The Turtle's Beating Heart

by Low, Denise;

  Nonetheless, my mother kept before us the imminent possibility of kidnapping. This apprehension echoes the real loss of Native children to boarding schools. I have a Navajo friend whose grandmother held a shotgun on social workers when they tried to remove children from the home. The year was 1985. During the 1950s and before, indeed, many Native children were taken from their homes by the government. In 1871 the United States Congress passed a law, the Indian Appropriations Act, which made Native people wards of the state. Children could be taken from their homes and forced to attend distant boarding school. That may have been the event that caused my great-great-grandparents, in Ohio and in New Jersey, to leave everything and go west. Within a few years after this law was passed, they all made the move. My mother’s parents and grandparents had avoided boarding schools by hiding their identity, but fear of losing children still existed as a reflex.

  I have talked with hundreds of Native people whose childhoods were cut short when government boarding school officials captured them, cut their hair, and forced them to attend church and schools. Many experienced physical and sexual abuse. Ramapough Mountain Indians of New Jersey, a Delaware community, emphasize the peril of their children on their website: “Upon hearing that a parent had died, or become ill, so called do-gooders would rush into the mountains and gather up the children, and take them away. Some never had contact with their relatives again.” The official websites of most Indigenous nations usually have community consensus before posting and are reliable sources.

  This Ramapough story is but one of many about how tribal groups faced continued efforts to terminate their communities. My grandfather’s paternal grandparents came from this northeastern region, almost forgotten until Connecticut’s Mohegans reemerged and built a casino.

  Joseph Bruchac, of Abenaki heritage, tells of Algonquin communities who survive in upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. He told me his story of Gypsy, or rather Abenaki, persecution in 1984, and later he published a book with more explanation. I have never forgotten his chilling story. His people lived in a traditional Native settlement on Lake Champlain, near the Canadian border. Their unaffiliated Abenaki group practiced subsistence living until attacked by a mob of townspeople.

  They lived in longhouses and wigwoms (wigwom is the Abenaki word for “house”) and existed by hunting, fishing, and trading for a few material goods. One night, however, the decision was made by some town fathers to get rid of the “gypsies”, who were aliens and might even be German sympathizers and were not to be trusted because they went back and forth between there and Canada. They came down on the Abenaki village with armed men and trucks, loaded the adults into the trucks, and gave the children up for adoption. The trucks roared out of town, and no one knows for sure what happened to those people.

  Rather than admit Algonquin Indigenous people still lived on their aboriginal land, which might suggest legal ownership, the mob used the term Gypsy.

  These northern Algonquins were kin to the Bruners’ New Jersey Delaware people, and the common theme is danger. Identities were hidden to avoid violence. Onondaga elder Mitchell Bush worked in the 1960s to 1980s as a Bureau of Indian Affairs tribal enrollment director, and he remembers the Ramapough Lenapes. He knew a Delaware man from there named Bruner in the 1950s who lived at Haskell Institute while he attended the University of Kansas. Billy Mills, the Olympic runner, and other Native people lodged at Haskell to avoid discrimination. Bush verified this Bruner man was a New Jersey Delaware, but at the university he told no one.

  I never met Roma people when I was growing up. However, I remember an unknown family settled into a house on Emporia’s main street when I was sixteen. They set up signs offering “Gypsy” palm readings and fortune-telling. One afternoon I took five dollars and ventured across the sidewalk for a palm reading. A woman in a long, tiered dress took me to a back room, collected the money, and looked at my hand. She said I would have a troubled love life, and I did not doubt her. She said I had good health, a fact that anyone could observe. Then she ended by saying, “Your family has secrets.” Perhaps every family has secrets. The reading did not make me a convert to occult beliefs.

  Afterward her extended family of children and adults were still in the front room. As I left, I asked where they came from. The fortune-teller explained they were Apaches from New Mexico, and the men worked for the Santa Fe railroad, as a track repair crew. They just called themselves “Gypsies” so they could get along in towns. Being a Gypsy was preferable to being an Indian. Sometime during the next winter they left town, and I cannot imagine that they had an easy existence in the 1960s, either as Apaches or Gypsies.

