Wandering Stars

There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek.

To become not-Indian the way they meant it at Carlisle meant you killed the Indian to save the man, as was said by the man who made the school, which meant the Indian children would have to do all the dying.

Looking back, everything that happened before Sand Creek seemed to belong to someone else, someone I once knew, as I once knew my mother’s perfect smile, my father’s crooked one […] our camp with our animal companions and big fires we made, the rivers and creeks we played in during summers, or kept away from winters; the hunts I watched the older ones prepare for, how they laughed themselves free when they got back, relieved to have food for everyone, then made fire and prayed and sang in earnest to the animal and to our Creator God, Maheo.

There was unspeakable pain and loss all about us wherever we went. So much hunger and suffering, but with the drum between us, and the singing, there was made something new. We pounded, and sang, and out came this brutal kind of beauty lifting everything up in song.

[Pratt] said he would train us as soldiers. Give us discipline and rank. Give us guns to guard ourselves, keep us clean and uniformed and regimented. Pratt said he would make us wolves of the U.S. Army. When he said that, something cold slid up my spine […] that was all we ever did besides school and church—train to be military men, dressed as the very kind of men some of us had seen wipe our people out.

On the train back to Oklahoma, I saw the bones of buffalo piled up as high as a man for miles. I’d heard this was happening. The Buffalo Wars, they called it. I’d heard about why they were doing it. Every buffalo dead was an Indian gone. But seeing all those buffalo bodies piled up like that, and the swarms of vultures and other such scavengers circling all that death, it did something to me, ate away at some last part of me, and though I couldn’t look away from the site of it, I wanted to close my eyes, not have to see any more of the old world so dead before it was gone.

I told Charles that my father used to tell me a story about his father, about how hiding was one of the things Indians got best at once we knew it was what was required to survive, and that hiding didn’t always mean hidden away, out of sight, but could mean transformation. I told Charles that his grandfather had soldiers after him, that they’d surrounded him in a cornfield. So he rolled up some tobacco in a dried corn husk, smoked that thing, and was gone. My father could have been making up a good thing to cover up the bad thing that happened. Meaning they probably shot my grandfather dead in the corn. But I didn’t think stories were made to comfort. I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better.

Charles Star’s memories [...] are a broken mirror, through which he only ever sees himself in pieces […] he knows there must be something worse beneath the worst of what he knows happened to him at school […] there is something deeper down, doing its dark work on him, some further forgotten thing, but what is it? His life is about knowing it is there but not ever wanting to see it. It is to be a kind of secret, kept over there, way over there, as he’s heard other Indian people say in prayer, referring to time, referring to a past long ago but not that long ago, when things were better for Indians, when praying was free of this plea, this begging, this please God have mercy on us haven’t we suffered enough kind of way it’d become for so many Indian people out there in the world.

When you push it down, when you go to kill memory, it finds its ways to haunt you […] He keeps the memory away from his thoughts, and is only reminded when something like rain touches the back of his neck, there where a man first held him down, gripped the back of his neck so hard his legs gave out on the floor of the bathroom of the boys’ quarters at Carlisle. This is the memory he keeps but doesn’t see, the one that lives in him, in a room he has all but abandoned.

There were connected points, events, and the people he’d come from that he wanted to try to save without delivering them into the vanishing, where it was assumed his people were headed.

The song he played was not a song and not even a lament and not an alarm but like a call from a broken bird, whose throat and beak had become elongated through some trial of pain meant to break him, but only ended up transforming him into something longer stretched, and into his song with these notes that kept stretching after he stopped playing them, that and about everything we’d been feeling all along stuck in our suits and dresses, in that school and without our language, he was making music find it for him, his lost tongue and all of ours.

I’d always had dreams about all of the stars in the sky falling down to earth, collapsing on us. I hated those dreams but they taught me something. As the stars were coming down, about to land right on top of me, each time I dreamed it, I said a little prayer, to say thank you that I got to be here, if I had to go, it was the last thing I wanted to be able to say before I went. Thank you. Beneath a willow tree whose branches almost touched the water, my mother said, “The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.”

In 1924 the American Indian Wars will be declared over after a hundred and thirteen years […] In the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.

Most of the dreams he had now were of shootings of one kind or another. The sounds, the running, the heavy sinking feeling of being shot. One time he ate the insides of a horse then crawled into its hollowed-out carcass and heard what he thought were drums from outside the body of the horse turn into gunfire […] Eventually he noticed that if he took more pills than they said he should, he felt even better, and he’d dream less, or not remember the dreams, which came to the same thing. And then taking more pills felt like it meant he’d have to take more pills to make the taking more pills thing keep working. Like more meant more meant more.

A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you. In therapy this is called trauma.

Lony recently googled blood, and Native Americans, and magic, and combined all of them to see what came up. He found on one site the name Cheyenne meant the cut people. That was enough for him to remain convinced that what he was doing with the cutting and the blood was okay, like something he was a part of, not something he was doing to get away from what he felt, or to feel some other pain he wouldn’t know he was feeling until he felt the cutting pain.

“You ever seen Native youth suicide rates?”

And yes it would be nice if the rest of the country understood that not all of us have our culture or language intact directly because of what happened to our people, how we were systematically wiped out from the outside in and then the inside out, and consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions, but we needed to understand it for ourselves. The extent we made it through. The extent.

Surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person […]

Jude Star would have been my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather survived the Sand Creek Massacre, and his son survived boarding schools, and his daughter, my mother, survived losing her mother and being raised by white people. And still brought us up knowing who we are. Who we are. Somehow. So why had I been sheltering the boys from their culture? Something made so strong it survived more than it should have survived. It was more than survival. The culture sings. The culture dances. The culture keeps telling stories that bring you into them, take you away from your life and bring you back better made.

“I was gonna fly,” Lony says.

“That’s not funny,” Orvil says.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. I could have done it if you hadn’t come. We’ve just been the feather. We used to be the whole bird. We used to believe and we were the whole bird […] we all need to believe in something bigger than what we think is possible. To make us believe. You know we used to exhibit our powers.”

“We? We who?”

“Cheyenne people. Medicine people.”

That was the thing. Something different. Transcendence was why people chose to die, to get high.

I went to running for a feeling. How it felt after the run. But something else happened on the runs. I wasn’t running away from anything anymore. I was running at whatever in me needed the way I needed before. I was running at whatever I had been afraid of.

I lived like Indians back when our world ended the first time. To be free and wandering and figuring it out because it all got so disfigured, this is what I wanted […] I really thought I was living like an Indian. I was hurting so bad but I wouldn’t have said that I was. I was doing what you do when you’re hurting and can’t say it. Digging another hole for myself.

That is the only good thing about getting hurt is that if it happens together we have a chance to heal and get better together, which is a chance to get stronger than you ever were before. Healing is holy and if you have the chance to not have to carry something alone, with people you love, it should be honored, the opportunity, it should be honored, and you all got selfish about it, you all got scared it was going to be bigger than our love and then it was.