فاصله

Interlude

What strange phenomena we find in a great city,

all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Powwows

For powwows we come from all over the country. From reservations and cities, from rancherias, forts, pueblos, lagoons, and off-reservation trust lands. We come from towns on the sides of highways in northern Nevada with names like Winnemucca. Some of us come all the way out from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Minnesota; we come from Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, New York City, Pine Ridge, Fort Apache, Gila River, Pit River, the Osage Reservation, Rosebud, Flathead, Red Lake, San Carlos, Turtle Mountain, the Navajo Reservation. To get to powwows we drive alone and in pairs on road trips; we caravan as families, piled in station wagons, vans, and in the backs of Ford Broncos. Some of us smoke two packs a day if we’re driving, or drink beer continually to keep ourselves occupied. Some of us, who gave up that tired life, on that long red road of sobriety, we drink coffee, we sing, pray, and tell stories until we run out. We lie, cheat, and steal our stories, sweat and bleed them out along the highway, until that long white line makes us quiet, makes us pull over to sleep. When we get tired we stop at motels and hotels; we sleep in our cars on the side of the road, at rest stops and truck stops, in Walmart parking lots. We are young people and old, every kind of Indian in between.

We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other.

We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.

Big Oakland Powwow

In the Oakland Coliseum parking lot, for the Big Oakland Powwow, there is one thing that makes many of our cars the same. Our bumpers and rear windows are covered with Indian stickers like We’re Still Here and My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony and Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask an Indian!; Custer Had It Coming; We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors, We Borrow It from Our Children; Fighting Terrorism Since 1492; and My Child Didn’t Make the Honor List, but She Sure Can Sing an Honor Song. There are Schimmel Sister stickers, and Navajo Nation stickers, Cherokee Nation stickers, Idle No More, and AIM flags duct-taped to antennas. There are dream catchers and tiny moccasins, feathers and beaded miscellany hanging from rearview mirrors.

We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.

Blood

Blood is messy when it comes out. Inside it runs clean and looks blue in tubes that line our bodies, that split and branch like earth’s river systems. Blood is ninety percent water. And like water it must move. Blood must flow, never stray or split or clot or divide—lose any essential amount of itself while it distributes evenly through our bodies. But blood is messy when it comes out. It dries, divides, and cracks in the air.

Native blood quantum was introduced in 1705 at the Virginia Colony. If you were at least half Native, you didn’t have the same rights as white people. Blood quantum and tribal membership qualifications have since been turned over to individual tribes to decide.

In the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein commissioned a Quran to be written in his own blood. Now Muslim leaders aren’t sure what to do with it. To have written the Quran in blood was a sin, but to destroy it would also be a sin.

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?

When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like “sore losers” and “move on already,” “quit playing the blame game.” But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.” This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

Last Names

We didn’t have last names before they came. When they decided they needed to keep track of us, last names were given to us, just like the name Indian itself was given to us. These were attempted translations and botched Indian names, random surnames, and names passed down from white American generals, admirals, and colonels, and sometimes troop names, which were sometimes just colors. That’s how we are Blacks and Browns, Greens, Whites, and Oranges. We are Smiths, Lees, Scotts, MacArthurs, Shermans, Johnsons, Jacksons. Our names are poems, descriptions of animals, images that make perfect sense and no sense at all. We are Little Cloud, Littleman, Loneman, Bull Coming, Madbull, Bad Heart Bull, Jumping Bull, Bird, Birdshead, Kingbird, Magpie, Eagle, Turtle, Crow, Beaver, Youngblood, Tallman, Eastman, Hoffman, Flying Out, Has No Horse, Broken Leg, Fingernail, Left Hand, Elk Shoulder, White Eagle, Black Horse, Two Rivers, Goldtooth, Goodblanket, Goodbear, Bear Shield, Yellow Man, Blindman, Roanhorse, Bellymule, Ballard, Begay, Yazzie. We are Dixon, Livingston, Tsosie, Nelson, Oxendene, Harjo, Armstrong, Mills, Tallchief, Banks, Rogers, Bitsilly, Bellecourt, Means, Good Feather, Bad Feather, Little Feather, Red Feather.

Apparent Death

We won’t have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don’t know those people, we don’t even know people who know those people, we’re once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don’t like and repost and then, and then it’s like it didn’t happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we’re used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he’s there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won’t know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near.

There will be less screaming than we expect. It’ll be that prey-silence of hiding, the silence of trying to disappear, to not be out there, we’ll close our eyes and go deep inside, hope that it’s a dream or a nightmare, hope that in closing our eyes we might wake up to that other life, back on the other side of the screen, where we can watch from the safety of our couches and bedrooms, from bus and train seats, from our offices, anyplace that is not there, on the ground, playing like we’re dead so not playing at all, we’ll run like ghosts from our own dead bodies in hopes of getting away from the shots and the loud quiet of waiting for the next shot to fire, waiting for another sharp hot line to cut across a life, cut off breath, bring too quickly the heat and then cooling of too-soon death.

