Fort Collins, Colorado, Spring 2004.
I am at Dr. Williams’s office; she is the most recent in a line of therapists I’ve seen. Her space is comfortable: the furniture consists of one couch and two overstuffed chairs, upholstered in lush fabrics of browns and golds, as well as three heavily shaded lamps that throw subdued and delicate shadows on the softly hued, textured, saffron walls. New Age music floats in the background, and its tinkling bells, waterfalls, and birdsongs work to embed themselves into my subconscious, to the point that I am nearly unaware of their existence. I’ve chosen the brown chair instead of the couch, needing to be in control of my personal space—you know, the one that’s about an arm’s length away? I imagine that when the therapist arrives, she will come in, note where I sit, and then write that placement on her pad of paper, where it will become a clue, a guess, a sign, a definition. I inhale, filling my lungs; I exhale, pushing out my anxiety. I close my eyes and feel my pulse moving rhythmically, frantically, throughout my body. In curiosity I place my fingertips over the veins in my wrist. Yes, the rhythm matches the one in my ears.
This is the fifth therapist I’ve seen in twenty-four years. They don’t last. Or rather, I don’t. I never saw any of them for more than two or three sessions. They talk about things that don’t fit or that I discount. Really? Exactly how does adoption fit with PTSD? Or they give me something, a word, a phrase, a diagnosis that grants me enough absolution to scuttle away believing that now I have the key for feeling better, for feeling cured. The last one I’d seen was Dr. Bernard, a marriage counselor who had helped Rick and me through one of our roughest patches, a barren area that had been scrubbed clean by the dysfunctional patterns each of us had grown up with. Suddenly, in the midst of his career taking off and me raising our two sons, our life’s puzzle pieces became frayed and rough, no longer fitting neatly together. Perhaps they never had. Perhaps we had simply learned how to work around them. But we realized that working around them wasn’t a good strategy when only a few connecting threads were left, two of which were our children. With each argument, each blowup, each collision, our marriage boat took on more water. That’s when I got a recommendation for Dr. Bernard. It took us eight sessions and a lot of work, but we were able to climb out of the abyss in full survival mode.
Except I was still unhappy—not with us but with me. So I saw her one-on-one. By session three her frustration with my inability to reach down into the depths of my soul was explicit. “What is this?” she asked, her voice tired as she waved her hands around her eyes. I couldn’t explain the tears that ran in an unstoppable stream for several minutes. I didn’t know what they stood for or why they happened. I did know that her question and her tone left me angry and humiliated. I went home and canceled future appointments.
In the eleven years since our couples therapy, the sadness waxes and wanes, but it doesn’t leave me. I am happy in marriage but unhappy in life. Something inside me is missing, which is why I’m sitting in the office of my fifth counselor, Dr. Williams, while my heart beats with anxiety. To pass time I look around this room, noting that the predominant theme is American Indian art.
Woven rugs and blankets hang on the walls, their patterns complex and abrupt. On an adjacent wall a bundle of sweet grass arcs near a cluster of arrows and a bow. A ledge runs along two adjoining walls, where the sheetrock has been cut in. On this shelf sits a variety of American Indian objects. Intricately painted geometric shapes march along the gently sloping shoulders of large clay ollas. Similar designs, drawn in reds, ochers, and browns, mark smaller Acoma-style pots. Basketry interrupts the spaces in between, their coils careful and deliberate, the fiber tight. An infusion of the indigenous permeates the room, and I wonder about its significance.
My attention turns to the forms in my lap, sheets of personal and impersonal questions seeking medical information. As I scan the words, I have no idea why she needs to know if I’ve had broken bones or allergies or my number of pregnancies and births. In spite of my questions I mark these appropriately. Don’t rock the boat, the voice in my head says.
The next batch consists of several pages stapled together: a brief mental-health assessment. “Do you experience any of the following? (Mark all that apply.)” The list is extensive: anger, anxiety, sadness, depression, mania, apathy, isolation. “Do you drink three or more drinks a day? Do you take medication, or do you self-medicate? Do you have a plan?” I am a light drinker. I don’t medicate, but I do have a suicide plan. However, it requires a season other than late spring. It requires snow and below-freezing temperatures. And I don’t want the plan.