  *

  Once an Eastern Cherokee filmmaker interviewed me about Grandfather’s Delaware identity. Under four-dimensional lights footage would show invisible hands over my mouth trying to muffle utterance. They would be my parents’ hands, powerful even after death. My tongue went dry as I tried to formulate meaning from experiences buried within a cache of denied stories. I rasped. Finally, I croaked brief answers to the interviewer. That flawed footage no doubt was discarded, but it helped me identify a point of pain that needed tending. It helped me begin to claim my own story and that of my family.

  Other times I have struggled to speak in front of people about my family’s past. One Veteran’s Day at Haskell Indian Nations University, a group of us met at the campus gazebo to commemorate the day, led by Ketoowah leader Benny Smith. Elders offered prayers. I was alone and orphaned—my parents gone to the next world by then. At my turn to speak I pulled into my shell and could not name my grandfather as a Delaware or a veteran. I held back as others described battles in Korea and Vietnam and then stories about the world wars and Native wars of resistance. These were Cherokee and Kiowa and Ponca people, from many different families.

  By their example I learned how much I had lost. These tribal members, despite assimilationist policies, knew their history. They could recite hundreds of years of events. Their tacit encouragement led me to question my remaining family elders. This was years ago, but they, like my grandfather, were correct about how each individual has a responsibility to a larger history.

  A few years later my older brother told me easily, when I asked—“Yes, Grandfather was Indian.” Everyone knew it. Brother had no hesitation, no chokehold on his throat.

  My older sister Mary also knew our grandfather’s identity but never thought it was important. She left home as soon as she could, taking a ruler and measuring which coast was farthest from our address. She followed a pencil-drawn latitude west to the Pacific. Such was the geography of distance in our family. She lived out her life among palm trees, blue lilies of the Nile, and crows—always a small group of the noisy birds in her garden. She kept dogs underfoot, her own pack of small wolves. She listened to her dreams carefully and sometimes talked with me to help unravel their meaning. Reading books and reading signs around her were the family heritage.

  We siblings loved each other and counted on each other. I suffered the tragedy of being born the youngest, so I soon learned how quickly families can break apart.

  First, my sister Mary left home when I was ten. I remember my grandmother weeping that Christmas, as it would be the last we would all be together. Mary returned only twice after that, in fifty years. Our brother left home as soon as he could, at seventeen years of age, and that loss continues to be one of my worst experiences. When I was a vulnerable fifteen-year-old, my last sibling, my sister Jane, left for California to take advantage of a scholarship to Stanford University. I was devastated. I worried I would hardly ever see her again, like my mother hardly saw her only brother.

  After that my parents hung onto me, their youngest, and my will to leave weakened. I learned how to be distant within myself, so geography was not necessary for departure. When speaking with them, I learned to avoid difficult subjects, and by my adulthood I knew all the sore points. Repressed speech was my habit more than ever.

  *

  My
twenty-five-plus years of teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University, formerly Haskell Institute, gave me daily contact with people from many Indigenous nations. Within weeks of starting to work at this all-Native federal school in 1984, I felt comfortable on its grounds. The best part was the storytelling. I have been fortunate to hear Native stories, histories, cosmologies, jokes, powwow tunes, drumming, funeral orations, ceremonies, confrontations, prayers, gossip, and lectures. Spoken words carry much spirit.

  Because of rigid federal rules at Haskell regarding tribal membership, “Indian preference” laws, I was on the outside in a new way. Yet I knew how to listen, so I had a niche as a quieter member of the Haskell family. Grandfather’s example taught me useful lessons for getting along at Haskell.

