Long ago, back in Distant Time, before time was time, before there
was a me, before there was a plot and arc, before I discovered that
I had a spine and a text and illustrations and maps, there was the
creation story. When I was in college, I would go walking around
at Pikes Place in Seattle and tourists would ask to touch my hair.
Just like when I was doing tours in Alaska.
Can I touch your hair?
At first, I let them touch my hair for a dollar but it didn’t make
me rich, it made me poorer, so I decided to trade stories. You can
touch my hair if you tell me a story. In the beginning, I got some
lame stories, some really bad ones, but not all. Camille was the first
person that I let touch my hair in exchange for a story. Camille
was from Utah and she was Mormon. She’d always wanted to be an
Indian, to touch an Indian, to kiss an Indian, and low-and-behold,
here one was. But I was a girl, though I think that intrigued
her. So she told me a story of how her father was an asshole. I
know all about asshole fathers. She told me how she had to wear
granny-style dresses and how her father had always told her to be
submissive to men. She was supposed to have lots of children. One
night, when she was sixteen, she snuck out to go to a party with a
friend. Her father caught her and locked her in the hall closet. She
hates the smell of boots, she said. For that story I let her touch my
hair and when I did, leather scent dusted my pages.
What kind of person are you?
I took a poetry class at UW and the professor asked what
ethnicity I was? Actually, she just said, “What are you?” When
I said, “Sáami,” she gave me a blank stare and I know she was
trying to think of something to say . . . there was a long pause,
even longer than I’m used to. So I said, “You know, indigenous
peoples from Scandinavia?” “White Indians?” I didn’t want
to say the “L” word and I don’t mean lesbian. I tried talking
around the word. I went over the tundra and down to the lake
and back up and around again. I stood up and circled that
professor a couple of times. I pounded a drum and nearly
fell over in a trance and finally I said, “LAPP. Have you ever
heard of a Lapp? Laplander? People recognize that name. Yes,
I’m a dumb-short-ragged-person. That’d be me.” But, you
know what? She didn’t know what a Lapp was, either. And I
was struck silent. How else was I going to explain who I am,
or was, or will be? The conversation pretty much fell off dock
and I made some kind of an excuse to leave the room. The
next day I saw the professor in the hall and she said to me, in
fact she blurted it out: “You’re all over the Internet.” She was
thrilled. I was real. I was true. I wasn’t lying. Google made me
real. She was smiling and so excited and I said to her,
“Do you want to touch my Sáami Hair?”
and she did. I let her touch my hair and when she did, I
reached up and held her hand there and she curled her
fingers through my hair. It felt good. Very good. I said let’s go
to your office and she led me down the hall and around the
corner. We went inside her office and she locked the door and
pulled down the shade and I said, no, leave the shade up, so
she pulled it back up again. And she took an Indian weaving
off the wall and laid it on the floor. I don’t know if it was an
authentic Indian weaving from India or the Americas or if it
was from China but that’s okay because I am all those fibers
anyway. And she didn’t let go of my hair the whole time.
Can I see your card?
I think they always mean they want to see my BIA card or
my tribal card or maybe my green card but I always pull out
my DNA card. Usually I have to take the card out whenever
I cross a border like whenever I go from Southeast Alaska
to Anchorage, or when I go to a meeting, or when I have to
stand up and say something publicly. Sometimes, I take the
card when I go into the grocery store. I had it laminated.
It’s a custom card created from a study of our Sáami DNA,
a diagram that looks like a sun. We are people of the sun. I
have the U5b1b proof laminated with my smiling face in the
center of its universe. It’s proof that I was born from those
people. Heck, I’m a born-again-Sáami or maybe I’m a Sáami-
born-again. I hate the church reference. They persecuted us,
tried to destroy our culture. The missionaries did the same
thing to my Tlingit relatives. You must be born again to enter
the KINdom. So maybe Christians need a card, too. Proof
that they’ve gone down on their knees and checked the box,
something about blood-of-Jesus-quantum. Check. Check.
Check.
What’s a Sáami?
My mom and I learned how to make an oval drum. I’m
learning about all the symbols on the drum now. We have
to research the information at museums in Scandinavia
because when the drums were confiscated, they put them into
museums and now we have to ask permission just to touch
them. We have to use gloves when we touch them. They’re
afraid of our oils, our fingerprints, our D . . . N . . . A . . . our
Sáami motif: mtDNA haplogroup U5b. Sounds like a punk
rock group, eh?
You look exotic. What kind of Indian are you?
I’m the kind that comes from a detailed phylogeographic
analysis of one of the predominant Sáami mtDNA
haplogroups, U5b1b, which also includes the lineages of the
“Sáami motif” that was undertaken in 31 populations. The
results indicate that the origin of U5b1b, as for the other
predominant Sáami haplogroup, V, is most likely in western,
rather than eastern, Europe.
Can I touch your Indian Hair?
The researcher promised that it was a noninvasive form
of gathering biological information. It’s just dead skin.
With 99.999 percent accuracy he yanked my hair, pulling
the strands, stuffing them into a plastic Ziploc bag. Right
then and there he analyzed the root bulb, told me a story
of Y-DNA, linking me to Asia and a story of haplogroup
I, linking me to Europe, and of U5b1b connecting me to
the Berbers. Even though it was a complicated story, full of
tricksters and fornicators, it was a good story so I let him
touch my hair again. This time he didn’t pull it out. Instead,
he leaned in and sniffed my hair. He said it smelled like a
New Year, or maybe gunpowder.
Do you want to touch my Chinese Hair?
Well, we don’t know if we’re Chinese but we might be. We
had a relative that worked in the canneries in Wrangell,
Alaska, who came from China. Maybe he intermarried with
our family. Maybe I have Chinese cousins.
Do you want to touch my creation story?
This story began with a young woman, me, who went off
to college to study ology to become an ologist. She learned
everything she could about Greeks so she could understand
the colonizers’ Western worldview like why she had to
memorize the birth of Zeus and not the story of how Raven
stole the sun, or how the Wind Man created the tundra
just for her Sáami people. She specialized in over 400 ology
stories: heliology, phycology, trichology, odonatology,
nephology, and more. But even today she resists stories with
beginnings, stories with a middle motivation, and an end
that makes sense, a story that’s so clear that you can see a
salmon egg on the bottom of the stream. Warning: These
stories are not fairy tales. These stories are not for children.