We’ve expected the shooter to appear in our lives in the same way we know death is and always has been coming for us, with its decisive scythe, its permanent cut. We half expect to feel the boom of shots firing nearby. To fall to the ground and cover our heads. To feel like an animal, prey in a pile on the ground. We’ve known the shooter could show up anywhere, anywhere people gathered, we’ve expected to see him in our periphery, a masked shadow moving through the crowd, picking people off at random, semiautomatic booms putting bodies down, sending them flailing through the broken air.

A bullet is a thing so fast it’s hot and so hot it’s mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full. A stray bullet, like a stray dog, might up and bite anyone anywhere, just because its teeth were made to bite, made to soften, tear through meat, a bullet is made to eat through as much as it can.

Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.

Tony Loneman

THE BULLETS WILL COME from the Black Hills Ammunition plant in Black Hills, South Dakota. They will be packed in boxes of sixteen, driven across the country, and stored in a warehouse in Hayward, California, for seven years, then stocked and shelved and bought in Oakland at a Walmart off of Hegenberger Road by a young man by the name of Tony Loneman. The two boxes of bullets will go into his backpack. He’ll take them out again for security to check against the receipt at the exit. Tony will ride his bike down Hegenberger, across the overpass and on the sidewalk past the gas stations and fast-food chains. He’ll feel the weight and hear the jangle of the bullets at every bump and crack.

At the coliseum entrance he’ll take each of the boxes of bullets out and empty them into a pair of socks. He’ll swing and throw the socks one at a time against the wall behind the bushes past the metal detectors. When he’s done he’ll look back up at the moon, watch the fog of his breath rise between him and everything. His heart will be in his ears thinking about the bullets in the bushes, the powwow. And wondering how he had wound up here under the moon, under the looming coliseum walls, hiding bullets in bushes.

Calvin Johnson

WHEN CALVIN GETS THERE, people are doing what they always do the first hour of every powwow committee meeting he’s ever been to: making small talk and dishing up paper plates of catered Mexican food. There’s a new guy there. He’s big, and the only one without a plate. Calvin can tell he doesn’t have a plate because he’s one of those big guys who doesn’t know how to carry his weight. How to own it. Calvin’s on the bigger end of the spectrum himself, but he’s tall and wears baggy clothes, so he comes off as big but not necessarily fat.

Calvin sits down next to the big guy and gives him a slight, general whatsup-type head nod. The guy lifts his hand and waves, then seems to immediately regret the wave because he puts his hand back down as fast as it went up and gets out his phone like everyone does now when they want to leave without leaving.

Blue is writing or doodling at the top of a yellow legal pad. Calvin likes Blue. Her and Maggie used to work together in youth services. She’s who got Calvin the job even though he had no experience working with youth. She probably thought Calvin was a youth. Or looks like one. With his Raiders sh@t and sad goatee. Blue’s the head of the powwow committee. She’d asked Calvin to join the committee shortly after he got the job. Blue said they wanted fresh new perspectives. They’d gotten this pretty big event-based grant and wanted to make this powwow big, compete with other big powwows out there. Calvin had stupidly said “Call it the Big Oakland Powwow” in one of the meetings and everyone loved it. He tried to tell them he was just joking, but they kept it anyway.

Thomas, the custodian, comes in talking to himself. Calvin smells it right away. Alcohol fumes. Then, as if Thomas knows Calvin smells him, he walks right past him to the big guy.

“Thomas Frank,” he says, and sticks his hand out.

“Edwin Black,” he says.

“I’ll let you folks get to work,” Thomas says as he takes the trash out. “Let me know if you need help cleaning up the leftovers,” he says with a tone like: Save a plate for me. Dude is weird. Awkward as fu@k like he had to make you feel as uncomfortable as he always appeared to be, like he couldn’t contain it.

Blue knocks on the table twice and clears her throat. “Okay, you guys,” she says, knocking on the table two more times. “Let’s start. We have a lot to talk about. It’s already January. We have less than five months. We’ll start with the two new people, one of whom isn’t here yet, so that means you’ll start, Edwin. Go ahead and tell everyone a little bit about yourself and what your role’s gonna be here at the center.”“Hi, everyone,” Edwin says, and puts his hand up and waves that same wave he’d waved at Calvin. “I’m Edwin Black, and well obviously I work here now, I mean, I guess not obviously, sorry.” Edwin shifts in his chair.

“Just tell them where you’re from, what’s your tribe, and your role here,” Blue says.

“Okay, so I grew up here in Oakland, and I’m, um, I’m Cheyenne, well I’m not enrolled yet, but, like, I will be, with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, my dad told me we’re Cheyenne and not Arapaho, and, sorry, I’m gonna be interning for the next few months leading up to the powwow, I’m here to help with the powwow,” Edwin says.

