13

This Once Used to Be Ours

Flathead Indian Reservation, Arlee, Montana, August 2008.

I am flying home.

Home.

Until now the reservation has never been “home,” and I wonder why it suddenly becomes home now. To me home has always been a place to return to, a place to belong, a place that provides a definition of self and connection with the land and its people. Therefore, with regard to me, the reservation does not meet the criteria for two simple reasons: I have no memory of living here, and my contact with my family over the past twenty years has been, at best, inconsistent.

Transiency has defined me, defined my family. Dad’s federal government job transferred him every two to five years, and we’d always find ourselves the “new people in town.” Consequently, these towns became places I lived instead of places I was from. I was born in Missoula and lived three years in Red Rock Lakes, near the infinitesimally small town of Monida, named for its location on the border of Montana and Idaho. I attended grade school in Stevensville and Naselle, Washington; junior high in Naselle, Great Falls, and Billings, Montana; and high school in Billings. College was in Bozeman, before I was placed on academic leave, whereupon I moved to Gardner to gain a certain measure of maturity. I finished college in Missoula and grew mature enough to have a marriage and a family, moving with them in 1987 to Fort Collins, Colorado. Here we put down very deep and solid roots, on my recommendation.

Unlike me, Rick doesn’t require a “home,” a place to be from. He was a navy brat who lived on six bases, nationally and internationally, over a period of eighteen years, birth to college. He does not have the same yearning for home that I do. His home, he states, is wherever his family is.

But me, I yearn for a home, that place that marks my identity as being a “community member,” and I don’t have it. Therefore, it was important to me that our sons know home as a palpable, knowable place, distinct in memory: a sanctuary. By design we found a neighborhood where the school was at its center; they would graduate with kids they’d gone to kindergarten with. When it came time to sell our house and purchase another, we stayed within the same schools the boys had been enrolled in, moving only six blocks away. They were heavily embedded in the neighborhood as well as the community we actively built. In many cases the networks we cultivated replaced long-distant relatives. When everything was said and done, they knew who they were and where they were from, and they knew they were an inherent part of a well-established and carefully tended support network.

And this was my definition of home. But now that definition seems to fly in the face of my sudden redefinition. This newly defined home exists only in a relinquished memory of the family homestead on the Flathead.

Like much of the reservation land across the nation, the Plant family homestead was the consequence of the Dawes Act. It was designed to bring American Indians into a “civilized” society, becoming independent farmers, becoming entrepreneurs. For twenty-five years the titles to each allotment were held in trust by the federal government. At the end of that period the title transferred to the landowners, and the land allotment would be theirs to do with as they wished.

Problems were rife within this policy: the allotments were small, and therefore usually not economically viable, yet American Indians still owed taxes on the land. Not able to afford the taxes, they lost the land to white farmers or, worse, non-Indians who had buddied up to the Indian agents and were added to the Indian census rolls, qualifying them for Indian status and allotments. The kicker was the land that had been put into reserve for American Indian residence was being opened to non-Natives at phenomenal rates. Regarding my reservation, the 1855 Treaty of Hellgate stated, “Nor shall any white man, excepting those in the employment of the Indian Department, be permitted to reside upon the said reservation without permission of the confederated tribes, and the superintendent and agent.”

The General Allotment Act of 1910 effectively opened the Flathead Reservation up to white settlement, stating that all Indians of the tribes who legally lived on the reservation would receive either 80 acres or 160 acres, and the remaining acreage would be open to white settlement. The Indians were never consulted, nor were they ever asked for permission.

My birth family does not know me as Susan Harness; they know me as Vicki Charmain, the name I was given when I was born. Some know me as Mainey. Vicki Charmain is the name I use now when I call Uncle Albert to ask him to take me to the family homestead. He considers the option for several moments. All of Albert’s replies are slow, careful, methodical, an indication of why people come to him for his consideration on tribal matters; he is an acknowledged elder and as such puts a lot of thought into the issue prior to ever giving an answer.

“Well, there’s not much to see,” he responds after a few moments. “It burned down years ago.”

Although I am disappointed, the feeling is fleeting. “But I just want to be there,” I assure him, trying to keep the pleading tone to a minimum. “I just want to walk there. I just want to see it.” For whatever reason, the idea of the homestead and its specific location on the land has become nearly sacred in my mind. So sacred in fact that I need to make a pilgrimage, to examine its physicality, to feel the grass between my fingers, to get a sense of rootedness. And I need a guide to accomplish this. I want Albert to be that guide.