What I want is to have the pain of everyday living go away, the sadness, the anxiety, the depression, the anger, the isolation. But I don’t have the confidence to address them, and no one knows they exist. It’s surprisingly easy to keep these feelings carefully hidden from anyone’s view. Rick, because of his travel schedule, is blissfully unaware. When he’s home I put on the smile and do all those things that one does in a day-to-day existence: laundry, cooking, cleaning. I conduct all business over my phone, which means I don’t leave the house unless I absolutely have to. I don’t answer the phone but will pick it up soon after a call to see if anyone has left an important message. Friends who invite me to social functions are turned down easily with excuses of headaches, of head colds (an alibi that hides the fact that my nose is stuffed up from crying), of being tired, of having done too much this week and just needing to stay home, of having to take care of sick kids, of just wanting a lazy day. Across town Mom, who moved to Fort Collins from Billings in 1991, is battling her own issues, her own anxieties, her own depression, so it’s easy not to have to check in. The phone calls and the visits fall off as people seek to support me in my aloneness, to give me space, to give me time.
But the kids are aware of the sadness that has blanketed me for years. Dan grows quieter; Chris becomes absent. When he was six Chris came into my bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. I tried to hide my tears in the pillow, the sobs in the handmade quilt. But I felt his presence. I knew he was there, and I was ashamed that I couldn’t pull my act together enough even to soothe his worries. When I finally looked at him, he stood with his hands on his hips, indignant. “Are you crying again?” he asked, his voice loud and harsh. “I’m telling Dad!” Anger is fear made visible. How scared he must have been to observe my distress and be powerless to stop it. Perhaps he understood I was powerless to stop it as well.
So here I am, waiting for Dr. Williams, who I hope will be able to explain to me, point out to me, help me understand why I, a person who has a beautiful family, a wonderful home, truly amazing and supportive friends, and life experiences that become memories upon immediate completion, feel so apart from the rest of the world. It is as if I am moving through Jell-O, and I can only watch people live their lives through a Plexiglas window.
In 1999 I turned forty. I had never purchased anything in a liquor store. When Mom was forty she was buying a gallon of vodka every two days for Dad, who didn’t want people to know he was an alcoholic. He evidently didn’t mind people thinking Mom might have been. But me, as an Indian woman, I wasn’t supposed to be in those places. That was the cadence of social training that drummed through my head and embedded itself into my brain when I walked through those doors: Indians shouldn’t be in these places. You know, they’re all alcoholic good-for-nothings. So, although I entered liquor stores, I never purchased.
To people who think I’m exaggerating I want to say, C’mon, I’ve heard the whispers, the talk. I’ve seen the unconcealed contempt at the sight of their brown skin and the long black hair pulled back in a ponytail as they bought their booze off-reservation. And I’ve witnessed the hangdog posture of the person who is well aware of the eyes on him. Or her. These remembered images are in stark contrast to my white mother, who could walk in almost anywhere unquestioned and buy the vodka with only a quick glance. If my dad had walked in, there wouldn’t have been any question at all to his right to a drink.
So I stayed away from the counter, until I turned forty, and began to experience my first acts of rebellion. Educational rebellion: I, as an Indian woman, graduated with a master’s degree in cultural anthropology. Social rebellion: I, as an Indian woman, became co-president of my children’s elementary school’s Parent-Teacher Organization board and worked, unsuccessfully, to get other minorities involved. Familial rebellion: I, as a daughter of a bipolar mother, refused to clean up after her most recent manic episode and listened, with such sadness, at her confusion as she wondered what the hell she’d done. Personal rebellion: I refused to be labeled as too old, too afraid. At thirty-five I began to study tae kwon do, receiving my black belt three years later. The following autumn I returned to school to obtain a teaching certification.