“We’re just waiting on one more,” Blue is saying when another guy walks into the meeting. “Speak of the devil,” Blue says.

He’s a young guy in a baseball cap with an indistinct tribal pattern on it. If he didn’t have that hat, Calvin doesn’t know if he’d have guessed he’s Native.

“Everyone, this is Dene Oxendene. Dene Oxendene, this is the powwow committee. Dene’s gonna set up a storytelling booth kinda like StoryCorps. Have y’all heard of StoryCorps?”

They all murmur various noncommittal answers.

“Dene,” Blue says, “why don’t you go ahead and say a few things about yourself before we start.”

Dene starts to say something about storytelling, some real heady sh@t, so Calvin tunes out. He doesn’t know what he’s gonna say when it comes around to him. He’d been put in charge of finding younger vendors, to support young Native artists and entrepreneurs. But he hadn’t done sh@t.

“Calvin?” he hears Blue say.

Dene Oxendene

DENE CONVINCED BLUE to let Calvin do his interview for the storytelling project during work hours. Calvin keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and pulling at his hat by the bill. Dene thinks Calvin is nervous, but then Dene is nervous, he is always nervous, so maybe it’s projection. But projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection. He is regularly subject to solipsism’s recursive, drowning affect.

He set up the camera and mic in Blue’s office beforehand. Blue’s on her lunch hour. Calvin is sitting still now, staring at Dene mess with the recording equipment. Dene figures out what was wrong and hits Record on the camera and on the recording device, then adjusts the mic one last time. Dene learned early on to record everything before and after, as those moments can sometimes be even better than when the interviewee knows they’re being recorded.

“Sorry, I thought we were good to go before you came in,” Dene says, and sits down to the right of the camera.

“It’s cool,” Calvin says. “What is this again?”

“You’re gonna say your name and tribe. Talk about the place or places you’ve lived in Oakland, and then if you can think of a story to tell, like something that’s happened to you in Oakland that might, like, give a picture of what it’s been like for you specifically, growing up in Oakland, as a Native person, what it’s been like.”“My dad never talked about being Native and sh@t to the point that we don’t even know what tribe we are on his side. Our mom has Native blood on her Mexican side too, but she doesn’t know too much about that either. Yeah and my dad wasn’t home hardly ever, then one day he was really gone. He left us. So I don’t know, I feel bad sometimes even saying I’m Native. Mostly I just feel like I’m from Oakland.”“Oh,” Dene says.

“I got robbed in the parking lot about to go to a powwow at Laney College. It’s not really a good story, I just got fu@king robbed in a parking lot and then I left. I never made it to the powwow. So this one coming up will be my first one.”Dene isn’t sure how to help him get to a story, and he doesn’t want to force it. He’s glad he’s already been recording. Sometimes not having a story is the story.

“It’s like having him as a dad and not knowing, and how he fu@ked us up as a dad, I don’t wanna come off like I think that’s what being Native means. I know there’s a lot of Natives living in Oakland and in the Bay Area with similar stories. But it’s like we can’t talk about it because it’s not really a Native story, but then it is at the same time. It’s fu@ked up.”“Yeah.”

“When are you gonna start recording for me to say, like, whatever I’m gonna try to say?”

“Oh, I’ve already been recording.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I should’ve told you.”

“Does that mean you’re gonna use anything I already said?”

“Can I?”

“I mean, I guess. Is this sh@t, like, your job?”

“Kind of. I don’t have another job. But I’m trying to pay all the participants out of the grant money I got from the city of Oakland. I think I’ll make enough to get by,” Dene says. And then there’s a lull, a silence neither one of them knows how to recover from. Dene clears his throat.

“How’d you end up working here?” Dene says.

“My sister. She’s friends with Blue.”

“So you don’t feel, like, any kind of Native pride or whatever?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“I just don’t feel right trying to say something that doesn’t feel true.”

“That’s what I’m trying to get out of this whole thing. All put together, all our stories. Because all we got right now are reservation stories, and sh@tty versions from outdated history textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.”“I just don’t think it’s right for me to claim being Native if I don’t know anything about it.”

“So you think being Native is about knowing something?”

“No, but it’s about a culture, and a history.”

“My dad wasn’t around either. I don’t even know who he is. My mom’s Native too, though, and she taught me what she could when she wasn’t too busy working or just not in the mood. The way she said it, our ancestors all fought to stay alive, so some parts of their blood went together with another Nation’s blood and they made children, so forget them, forget them even as they live on in us?”“Man, I feel you. But then again I don’t know. I just don’t know about this blood sh@t.”