In his hesitation to answer, I sense a question: why is this suddenly so important? Perhaps I am trying to reconvene with my ancestors of long ago. Perhaps I want to reestablish my birthright, at least in my own mind. But a more shadowed possibility floats at the edges of my consciousness, whispering what I could not think aloud: perhaps I am seeking to experience the last place I was before social services took me away. I try to imagine what this might have looked like. I wonder who answered the door when the social worker arrived. Were members of my family surprised, or did they expect this person? Had someone made a call from this house? Or a concerned neighbor?

I push the questions away before they can begin to form into quicksand. These considerations map out dangerous territory, giving the ethereal “what-ifs” form and substance. What if social services hadn’t come? What if Vic had come to the courtroom to claim us? Or even if she couldn’t be a mother, what if we’d been kept in that community, raised by someone else? Or what if all contact with my birth family hadn’t been severed?

These questions are dangerous; they illuminate the boundaries of who I am, where I belong. Mom would be devastated by their being placed onto the wind. She would ask, was she not a good-enough mother? Had she not devoted decades to my well-being, and why was that not enough? The questions are painful reminders to all involved, except for the child-placement professionals, that family ties are so fragile they can be broken and remanufactured and sold as the original. As long as the questions are never uttered and the answers are never found, they lose their destructive power. So I push them to the back of my mind and acknowledge that, for whatever reason, the thought of returning to this space has consumed me for years. But the “why” factor keeps coming up.

6. Albert Plant. Photo by the author.

“Why is this so important to you to try to go back to people who aren’t that interested in having anything to do with you?” Rick asks, more out of concern for my emotional well-being than anything else. “Why would you want to come back here?” asks my youngest brother, Vern, who has dreamed of leaving and having a different life elsewhere. “Why isn’t being here with your friends and your family enough?” asks my friend Anne, confused by my compulsion.

Because.

I want to go because I believe it is in my blood, because perhaps I can get them to care about me as much as I care about them, at least in my mind. Perhaps I can fight the demons that chased me away with their racist tones and their judgmental eyes. Perhaps through claiming this space as my home, I can claim authenticity to my inheritance, genetic and otherwise. Perhaps, by being here, I’m staking a claim on my identity and will no longer accept ascriptions that aren’t true.

These answers, however, remain unsaid. To my ears they sound romantic, laden with unrealistic sentiment, as if constructed in dreamscape. I can’t imagine how they would sound to others. So my response is vague because it will shield the pain of being seen as illogical. “Because. I just do. I don’t know why. I just want to go back.”

Albert seems to hear my thoughts because he doesn’t ask for an explanation. “Sure,” he says, “I can take you there. How about Sunday, after church? Delphine and I can meet you at the North Valley Creek turnoff.”

My vocal chords grow so tight I can barely squeeze the words “thank you” past them. When I hang up, I send a prayer of thanks to the Creator. I have scant knowledge of the homestead. I know several family members had lived on and off in the log cabin over the years, and that my birth father’s only photo known to exist was up at the homestead. I’d heard it had been destroyed when the homestead burned. Ronni had mentioned at one time she’d had the photo, then lost it. Regardless, Ronny Smith’s image remains a ghost in my imagination, having been bulldozed by the ethereal memories of others, abstract and elusive.

The following Sunday I’m sitting at the turnoff in my car. I glance at the clock on my car; it reads twelve-thirty. Albert and Delphine show up ten minutes later in their little blue truck. After a few pleasantries I put my Subaru wagon into gear and follow them across the sturdy wooden bridge that crosses the Jocko River. The dirt road hugs a low-lying bluff, then turns abruptly southward and continues across a checkerboard of grassland, where cattle graze contentedly in the August sun. This piece of land runs along the foothills that border the western edge of the Flathead Reservation. Few colors make up the palette of this place; however, the hues are stunning as the shades of gold and amber of the fields sit in contrast to the greens of the mountains and the cerulean blue of the sky. This feels like home.

Except that little voice in the back of my mind asks a question I’m not yet able to fully answer. If this is home, why are you still looking? You’ve met your birth mother, you’ve met many of your siblings, you’ve met extended family, and yet obviously something is missing. Why else would you return again to this place?