  Haskell is at a crossroads in Indian Country, and through the years I saw most of the leading figures—Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen, Thomas Banyanca, Jim Barnes, Clyde Bellecourt, Kimberly Blaeser, Allison Hedge Coke, Vine Deloria Jr., Heid Erdrich, Lee Francis III, Lee Francis IV, Joy Harjo, Geary Hobson, Clara Sue Kidwell, Wilma Mankiller, Russell Means, William Mehojah, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, Buffy Saint-Marie, Joan Shenandoah, Benny Smith, Crosslin Smith, Wes Studi, Luci Tapahonso, John Trudell, Ophelia Zepeda, and many more. All presented living examples of how the past folds into present and future time frames. One elder told us how important faculty were to students, as stand-ins for relatives. This teaching stayed with me.

  Two moments stand out among the maelstrom of years. One is the arrival of elderly Athabaskan dancers at a powwow. They traveled a long distance from Alaska, and many had not been outside home villages. It was August, and the drone of locusts was constant. One of them asked, “What is that noise?”

  “What noise? I hear nothing,” responded a local student. Finally, someone recognized the low-level buzz that fills the air in late August, what no one else separated from the daily breeze. The insects were exotic to the Alaskans and disturbing.

  Also, they had not experienced lightning. In the far North electric storms do not occur. During their presentation storm clouds gathered with sheet lightning. An elder went to the microphone. “We are amazed at this sign from the clouds,” she said. “We have no thunder or lightning, just rain and snow.” Then they proceeded to dance, about two hours, without stopping in the sultry heat. They had come this far, and despite their brief slot in the program, they felt they should present their best. This was not a powwow dance for entertainment. It was a prayer for the world.

  A second moment I remember is when a Cree spiritual leader arrived from Montana. He was brought to find a missing person. We sat with him in a room as he told his story, about losing his wife and young children in a car wreck. He despaired. Yet, he said, such loss is what precedes spiritual gifts. This was part of his past and important for how he became able to help people. As he explained this, I understood that the missing man was dead, but no one said this out loud. Then, after blessings and smoke purifications, he asked the women to leave the room because the next part was men’s spirituality. From this I understood gender in a new way. I appreciated my womanhood as unique, even with many cross-gender activities in my experience.

  After time at Haskell I turned to stories from my own background and questioned my parents. I also noticed what was omitted, and this said as much as their assertions. Mother was the crucial generational link to Grandfather’s life. She had lost so many stories. My mother told only a few anecdotes about her close friend Ada, a Native from Oklahoma who was like my aunt. Mother told only brief outlines of her grandparents’ and parents’ lives. The term sui generis describes her—she believed she was one of a kind, unlike anyone before or after her. This shortsightedness saved her from learning overwhelming stories of loss. It also left her adrift in her own isolation. I did not want to be like her.

  My mixed heritage is not easy. Geary Hobson, a professor and storyteller who came to Haskell to speak, gives me courage, especially with his account about his early forebear Alexis Pierre Beatte, a mixed-blood man of Quapaw and French ancestry. Catlin would not paint his portrait because, even in the 1830s, stereotypes of Indian appearance were set. Geary still refuses to accept this void as he writes narratives for journals and books.

  Years ago I was in Utah presenting poetry, and a man from Georgia stopped me at a restaurant. He had heard my presentation and knew I was teaching at Haskell. “You are Indian,” he said.

  “No, I’m not enrolled in a tribe,” I responded.

  “That doesn’t matter. Your folks still were Indian. They went through the hard times.”

  Then he explained he was from an isolate Cherokee group in Georgia that managed to avoid the Trail of Tears. He persisted in his tale, and then he gave me an essay he had written about the psychological stress on people who do not look like stereotypical Indians yet live in the aftermath of the same history. The discord between appearance and identity creates inner turmoil, according to his research. It was the first time I had considered this idea and also the intergenerational effects of trauma. It was also one of the first times someone had looked at me and identified me as a Native person.

  I kept the man’s paper and read it several times, feeling sorry for him. The last reading I felt sorry for myself. I showed the paper to Haskell students who struggled with identity, and I learned from it myself. This was a step toward reclaiming my family’s history.