Although all these events began to form a redefinition of who I was, by forty years of age I could say I was definitely living on my terms now. Therefore, I discarded the identification that marked me solely as an Indian woman, and I entered a liquor store with the intent to purchase. But as I crossed over the threshold, I felt an overwhelming and immediate sense of vulnerability, embarrassment, and almost shame to be in this den of libationary iniquity.
Dr. Williams walks in, and I study her, the same way I study every person I come into contact with the first time. One of the first therapists I’d visited told me I carried out this kind of assessment because I grew up in an alcoholic family, and I had to watch people, my dad specifically, for any nonverbal cues as to what to expect: calmness or violence. I believe that is true.
I watch as she notices my choice of seat. That’s when I feel my chest tighten with a constriction that chokes out my calm, as it buries the bells, the waterfalls, and the birdsongs beneath the pulse that drums in my ears. I feel myself readying for battle, as I seek to establish my own new personal world order. But I am well trained. In spite of my angst, my anxiety, my apprehension, I stand and extend my hand, keeping my smile tight but warm. Oh, the things we know how to do under pressure, as we hold our cards so close to our chest. We’re fine, everybody’s fine; we’re all fine here.
Her handshake is firm, the kind of handshake career counselors suggest you learn before applying for jobs. But then she holds my extended hand in both of her palms, and I wince, not with pain but too much familiarity. I don’t know if she notices that when she lets go, I wipe my hand on the side of my pants. She walks gently across the floor and takes a seat on the couch, smoothing the bottom of her skirt so it won’t wrinkle. Her subtly ample figure is constrained in a dark-brown skirt-and-jacket suit. Blond hair, light brown at its roots, falls to her shoulders and rolls under itself. With a swipe at a wisp of her bangs, she reveals a pair of the darkest eyes I have ever seen. Her smile is broad and welcoming; mine is tight with uneasiness.
Moments later a heavy silence blankets the room, and Dr. Williams watches me, mute. I guess I’m supposed to start. I motion to the room around me. “I notice you have a lot of American Indian art.” It’s conversational—not a lot of pressure.
“I do,” she says, wearing that brightening smile, while her dark eyes glint in pleasure. “I just found out I am a thirty-second Cherokee, and I am so proud of my heritage.” She smiles more; my smile retracts.
“In fact,” she continues, her Oklahoma accent thick like honey at the first frost, “I’m in the process of trying to get my name on the Cherokee tribal rolls. I’ve got my birth certificate and my mother’s certificate and the certificates of all the women back to my great-great-grandmother, but I’m still trying to track down my great-great-great-grandmother’s. Once I have that I can submit my petition to the tribal council and request my name to be added to the rolls.”
The Dawes Rolls, created by the Dawes Commission and authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1893, were also known as the “Final Rolls of Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes.” The rolls are the bible of Native belonging and tribal membership in several tribes located in Oklahoma, ensuring their members are granted all the rights and benefits thereof. The designation “Five Civilized Tribes” was used by nineteenth-century white politicians to distinguish members of the Cherokees, Seminoles, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws from their “wild” counterparts, who still hunted for survival. Instead, members of these five tribes had adopted many Euro-American cultural attributes, including Christianity, literacy, a written constitution, farming practices, and market participation.
Rolls, or censuses, were a way to establish tribal membership to determine who had access to rights and goods as stated by the various treaties signed between tribal chiefs and the presidents of the United States. The earliest censuses were chaotic and unstandardized. Questions arose of who should be counted and who should not; how to deal with people who lived with the tribe but were not tribal members; how to deal with people who lived off the reservation but belonged to a tribal family unit; who was part of a family unit regardless of name; and so on. Although rules were established as to how to address inconsistencies, many times they weren’t followed, making the rolls exceedingly imprecise.
Rolls became a central issue with the passage of the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act of 1887. The purpose of this act was to (1) support assimilation, (2) break up tribal units, (3) encourage individual initiatives, (4) further the progress of Native farmers, (5) reduce the cost of Native administration, and (6) implement a policy that could eliminate the federal-trust responsibilities over Indian lands within twenty-five years. Once all tribal members received their acreage, the excess lands were to be sold to white homesteaders for profit. Characteristics of allotment eligibility were determined officially as well as unofficially by the Dawes Commission. Officially, a person was required to be a member of a federally recognized tribe; unofficially, the Dawes Commission used a standard of blood quantum to help determine who should be counted. In the case of the Five Civilized Tribes, that quantum was one-quarter.