Psychologists say that memories typically begin at two years of age. That may well be true. I remember waking up from a nap in a room darkened by a pulled vinyl shade. I stood in my crib and stared across the seemingly vast empty space to the closed door, waiting. There was a sense of anticipation, excitement. I remember I didn’t make a sound, but I was so surprised and so pleased to see the smiling face of the woman I would always know as Mom, as she gently pushed the door open to see if I was awake. Both of our smiles were filled with joy, and both of us were happy to see each other—we were mirrors of the same emotion. I can only believe this event had to have been days after my placement; why else would it stay branded in my memory as if cast in metal?

We pull into the property, and I get out of my car and experience a sudden sense of vertigo as I look back across the grassland to the highway that lies like a gray ribbon on the other side of the valley. I had driven on that road perhaps a hundred times with my adopted family, with my husband, or by myself, always on the way through the reservation to the Bison Range or Flathead Lake or Bigfork or Kalispell or Glacier National Park. Looking at that highway from this perspective I recall how each time I drove by I had looked across the valley to this very location and wondered what it would be like to live here, on the edge of these foothills. Sometimes I wondered if I could buy a plot of land and build a house and what that experience would be like. I am in two places at the same time, here and on that highway. I close my eyes, trying to capture a steadying breath at this tattered remnant of memory that has lain untouched, ready to come to life given the right circumstances, like a snowdrop blossom on the edge of springtime.

I am brought back to the present as a large shepherd mix walks stiff-legged toward me, sniffs my jeans, and wanders away. Another mongrel mix of some sort keeps its distance, barking, its head thrown back, its eyes as wary of me as I am of it. The third, a young lab, is so excited to have visitors that actually like him that he dances around us for quite some time. He turns out to be our key into this pack.

A stocky man with the straightest, coarsest hair I’ve seen on anyone besides myself opens the door, his Hawaiian shirt bright against the day. “Welcome!” he hails, his smile as infectious as his demeanor. This is Pete, the owner of the double-wide and the son of Albert’s eldest brother, Peter, although he is the same age as Albert. He is my cousin, but later I will learn I’m related to many people up here, the vast majority of whom I have never met and probably never will. Pete’s wife, Linda, fair with silver hair, stands slightly behind him and smiles, waving a welcome of her own.

There are introductions and handshakes, and then I step back, away, and take in my surroundings. Although the original homestead had been eighty acres, Pete’s small piece of heaven that sits next to the homestead is probably five. Somewhere along the line the family had lost the land allotment, and the tribe, having first dibs on all property up for sale, purchased it to retain it in tribal lands. Pete was able to purchase the adjacent property, which allowed us access to the family’s original allotment.

I turn back to my cousin and study him, looking for those shared similarities. For years I shared no characteristics with the people who surrounded me; now these faces are nearly as foreign but somehow more familiar. Perhaps it sits in our brownness, in our hair color, our eye color. Perhaps it’s more intangible, visible only in our laughter. There’s a quick sense of humor that weaves gently through this genetic family, one that I share with everyone I’ve met so far.

But for Pete and me the only similarity I see is the individuals we married. Not only are Linda and Rick non-Native, they are visibly so. Pete’s dark skin, salt-and-pepper hair, and dark eyes contrast sharply with Linda’s fair complexion, blond and silver hair, and blue eyes. In that moment I become aware of how much I take Rick’s and my difference of appearance for granted; I experience a jolt of surprise to see it on someone else. I think of the line from Robert Burns, “Oh would some power the giftie give us, to see ourselves as others see us.” And through this introduction I am finally handed the mirror.

“You sure you don’t want to take the four-wheeler?” Pete asks, for the second time.

“No, that’s okay. We’ll walk,” Albert replies.

“When you get done, come on back for some iced tea, and we’ll go over the family photos.”

Land is so closely associated with the people, the cultures, that sit on its soil. In 1984 Rick and I set out to see America. We began our trek from Missoula, Montana, driving through Wyoming and South Dakota, then dipping into Iowa, where the contrast of landscape shocked my system. We’d exchanged the arid high desert with a green lushness that I hadn’t known existed, except in books or movies. Cornfields, staccato in their rows, flew by my window, mile after mile. Dotted between these fields were aspects of white: carefully tended whitewashed barns, large and sturdy; white houses with white Ford Fairlanes in their white detached garages surrounded by white picket fences. And tidy! There was not so much as a board out of place. In the West it was not uncommon to see junked vehicles of all kinds occupying land around the residences; here those scraps of rusted metal had long ago been disowned and hauled to salvage yards, leaving yards clean of debris. Of course, the majority of the settlers in this area were the Germans and the Swedes, known for their almost obsessive ability to keep things neat and orderly. Not only have they taken control of their lives; they’ve taken control of the land, their earliest ancestors forcing themselves in while forcing us out.

