I’d called and called and called again. Most times, no one picked up at the Indian Center. Then when they did, they said they’d take a message, ask around to see if anyone had known a Cecilia James, but weeks later, no one had gotten back to me.
I was starting to lose hope. Wonder why I’d ever given a shit about all of this. And that’s when my mother would show again, first in my dreams, then when I’d wake up, in the shadows—then at the foot of my bead, screaming. I’d decide to keep going, call the center again, then the monster would materialize once more in my nightmares. He’d appear in the shadows first, just a hint. Then the smell of rotting meat floating out from behind a building or a cluster of trees. His roar. My heart palpitating violently. I would begin running, hearing him behind me, catching up. The feel of his long claws reaching into my flesh, pulling, ripping. The pain. My mouth opening in a scream, my lips bubbling over with blood. The overwhelming feeling that I should give all of this up, allow my mother to float, somehow, back into the ether. And then someone at the Center picked the phone up.
“Cecilia James? Heck yes, I knew her. Poor girl. You her daughter, you say?”
My heart was beating like a rabbit’s. It was a Saturday. I had a day off, and I’d been reading when I thought, why not try a call?
“Yeah. I’m trying to find out what happened to her. She just—disappeared.”
“Why don’t you come down tomorrow? I’d like to meet you. I was close to Cecilia. Shoot, we got in a lot of trouble together, eh?” He laughed hard, coughing at the end of it.
I agreed and hung up.
I was more of a work at the bar, go to the bar, thrash at a heavy metal concert kind of Indian than a powwow Indian. But the Indian Center, I had to admit, had its charms. I’d gone there a few times for different events—every summer they had a little daycare workshop on plants that I’d told Debby about, and she’d taken her kids. Sometimes I went for lectures, or to see children practice traditional dancing. Mainly because Debby had dragged me, but I had to admit they were cute as hell, and I loved to see the flags from every Native nation hung along the walls, the long foldout tables, the one against the wall perpetually holding a carafe of weak coffee.
Debby. I couldn’t help but wish that she were with me. But there had been nothing from her, and I was too stubborn to call her first.
The man who’d asked me to come down looked Lakota, or one of the plains tribes—tall, big, his hair thinned from age but still kept in a long ponytail. As soon as I came in, I’d walked to the small series of offices, and knocked when I saw his name, Dr. Hank Goodbear.
He’d asked me to sit with him at one of the folding tables, got us both a cup of watery coffee, told me he’d met her here, forty years ago. They’d both been attending an AIM rally, and it was after that they’d organized the protests.
“You think there’d be some record of her with the Chickasaw?” I asked. I knew my Apache family had been originally from northern Mexico and had made their way into Texas and then Colorado, like Auntie Squeaker said. There was a group of Chiricahua with state recognition, I’d found when I googled—but I wasn’t sure I was related to them. The Chickasaw though, they were a smaller, federally recognized group.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but no. Your mom—her family—your family—they went straight from Arkansas to Texas. No Trail of Tears. We checked for your mom, but your family’s not on the rolls.”
That surprised me.
“Don’t get me wrong. All of us accepted her. Well. Except for one. But we all thought she was an asshole,” he said, laughing. “Insecure on account of growing up in Ohio. Sad when they’re disconnected like that.”
I nodded.
“And dang,” he continued, “not that it’s all about blood but,” and here he stopped to laugh gently again, “there was nothing that girl could be but Indian. Some might take issue with that, but shoot. This is a country that experienced genocide—some families had their own path. I’m Cheyenne, but from what I understand, a lot of those tribes in the Southeast, before they were removed to Oklahoma, some of the communities lived on the outskirts of those cities. And though they sure did remove them eventually, the government told them they were gonna do it—I have to assume some of them took that threat seriously and took off on their own—or even before that, for other reasons. At that time, those nations were fully sovereign, unlike mine and most others—they could leave when and if they wanted, even if they’d experience racism other places. And it also depended on what state you were in. Arkansas? They had a choice to become a citizen of Arkansas. Georgia? They had to get out—or die.”
I sat back.
“And you know those tribes were slave owning—if you were Black and Indian, instead of white and Indian, well, the rules weren’t the same. I know. My grandfather was Black, and though my tribe’s different, they got crapping on Black folks in common with the rest of Indian Country.”
I nodded. I had Black-Indian cousins. I’d seen it. And I’d been told by Squeaker that was in my family line too. So much history, so much fucked up history.
“Complicated,” he said, and smiled a wry smile.
“No one on the rolls, though?” I asked, thinking about all the folks I’d grown up with, the ones who claimed, like Debby’s mom, that their great-great-infinity Cherokee princess grandmother had escaped the Trail of Tears. The ones who’d asked if I was Mexican, and when I’d said I was Indian, had countered, with a look of disgust in their eyes, that they were Cherokee, and I was plainly Mexican. The irony was that some of my family were originally from what is now Mexico.
He could tell exactly where my mind was going. He laughed. “You ain’t no Generokee honey,” he said, patting my hand respectfully. “Your family has been powwowing, going to Native American Church—protesting, for generations. Hell. You know your grandmother’s grandmother spoke three Native languages? And your last name? Common—very—with Chickasaw. And Choctaw for that matter. Don’t you worry about what some folks might say.”
I was glad to know that.
“You a historian?” I asked. It had been a while since I had visited the center, and in all honesty, my visits had always been scattershot. I was sure I had seen him at some event at some point, but we had never talked, to my recollection.
He laughed. “I’m a professor of Native American studies at the University of Denver.”
“Bet your parents are proud of you, Dr. Goodbear.”
“They were,” he said, “and just call me Hank.”
He and I paused to drink from our Styrofoam cups, and I thought about how much I didn’t know about being Native—about my own family. I remembered the half a page history lesson I had received in high school, in the rotting trailer they had set up for supposedly temporary purposes, and which had become permanent. Our teacher carried a cattle prod. His truck had a TO HELL WITH THE WHALE, SAVE THE COWBOY, sticker on it. He’d whacked the prod down on our desks as he walked in-between them, stating that if we wanted to feel sorry for the Indians, we could. There had been four or five Natives in that class. We’d looked up, and at each other.
When it had come time for him to whack the prod down on my desk, I’d caught it, stared that skinny white man dead in the eye. His lips trembled, and he slid it out of my hand. Later that year I’d pulled his parking brake, had the other Natives from my class help me push that truck down the hill, right into the ravine near the lot where we all went to smoke and get high. I’d felt better after that.
“Here’s what’s important, though. You really want to find out what happened to your mother? This is what you do. During those protests, we got on lists alright. Government lists. Some of us disappeared. Permanent. You file yourself a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI. I can tell you how to do that. And the fact is, your momma knew some Indians who got into big trouble. The FBI won’t admit if they killed her, but let’s just say that they’re not so pleased with some of the things that their predecessors done, and sometimes when you get the paperwork you can read between the lines.”
“Thank you,” I said. I was stunned.
“It’s no problem. Just promise me that you’re going to come back here.”
I told him I would. And I meant it.
“We got lots going on, and I’d love to see Cecilia’s girl at the Indian Center—shoot, you don’t have to be some super-tradish, powwow Indian to hang with us,” he said. “We got movie nights. And if you’re interested, sometimes folks come in and do a language workshop.”
“Okay,” I answered.
“Don’t want to pressure you. I can tell you’re a loner. But even lone wolves got a pack.”
I stood up, shook his hand, and thanked him for his time.
As I got back into my car, my mind swirled with everything I’d learned. Had my mother really gotten herself in the kind of trouble that gets you killed by the FBI?