I could hear every word they said, but they didn’t know I was listening.
They talked about their friends—all the girls they thought were the coolest and the ones who were the least cool—and then they talked about the boys they liked and the boys they loved.
I wanted to hear them talk about me, but I also wanted them not to talk about me.
“You know who you should like?” the first Indian girl asked the other Indian girl.
“Who?” she asked.
“Junior,” said the first Indian girl. She said my name. Oh, shit, she said my name.
“Junior is nice,” said the second Indian girl. “And he’s supersmart. But he is so ugly.”
I know that every person reading this has experienced that kind of romantic devastation and personal destruction. But it doesn’t make me feel any better to know that it’s a universal experience. And I hope only a few people have experienced what happened to me after that moment on the stairs.
The next day, some other Indian girls began to call me ugly. They said it to my face, in public, at school, at sporting events, at ceremonies, everywhere. When they walked by my house, they’d yell “Ugly” loud enough for me to hear it in my basement bedroom. Insulting me suddenly became a wildly popular thing to do. I’d been randomly bullied and insulted for years, but I quickly became the target of an organized harassment campaign.
So many insults, so many names.
They invented a disparagement for me that I’m embarrassed to repeat so many years later.
“Junior High Honky,” they chanted at me. “Junior High Honky. Junior High Honky.”
That’s a stupid insult, right? Inane. It hardly seems like it would be damaging. But, like water falling drop by drop onto your face for hours and days and weeks, that tiny insult slowly came to have enormous power over me.
So how did those mean girls invent that particular appellation? What is its etymology?
Junior High Honky. Junior High Honky.
Such a silly damn insult. I was an Indian being racially insulted by other Indians. I was being called white by Indians who had a white mother or father. I was being called white by Indian kids who’d known me since our births. Many of us had played together as babies in cribs. So they were racially insulting me for the whiteness they knew I didn’t possess. Well, my maternal grandfather was partly descended from a Scottish traveler, but he died years before I was born. Some of my uncles, aunts, and cousins had married white folks and had biracial kids, but every one of my living blood relatives was an official member of one tribe or another. A few of my cousins were distant urban Indians. That didn’t make them any less Indian. It just meant they weren’t reservation Indians. But I was the child of two reservation Indians who were the children of reservation Indians who were the children of reservation Indians. It was ridiculous and maddening to be called white by Indians who were less Indian than me.
As an adult, I can now intellectually understand why they called me white. In the Indian world, “white” is our enemy. “White” is the conqueror. “White” is the liar, killer, and rapist. So, if one Indian wants to inflict a grievous emotional wound on another Indian, then “white” is the Big Fucking Gun of insults. The bullies wanted to hurt me as much as possible. So, despite the fact that I was culturally, economically, politically, racially, and geographically a full member of the tribe—as much a Spokane Indian as any other Spokane—I was called white, not because I was white, but because I was the frail kid. I was the easiest target. In the Land of Others, I was the Otherest. These days, you can go online and read other indigenous people’s scholarly and less-than-scholarly reviews of my books, and you’ll discover that some of those assholes overtly and subtly accuse me of whiteness. And, sure, it hurts my feelings. It definitely gives me PTSD flashbacks to childhood shame. But it also makes me shrug, sigh, and laugh. I
used to be bullied because I was the Indian with the least social power. Now, I’m sometimes bullied because I’m one of the Indians with the most social power. So, yeah, when another Indian, especially one of the smart ones chasing that completely nonassimilative prize known as academic tenure, accuses me of whiteness, I think, “Different bully; same bullying.” And, sometimes, when I’m being the best version of myself, I will remember that bullies are created—that bullies seek to torture because they’ve been tortured. When other Indians—friends, acquaintances, or strangers—talk shit about me, I try to remember they are acting out of their own weakness, their own crisis of self-identity, their own pain and fear and paranoia. I try to instantly forgive them.
I try. I try. I try.