We Natives now live on the fringes, on reservations where many of the homes are not only unkempt but in some cases barely standing, while rusted metal sits in spaces once seen as yards, the representation of a middle-class life. Some may perceive this chaotic landscape as an active resistance to those ethnically white ordered spaces and ordered lives, while others might see this disordered environment as the product of an uncaring and lazy people. I think this is what happens to societies that have been battered by immigrating forces and made to endure their brutal governmental anti-Indian policies and practices. Each generation of people that remains on the margins loses a little bit more of their connection with one another, as well as their connection with themselves. This loss becomes visible on the land and in the system.

Delphine waits off to the side as Albert and I walk away from the double-wide. When we go about ten steps, Albert stops, put his fingers in the front pockets of his jeans, and gazes out over the long-grass prairie. When I look at Albert I feel such pride in our relationship, both blood and constructed. Standing nearly six feet tall with his broad chest and shoulders thrown back, he reveals someone committed to beliefs and values. It’s clear why he’s a beloved and respected elder. As I study him, I long for that sense of self that he so easily portrays. My gaze drifts to his face; although he is nearly sixty-four years old, his skin is smooth. The only wrinkles that ever become visible are when he smiles, and his cheeks become round and his eyes dance. That’s when I feel the most joy. I go out of my way to say something funny just so I can watch him relish a moment of life.

But today he is serious as he looks out on the landscape. After a few moments he takes one hand out of his pocket and gestures as he speaks, his fingers following the terrain. “Our family,” he says, the rez dialect clear, his voice quiet, “used to own everything from those trees up there, all the way down to the river.” He pauses and looks at me, a sad smile playing on his lips. “At one time, we were rich. We used to have nearly a hundred horses that grazed this valley.” But slowly, the smile disappears, as a shadow crosses his face and his brow furrows in distant thought. Then he shakes his head. “I’m not sure when we weren’t rich anymore. But we lost almost all the horses. And now this land belongs to the tribe.” This tract of land that he speaks so lovingly about is tinged in late summer gold, and his face betrays a sense of yearning, almost a pain. When the smile returns, grief crosses the air between us. His voice grows quiet, soft on an errant breeze. “But this once used to be ours.”

He turns then and faces the opposite direction. “And there were three cabins here, the main one down here, then one about a quarter mile up the road—that was where guests went or people who just wanted to break away from the main house—and then another one a half mile or so beyond that, which was where our grandparents lived in the summer. We called that the summer house.”

Albert walks slowly away, stopping about twenty feet from me. I follow but trip as the edge of my tennis shoe catches on something. When I look down I see a concrete foundation, the outline of the original house. It had been carefully poured, its edges sharp and defined. I walk along the top, trying to imagine the interior’s layout, but my imagination remains blank. Finally, I look at Albert and ask, “What did it look like?” Then I wait, like a child for a story. And I am not disappointed.

“It was a two-story log cabin,” Albert explains, his voice soft with remembrance, “with an addition added on at some point.” He steps carefully over a piece of concrete, which, upon closer inspection, is actually a step to what would have been the threshold of the house. “This was where the front door used to be, and over here to the left was the living room. Back over here was the kitchen. Every day we had to get water from the creek, over there.” He gestures to the embankment to the south, now heavily lined with willows. It seems a long ways to go, especially for a young child, the person, I imagine, who was most likely to fetch the water.

“The sink was here, and we had a wood stove here. And just over here there were the stairs that went up to the second story. That’s where the bedrooms were.”

As he speaks, time falls away and I see myself standing in a dark interior filled with people. Loud people.

“Oh, we had some really great times in this house and some really bad times,” Albert says with a smile, interrupting my thoughts.

“When were the great times?”

“Oh, you know, when people came to visit. We’d sit around and play cards; we’d tell stories. And we’d laugh. We would laugh for hours.” His eyes dance and his cheeks are round.

“And the bad times?”