Membership determination regarding blood quanta, a double-edged sword, is left to the tribes to establish. It ensures recognition to receive what we are owed by right of treaty, but more insidiously, it is a way to ensure we breed ourselves out of existence. A “full-blood” American Indian woman is considered to have a 100 percent blood quantum. If she marries and produces a child with a non-Native man, her child would have a blood quantum of 50 percent; if that child produces a child with another non-Native, that grandchild would be 25 percent. By the fourth generation her great-great-grandchild will be ineligible for membership in many tribes, as many have adopted the “quarter-blood” quantum requirement. The Cherokees, however, do not require blood quanta to determine membership but rather rely on legal proof of matrilineal descent to women on the Dawes Rolls.
Under the Dawes Act, depending on age and family status, each tribal member would receive between 40 and 160 acres of reservation land that they could use, bequeath, or sell. The Dawes Act of 1887 didn’t require the most assimilated tribes, including the Five Civilized Tribes, to participate; however, that changed with the passage of the Indian Appropriations Act of 1893. At that point the Dawes Commission was established by Congress, whose purpose was to negotiate with the five tribes to get them to agree to participate in yet another land swap, this time exchanging reservation land for a piece of owned property. When the exchange was approved, the commission required a census, and the Dawes Rolls resulted from the final census. These are the rolls to which the Dr. Williams referred. But membership is never a given, especially when the Bureau of Indian Affairs is involved.
After I was born my birth mother enrolled me as a member of the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes. Within a few months of my adoption, Mom was contacted by a Bureau of Indian Affairs representative and asked if she wanted to sign away my Indian rights, meaning my tribal membership. The 1950s was an era of aggressive assimilation efforts: termination of reservation land and the rights of its people; relocation of Native people from rural to urban areas, where they competed for jobs and lived without the safety net of family or community; the continuation of the centuries-long program of Indian education, where administrators, both secular and nonsecular, commonly saw their American Indian students as, at worst, animalistic soulless beings and as, at best, not needing much more than a third-grade education because of their substandard intellect; and the placement of American Indian children into white families, far away from their tribes and their reservations.
Do you see the direction this is going? Do you see how legislators over the past several centuries have devised a myriad of ways we, as Native people, could lose our membership, our land, our culture, our children? Do you see the laws put in place to annihilate us; to dismantle our treaties signed in good faith with the Great White Fathers, as they liked to call themselves; to create avenues by which tribal land could be accessed and opened, our resources extracted without argument, without barriers?
In 1961 Mom understood the consequences of the representative’s request. “Those aren’t my rights to sign away,” she stated. “Those are my daughter’s rights. And when she reaches the age of eighteen, if she wants to sign away her Indian rights, then she can do so. But I won’t sign away what is not mine.”
Bless her.
I’ve been Indian ever since.
“I’m Native,” I tell Dr. Williams quietly, my smile still in place. Like a river’s eddies in turbulent water, a dark anger begins to swirl, and it is directed at this person in front of me, who is so white. How could she possibly have any idea what it means to “be Indian,” to know the price I’ve paid to “be Indian”?
“Really?” Her voice rises in interest, happy that we share this kinship, this blood bond of being. “What tribe are you?”
“I’m Salish. From the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes.” I’m not Cherokee, I want to say.
She looks at me with a quizzical expression. “I’ve never heard of them. Where are they located?”
There’s a certain sense of pride belonging to a tribe that no one’s ever heard of. “Western Montana.”
She nods while her dark-brown eyes attempt to pierce me. “Are you proud of your Indian heritage?” I hear it, her attempt to establish another kinship bond.
I level her with a steady gaze, and I feel the familiar lump in my throat. I have a half smile that I’m sure if I look in the mirror looks more frozen than warm. “Where I come from, you got beat up if you were proud of being Indian.”