But my adult understanding of this indigenous cultural cruelty does nothing to help the bullied rez kid I was. My intellectualism, empathy, and self-empathy cannot time-travel.
“Junior High Honky, Junior High Honky, Junior High Honky,” my bullies chanted at me.
They chanted, “You’re so ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Oh, uh-ha! Oh, uh-ha! You’re ugly!”
Not all of the Spokane Indian girls called me names. I distinctly remember the kindness of many girls. Those kind girls have grown into kind women. But there were three girls in particular who incessantly bullied me. And they happened to be beautiful and overwhelmingly popular. Shit, one of them owned her own snowmobile and a full-body snowsuit she could have worn to climb Mount Everest.
A snowmobile! A fucking snowmobile on the rez! I didn’t even have my own radio. I didn’t have a bicycle. I had to wear my only pair of shoes—tennis shoes bought in Kmart—during winter.
“But, Sherman,” my critics like to say. “Not all Indians are poor on the reservation.”
So, yes, yes, yes, I agree, there were a few rich Indians, relatively speaking, who lived on my reservation. There were also a few middle-class Indians living on my rez. And nearly all of those rich and middle-class Indians were dickheads. There was income inequality on my rez. There was a 99 percent and a 1 percent. There was social and political separation based on economic and cultural class. I can’t imagine how those class differences play out now within tribes that have serious casino money. Or maybe I can imagine it. There are plenty of tribes disenrolling their members—legally destroying their tribal identities—exiling them. I think of those wildly successful casino tribes, and I wonder if their reservations have come to resemble and mimic the inequities of the United States itself. Doesn’t an Indian tribe finally surrender to colonization by becoming as capitalistic as our conquerors? Isn’t indigenous economic sovereignty one of the sneakiest damn oxymorons of all time?
I was a poor rez boy, and from the spring of 1978 through the fall of 1979, I was intensely belittled by three Indians who had some family money—whose parents had and kept jobs. My father died at age sixty-four without ever having had a checking account in his name. So, yes, I was a poor kid and those three rich Indian girls bullied and brainwashed me. They called me ugly with such cruel and constant precision that I came to fully believe that I was ugly. I looked in the mirror and said, “You’re ugly, ugly, ugly.” I often look in the mirror now and say, “You’re ugly, ugly, ugly.”
That same fall, during the first few days of seventh grade, I opened my math book and saw my mother’s maiden name written on the inside cover. I cursed at the obvious injustice. They had handed me that ancient math book because I was an Indian kid and because I was a reservation kid and because I was a small-town kid and because I was poor and because I was a poor reservation Indian from a small town in a small state in a region of the country where almost every kid, no matter their race, is treated like shit by the rich and powerful. I was enraged at the racism and classism. I felt doomed. I felt like all my classmates, my fellow tribal members, were also doomed. In real life, I stood and threw that thirty-year-old math book across the room and impaled it three inches deep into the wall. In the fictional version of that incident, as detailed in my novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, my autobiographical avatar throws that math book across the room and breaks the teacher’s nose. The fictional version is much more satisfying.
My childhood dream had been to become a pediatrician, like all of the doctors who had treated me so well during my sickly childhood, but the reservation school was so shitty at that point—so devoid of advanced math and science curricula—that I might as well have been dreaming of becoming bulletproof, invisible, and ten feet tall.
When I got home from school that day, after being suspended for three days for throwing that old math book into the wall, I asked my mother and father if I could leave the reservation school and go somewhere different, somewhere better.
My father had gone, on purpose, to Immaculate Heart of Mary Academy, a Catholic school in Coeur d’Alene, where he and his sister were the only Indians. So I don’t think it was a shocking idea to him that I might want to see more of the world. He’d been in the army. He’d traveled on all-Indian basketball teams through Canada, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, Oregon, and Northern California. When he was drunk, he often bragged that he used to have a Japanese girlfriend who lived in San Francisco. He’d written the first thirty pages of an “autobiographical” novel about his love affair with her. I doubt she was real, but he’d wanted her to be real. My father’s lifelong dream had been to live in Phoenix, Arizona.