“When Mom and Dad were drinking.” He doesn’t elaborate. Perhaps he doesn’t need to. That’s kind of how it worked in my family as well. Maybe drinking and its consequences are the same worldwide.

I look at this place and try to imagine myself here on that fateful day. Had Albert been here when I was removed? Had he witnessed the event? I had been eighteen months, which meant he was maybe sixteen, seventeen, perhaps. Had my eldest sisters been there? My grandparents? My mother, Vic? My father, Ronny? Who watched as we were taken from this space and put into the car and driven away? Did anyone understand how that exactly had happened?

When I became a parent, I was overwhelmed by the feelings of love and protectiveness that swelled my heart until I thought it couldn’t swell anymore. Cradling each of my boys as infants in my arms, I would look into their faces, their eyes, Chris’s green and Dan’s blue, and marvel at their gaze back at me. I studied the shape of their noses, their mouths, wondering which parent they resembled most; I would laugh at their wide-mouthed, toothless grins. I ran my fingers through their hair, Chris’s fine and light brown, Dan’s coarse and golden brown, and held their tiny hands, feeling their fingers grasp mine and hold on.

When Chris was seven months old, I watched as he reached for the lip of the brick fireplace and lifted himself like a walrus, except gravity forced him to fall, his forehead hitting the fire-hardened bricks. He howled in pain, and it took a long time of rocking to calm him. I watched when Dan, at thirteen months, began walking quickly, if unsteadily, down the slightly sloped driveway. His body got too fast for his legs and he pitched forward, scraping his chin along the concrete. I winced with these and other attempts of theirs to get the world, and their bodies, under control. And most times there was nothing I could do to assist but stand by helplessly and watch.

But one of the most difficult times I experienced as a parent was when each of our children turned eighteen months old. As I watched their every move, their tests of nature, as my worry mixed with my joy, one question battered my psyche: how could anyone give an eighteen-month-old child up, forever? I couldn’t imagine lacking the ability to adequately care for them, to the point of watching them being loaded into a car and driven away, with no plan on how I was going to get them back. Would they be scared? Would someone hold them and assure them that everything was going to be all right?

How did my mother let her decisions get to the place where my sister and brother and I needed to be removed from that home? This was the question rolling around in my head like marbles as I watched Chris and Dan play with their building blocks or their Tonka trucks, building a world that was safe under my gaze. Under what circumstances could I allow them to be seized and driven out of my life?

I stand in the house and imagine my place in it. “How many people lived here at one time?”

“Oh, let’s see . . .” he counts off the names of parents and siblings, ticking each of his fingers and adding digits for husbands or wives, and children. He comes up with something like twenty people as an average number.

“Where did you all sleep?”

“Mostly upstairs. Mattresses covered every inch of the floor, and when that area was full, people slept downstairs. You just laid down wherever there was a spot.” His laughter causes me to smile; it always does, offering the seemingly heartfelt invitation to join in. We turn and step back over the threshold, and when I turn to face the river it feels surreal, as if I am coming out of a dream. When I glance back into the foundation, I am surprised that the cabin isn’t real, that it existed entirely in my mind. And then, as if welcoming me back, Delphine smiles and murmurs a greeting.

“Ready?” I ask, and the three of us begin the walk up the two-track toward the upper acreage of the land. The black lab also joins us, and I keep track of him by following the sounds of grass moving. He is well cloaked in the honey-gold slender stalks that stretch above my knees, except every so often that black wagging tail beats with violent interest as he tracks particular scents, betraying his tangential path. I’ve become so interested in the dog that when I look up I realize that Albert and Delphine are slightly ahead of me, their feet raising puffs of dust that dissipate quickly into the still air.

We pause on the gentle slope, and Albert points out two distinctly different sites. “These are the dumps,” he explains. “That one over there is older; it’s been filled over with dirt. And the one here? That one’s newer; it’s still open.”

I can tell the sites are old. My parents found all kinds of antique bottles in places like these. I look at Albert and say, “There might be treasures in this dump!”

They both laugh, and Albert’s eyes sparkle as he replies, “I don’t know, but I doubt it’s anything anyone wants to keep; otherwise they wouldn’t have thrown it away to begin with!”