Jacquie Red Feather

JACQUIE AND HARVEY RIDE in Harvey’s Ford pickup through a moon-purple desert on that stretch between Phoenix and Blythe on I-10. The drive so far has been full of long silences Jacquie maintains by ignoring Harvey’s questions. Harvey is not the kind of man comfortable with silence. He’s a powwow emcee. It’s his job to keep his mouth running. But Jacquie is used to silence. She has no problem with it. She’d actually made Harvey promise she wouldn’t have to talk. That didn’t mean Harvey wouldn’t.

“You know, one time I got stuck out here in the desert,” Harvey says, keeping his eyes fixed on the road in front of them. “I’d been out drinking with some friends, and we wanted to go for a drive. A night like this would have been perfect. It’s not even dark. That full moon on the sand like that?” Harvey says, and looks over at Jacquie, then rolls down his window and sticks a hand out to feel the air.

“Smoke?” Jacquie says.

Harvey pulls out a smoke for himself and makes a vague grunting sound Jacquie has heard other Indian men use before and knows means yes. “I used to drink with these twins, Navajo guys. One of the twins didn’t want the truck to smell like smoke, it was his girlfriend’s truck, so we pulled over on the side of the highway. We’d brought a handle of tequila along. We drank too much of that, talked nonsense for a couple hours, then decided we needed to distance ourselves from the vehicle. We stumbled out into the desert, ended up getting so far out we couldn’t see the truck,” Harvey says.

Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’d want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have. Take Harvey here. Telling this terrible story like it’s captivating. There are so many people she comes across who seem born with confidence and self-esteem. Jacquie can’t remember a day going by when at some point she hadn’t wished she could burn her life down. Today actually, she hadn’t had that thought today. That was something. That was not nothing.

“And then even though I can’t remember having passed out on the desert floor,” Harvey says, “I woke up and the twins were gone. The moon hadn’t moved too far, so not too much time had passed, but they were gone, so I walked toward where I thought we’d parked. It was all of a sudden real cold, like I’d never felt before. Like it’s cold when you’re near the ocean, like it’s cold in San Francisco, that moist cold that gets to the bone.”“It wasn’t cold before you passed out?” Jacquie says.

“This is where it gets weird. I must have been walking for twenty minutes or so, the wrong way of course, farther into the desert, that’s when I saw them.”

“The twins?” Jacquie says, and rolls up her window. Harvey does the same.

“No, not the twins,” he says. “I know this is gonna sound crazy, but it was two very tall, very white guys with white hair, but they weren’t old, and they weren’t so tall that it was freakish, just maybe like a foot and a half taller than me.”“This is the part where you tell me you woke up to the twins lying on top of you or something,” Jacquie says.

“I thought maybe the twins had slipped me something. I knew they were Native American Church guys, but I’d done peyote before and this was not that. I got maybe ten or so feet away from them and stopped. Their eyes were big. Not in that alien way, just noticeably big,” Harvey says.

“Bullsh@t,” Jacquie says. “This story goes: Harvey got drunk in the desert and had a weird dream, the end.”

“I’m not joking. These two tall white guys with white hair and big eyes, hunch-shouldered, just staring off, not even at me. I got the hell out of there. And if that was a dream, then so is this, because I never woke up from it.”“You act like when you’re drinking your memory is, what, reliable?”

“True enough, but get this, when the internet came out, or when I started using it I guess is a better way to put it, I looked up tall white guys in the desert in Arizona, and it’s a thing. They’re called the Tall Whites. Aliens. No joke. You can look it up,” Harvey says.

Jacquie’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She gets it out knowing Harvey will think it’s to look up these Tall Whites. It’s an unusually long text message from Opal.

I already assumed you would have told me if you found spider legs in your leg, either when we were younger or when I told you about Orvil’s, but that assumption doesn’t make sense because I found spider legs in my leg right before everything happened with Ronald. And I never told you I found those legs, I mean until right now. I need to know if it happened to you. I feel like it has something to do with Mom.

“I read one website that said the Tall Whites are controlling America now, d’you see that?” Harvey says. And Jacquie feels sad for Harvey. And for Opal. And about these spider legs. If she’d ever found spider legs in her leg, she probably would have ended it right there and then. She suddenly feels so overwhelmed by all of it that she gets tired. This sometimes happens to Jacquie, and she feels grateful when it does, because most of the time her thoughts keep her up.

“I’m gonna get some sleep,” Jacquie says.

“Oh. Okay,” Harvey says.

Jacquie leans her head against the window. She watches the white highway line stream and waver. She watches the lines of telephone wires rise and fall in waves. Her thoughts wander, loosen, reach out aimlessly. She thinks about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bites into something too cold or hot. She thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the dentist. She wonders about her mom’s teeth. She thinks about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating. She looks at her head leaned against her head’s dark reflection in the window. She blinks an erratic pattern of blinks, which ends with her eyes closed. She falls asleep to the low drone of the road and the engine’s steady hum.