Her quizzical expression returns. “But you should be proud of what you are.”
“I am who I am,” I tell her. I explain, “I was adopted by a white couple, but I look Indian—so in the big scheme of things, I’m too Indian to be white, and I’m too white to be Indian. I am who I am.”
By now my smile is gone. I realize I’m tired. I’m tired of justifying the paradox of my existence, why I talk so “white,” or why I talk so “funny,” without the reservation cadence to my sentences. I’m tired of explaining why I don’t know how to speak “Indian” (there are 290 Native languages in North America alone), or why I don’t know “my” culture. I’m tired of explaining why I’m not a “real” Indian, or how it is that I know so much “white” history, but no one asks me about “Indian” history. Perhaps because they are uncomfortable hearing that story.
But when she tells me, one last time, nearly pleading with me to understand, with a look of absolute confusion, “But you should be proud of your heritage,” I want to scream. I want to get in her face and say, You haven’t walked in my shoes. You haven’t had the hatred follow you through a place where people thought you didn’t belong, like the Denny’s in Missoula, where I met my uncle Albert and his wife, Delphine, in 1994.
Albert’s hair was short, cropped close to his scalp along the sides, a bit longer on top, a symbol left over from the 1950s, when Indians were pushed to “act like white people.” But it didn’t work—he was clothed in a Pendleton vest. Delphine was brown and slender, her long dark-brown hair draped loose about her shoulders. They’d seen me only one other time, so I was overjoyed to sit in the booth with them and visit—proud, even—except when I looked over through the wooden screen that separated us from the adjacent booth and saw the old couple, bent and bitter, their white hair reminding me of Q-tips. He was grumbling about his food; she was throwing us ugly looks, her brows drawn together like thin tubes of cotton, while her glacial blue eyes were filled with poison as she “tsk-tsked” and looked away, only to look back and do it all again.
Dan, who was four, began acting up. Not only was he tired of being in a grown-up world; he felt tension squeeze around us like the coils of an anaconda. I had to force my eyes away from the old woman, as Dan began whining and dropping things purposefully on the floor. When that didn’t work, he swatted my face to get my attention, and when that failed he began screaming. His tantrum rose to such a level that I picked him up and took him to the bathroom. I swatted him on the behind, certainly nothing that could be felt through a pair of toddler underwear and thick corduroy overalls. It was a reminder that he needed to get a grip. And who walked out of one of the three stalls but the bitter old woman who, by now, was so angry with my obvious lack of parenting ability she sputtered her hatred of me and my kind, hissing that I had no business having children if I couldn’t even take care of them properly. And by that time I was really tired, tired of having to defend who I was, where I was, and why I was. I was tired of my four-year-old’s tantrums and of people barging into my life, uninvited, who feel they have a right to tear me down for no reason other than I was brown, a characteristic that somehow held deep meaning for them, which they were more than happy to share with me.
“Just mind your own business,” I said to her, my voice nearly defeated but still audible. I picked up my son, who by that time was sobbing because he’d witnessed this hatred, and I pulled his head to my shoulder, turned his face to my neck, and rubbed the back of his head. As I walked out the door, I said with a quiet venom that matched hers, “Just mind your own fucking business.”
“I am who I am,” I repeat to Dr. Williams, and my smile is now entirely gone. “It’s taken me forty years to be able to get to this point, and it is a place that I’m okay with, and that’s the only way I can tell you who I am.”
She tilts her head, and I watch her smile return. She says, almost playfully, “You stick with me; we’ll get you proud of being Indian.”
I’ve been emotionally slapped. She doesn’t get it! I realize, stunned. But then again, how could she, with her blond hair and fair skin and advanced education and the ability to move unquestioned in this society because she looks just like them?
No, she would never know what it meant to be Indian in Montana.