He said, “I want to live in a place where it never gets cold.”
So, by action and ambition, my father had always been a traveler.
But my mother, except for a brief period where she became a teen mother in Sacramento and another where she became a teen bride in Arlee, Montana, had never lived off the reservation. And difficult and terrible things had happened to her when she had traveled away from the rez.
So, considering their respective histories with adventure, it is not surprising that my father supported my escape. But I remain stunned that my mother gave her consent. I know I was brave to leave the reservation school, but I think my parents were far more courageous in letting me go. I was so young. I was a fucked-up Indian boy. And, despite being descended from thousands of years of traditional Native people and their conservative lives, my parents said yes when I asked to be a total radical and leave my tribal school.
My mother, despite all the pain she caused me, saved my life twice. The first time, in 1973, she saved my siblings and me when she stopped drinking and made our home a safe—a relatively safe—place to live. And then she saved my life again when she let me walk away from the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1979, never to fully return.
This is a familiar story for those readers who already know my work. But I have never fully told the truth about all of my reasons for leaving the reservation school for the white high school twenty-two miles away. So, for the first time in print, here’s my most honest account for my actions: I left the reservation in the desperate pursuit of a higher and better education—in search of a more epic life. But, with an equal amount of desperation, I also fled the reservation because I believed that no Spokane Indian woman would ever marry me. Because I was too ugly to be loved by any of them. I set sail on an academic adventure, but I was also on a mission to find love. So, after a year-long effort in building courage, I transferred to the farm-town junior high in Reardan, where I became Jason, and my ambitions became the Argonauts.
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
While I was working on the early drafts of this chapter, I said to my wife, “You know, I have been thinking about the rez. And what would have happened to me if I hadn’t left. I have been trying to figure out which Spokane Indian woman I would have married if I’d stayed. And, you know, I don’t think any of them would have married me. I really don’t. And not any women from other tribes living on our rez either.”
My wife was reluctant to follow that particular line of co
nversation with me. What person wants to debate the merits, the possibilities, of their real spouse’s imaginary husbands or wives? At the time, I was miffed that she was unwilling to hear me think out loud about potential lovers and spouses. But, shit, I was obsessed with this book and its ideas. Like every other writer, I’d set aside my real-world manners in order to rudely pursue an idea.
So I continued to ponder the question by myself: If I’d stayed on the reservation, then who would I have loved, and who would have loved me? Nobody, nobody, nobody.
And then I remembered Angie, the white daughter of a white traveling salesman. Sounds like the beginnings of a dirty joke, right? I met Angie during my tribe’s Memorial Day Powwow in 1979. I was almost thirteen and she was fourteen. Angie’s father owned and operated a mobile arts-and-crafts and toy shop. That description is way too polite. So let me try again. Angie and her family lived in a rugged RV that also served as the warehouse and storefront for glass jewelry and polyester T-shirts and stuffed animals that resembled no living creature and thin plastic toys that broke within hours and candies that were clumsy-ass rip-offs of famous brands. So, yeah, maybe Hershey’s chocolate bars were your favorite candy, but that’s only because you never had a bag of Horshey’s Choco-Dust.
Angie and her family lived in Seattle or Tacoma, I think. But they spent their summers and school-year weekends traveling from powwow to state fair to rodeo to car shows to wherever they could park their RV and sell their cheap goods.
In 1979, twenty or thirty of those traveling vendors had set up shop at our powwow grounds. And we Indian kids—the ones who didn’t dance powwow—would “walk the circle” of those vendors like we were cruising in cars. Around and around we’d go, examining and reexamining the cheap merchandise, eating fry bread and cotton candy and sno-cones, and staring at all the Indians we knew and all of those Indians who were strangers. And we’d also stare at the white tourists and vendors.