  *

  As I age, more aspects of the spirit world braid into my life. I remember my mother’s eyes became portals within her ancient lids. She lived to be almost ninety. I expect to make a hundred, and one day I will peer at the world through such eyes.

  My dead mother’s spirit follows me. Sometimes she is in the kitchen during meals. A whirlwind of unvoiced words circles her place at the table. My older departed sister sits next to her in the straight-backed chair. If I pour coffee and set out a cigarette, my Delaware grandfather arrives with a blessing. Tobacco can carry messages to him.

  I worry about growing old not because of infirmities but because more and more departed relatives crowd around the kitchen table. Many of my Menominee husband’s older relatives have also joined the spirits, and they signal to us as well. Maybe it is easier to have Christian relatives who wait quietly in underground coffins for the celestial city of Jerusalem, a place beyond my responsibility. Whoever sits at the table must be tended.

  This is not a world of consistent, logical uniformity. Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko explains irrationality as a dimension of physical laws, “where the gravity is either weaker or stronger, where even light may speed up or slow down.” So, perhaps my departed relatives breathe quicker light rather than air and their weight is barely perceptible. Time is a circle of gravity, light, and matter. We incarnate. We disperse into light, all in the medium of time, but we do not disappear.

  Here, if you can see him sitting next to me, you can meet my grandfather. We can see him start to smile. He may be a vortex of silence to others, long buried in a country cemetery, but to me he speaks.

  *

  A Native friend made a suicide attempt yesterday, and I spent time talking with him. American Indigenous people have a much higher suicide rate than any other United States population. He was not a statistic, though, as I stood by his hospital bed. What encouragement is there for a young diabetic man in poor health to help him endure the painful experience of that disease? I took a deep breath and told him he must live for the next generation. Children, nieces, and nephews all depend on him. He cannot start a cycle of self-violence. He cannot abandon a daughter with the example of suicide as a viable option. I described Grandfather Bruner and his difficult and heroic life as a survivor. As an adult, I see his life in larger terms.

  Grandfather lost two of his four children, had a bad injury, faced discrimination, and yet he kept going. He did not have a perfect life, but he endured. In his last photograph, on the wall behind him I see how he displayed two Santa Fe calendar prints—a Pueblo eagle
dancer and a silversmith. The month is December, his birth month, and the dancer spreads wings above the numbers. He loved beauty. He also enjoyed a good laugh. When I have bad times, I remember his example of survival. I think of my children.

  As we talked, I told my friend how the departed are not gone. Every day I remember my mother, the way she kept her muddy garden shoes by the back door. Or I use her cake pan. Or I hear her voice in the timbre of my own. I remember her stories of her father’s kindness to her as he taught her proper manners. All of his lessons come down to me, in her attempts to describe her father. All of my friend’s lessons will go through his children to the generations to come.

  Once, when I was a young woman, a Native elder told me that younger people are always watching me, to see how to behave. Even though I was a mother by then, I had not understood that responsibility—not just for my own children but for all those who follow in the sequence of time. Since that lesson, I have tried to remember all the younger people who observe my example. I consider the seven generations ahead of me. I preserve the memory of seven generations behind, so I will know their history and have the power of self-knowledge. My grandfather’s lessons continue into the twenty-first century.

  Part 4

  Today

  Living in Delaware Country

  The Kaw River rims the sky north of my home. It rises in the Smoky Hills of Kansas east of Penokee Man, curves through Lawrence, and empties into the Missouri River at Kansas City. In the early years the Delaware “outlet” to the plains for hunting trips stretched along this entire course. The river, usually called the Kansas River, is a daily reminder of a time when the north section of my town was officially Delaware territory, from 1829 to 1867. Many Delaware descendants, like me, still live in the former Delaware towns along this muddy waterway.

  One moody November day, clouds a marbled gray, my husband and I travel the river to look for former Delaware trading posts. Without sun, dawn to noon to twilight will be the same hue. The dull light creates a timeless mood as we peer at the antiquated map and plot a course.