Bottles stood in rows on the shelves, upright and elegant, the glass or the liquid within or both were tinted in ambers, browns, greens, reds, blues, and ecru. Long necks, short necks, wide shoulders, no shoulders—their forms varied; their bodies triangular, rectangular, circular. As I stared at the colors, the rows, the shelves, the labels, all whispered to me of the sins of my birth mother, the Indian woman who lost her kids to “the system” because she couldn’t quit drinking. I winced, quelling the whispers, and reminded myself that I was in the decade of rebellion; I was not her.
Even so, I was self-conscious, heinously so. But I walked (strolled) to the wine aisle (wine seems to be more socially acceptable than beer, as least on the social-status ladder) as if I’d done this for years. I perused the labels, searching for the fine wine, the one that raised eyebrows in interest. I ran my fingers along the bottles of reds, whites, rosés, whose points of origin resided in South Africa, Argentina, Italy, and California. I read the labels beneath that described the flavors as “sparkling citrus” or with “hints of cherry and dark chocolate.” The labels served two purposes, education and a way to hide my embarrassment by focusing on something as people walked by. Good God, I thought to myself, I hadn’t considered that someone would actually recognize me in this place! If I can’t look at wine, I’m never going to be able to look at porn! My face flamed as I pretended to be at ease in this place, even as I tried to push aside the fact that at forty years of age, I was still letting other people dictate my life and my actions through their judgments. But old habits die hard; I could quiet my trepidation, but I couldn’t quiet my shame.
I breathed in resolve and settled on a $21.99 bottle of red (the price at least gives the appearance that it is better than the $7.99 bottle next to it), whose green bottle with the long, slender neck seemed more uptown, swanky. Balancing it in the palm of my hand, I looked at the label without really seeing it, averting my gaze from yet another newcomer to the aisle. It was heavy. I focused on the gilded label’s French script, unable to ascertain even one word that looked familiar. It must be good, I thought with a wry smile. But really, I had no idea if the wine was good, bad, awful. That’s when the panic set in. I was stuck. I couldn’t put the bottle down, and I couldn’t walk up to the counter and just pay for it. I couldn’t do those things because each of those actions would mean something, represent something that I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge.
I concentrated on the label’s red-line drawing, an estate of some sort, presumably where the grapes had been picked. The placard indicated the wine to be red, with a “rich” and “complex” taste of plums and blackberries. Rich and complex. I rolled those around on my tongue. Yes, those were words that I wanted to define me. So, despite my claustrophobic spirit, I forced a sense of rich complexity and approached the counter, behind two other people. I felt a thin line of perspiration trickle from beneath the fringe of my hair.
When I glanced at the checker I saw a college kid, but horror overtook me as I realized I knew him! He was six years older than my eldest son, and they were in Boy Scouts together! Good Lord, of all the people to witness my identity experiment! He’s a professional, I reminded myself. He rings up sales, asks customers if they want a receipt, puts bottles into bags or boxes, and he does this day after day after day.
“How’s your day?” he asked without more than a cursory glance, a practiced smile.
“Fine,” I answered, my throat dry, my words miniscule.
“Great. $21.99 plus tax brings it to . . .”
I extracted my wallet and felt the palm of my hands grow damp. My fingers shook at I pulled the credit card from its pocket, and I was sick to my stomach, as I hoped the kid didn’t think I stole this card and that’s why I was shaking.
A lifetime. A lifetime of feeling that somehow I had done something wrong just because I was who I was. I breathed and pasted a smile on as I looked directly into his eyes. I waited then, for the judgmental look, the quiet sneer, the request for an ID or something else that would take a long time to find in my purse while those behind me waited, muttering their sanctimonious whispers with barely hidden irritation. The purpose of the exercise was discomfort, to make me so uncomfortable that I would leave and not return. I’d seen that game applied to Indian people in Montana too many times to think it wouldn’t happen to me.
I waited.
“Do you want me to put it in a bag?”
My heart pounded with relief.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Have a good one,” he said, his smile friendly as he looked at me, but only briefly. There was another customer right behind me.
I cradled the bagged bottle in the crook of my arm and walked out into the sunshine that bathed my face. I, at forty years of age and an Indian woman to boot, had purchased a bottle of liquor. Well, wine. And the world hadn’t stopped spinning.