We turn and walk toward the upper acreage. We are silent. As I look around I drink in this landscape, pulling it deep into me like it is a cool glass of water. Montana in August is incomparable. This is when grasses wear their yellow and gold gently, brought to light by the angle of the late afternoon sun, which has softened the hues that blazed so vividly only a month before. When put against the dark green of the pines or the sapphire blue of the sky, these colors become truly stunning. And the aroma: I close my eyes and draw in the scents, a complex mix of pine, grass, dust, and . . . cow pies? Startled by the acrid whiff, I open my eyes and look around, but I don’t see anything that hints at bovine feces. But what I do see is that Delphine and Albert have somehow gotten quite a ways in front of me again, and I have to walk quickly to catch up. Once more I’ve gotten lost in my daydreams, a lifelong tendency.

“I’ve never seen the creek this dry,” Albert says, as we approach the site for the summer home, which sits a couple hundred feet away. The only evidence that water had run here recently are the willows that grow sturdy and plentiful along this shallow wash. And yes, dotted among the willows are numerous cow pies, evidence that this land is being used for grazing. As I scan the landscape, something catches my eye: a tall shrub with broad leaves that looks out of place in the midst of this community of willows. I touch Delphine’s shoulder and point; she follows the direction of my index finger. “That’s a lilac bush,” I say, not being able to keep the excitement out of my voice. It is the vestige of human existence, a clue.

She squints to see it clearer. “No, I don’t think so,” she answers. She turns to Albert, her voice soft, fragile. “Albert, do you remember your folks having a lilac bush up here?”

“No,” Albert says, shaking his head. “I don’t remember any lilac bush.” He pauses. “There used to be something growing by the front door, but I don’t think it was a lilac bush.”

While he talks Delphine walks slowly to the shrub in question and soon I hear a small exclamation of gentle surprise. “My goodness, will you look at that? Vicki Charmain’s right. It is a lilac bush.” Delphine studies its branches, its leaves, the seedpods left from the previous blooming cycle.

“Hmm,” Albert mutters, bewilderment tingeing his voice. “I don’t remember one being up here, but here it is. It must have been pretty small when the house was here.”

The foundation of Albert’s grandparents’ house isn’t as elaborate or cleanly set as the lower house, whose concrete lines clearly delineated the shape of the home. In fact, this foundation looks more like a collection of rocks loosely piled on top of one another, which indicates to me it is significantly older than the family house down the road.

Delphine gently pushes the toe of her tennis shoe against a large, half-buried boulder. “This is where the corner of the house sat,” she explains quietly. “This is what it sat on, what held it up.” With that clue I can make out the faint outline of where the original cabin had existed. It had been much smaller, big enough for two people and perhaps a child or two. What is surprising is how close it is to the creek that trickles by the boulder, practically on top of it. I furrow my brows. Surely the creek wasn’t in this location fifty years ago or more; it must have wandered closer over time, the way creeks do. But where the creek’s original path had flowed is not clear; the willows have encroached so heavily on the home site that it is difficult to tell what it must have looked like before.

As if reading my mind, Albert says, “It wasn’t nearly this overgrown.” He gazes at the landscape for a long time. “In fact, I don’t remember there being any willows at all. They’ve come in here since the house has been gone.”

Albert and Delphine then turn toward each other, their heads close together, a self-contained unit, and walk through their memories. Then the feeling overwhelms me, an overpowering appreciation of this gift they have given me, a chance to see this place through their eyes, a chance to get to know them. From the beginning, when I met them in 1993, they’ve embraced me, sheltered me. They’ve asked to meet my husband, to let him know he is a member of this family. They made way for Ronni, James Allen, and me to sit with them at a funeral where we felt unrelated among the relatives but safe within their being. They offer me a certain sense of solace when I seem to need it the most.

Like here.

“Did your mom practice traditional spirituality?” I ask Albert as we begin our walk back to the home site.

“Yeah,” he nods. “She’d get up real early in the morning and go out and do those things that she always did. I don’t know what they were,” he clarifies quickly, “because she didn’t include us in those things. She raised us Catholic, but she was traditional.”

Like many conversations, ours ends abruptly, because there is nothing more to say. And although I want to dig deeper, I respect Albert’s pragmatic nature; some things are better left unquestioned because questions require answers, and sometimes there aren’t any. But regardless of how pragmatic my own nature is, the questions of my family, my adoption, the what-ifs, never abate and continue to swirl in the restless currents of doubt.

I stop and watch the black lab weave and bounce its way among the three of us and then veer off to the side, following a scent that draws his attention. My gaze drifts once more to the landscape, across the grasslands, along the ribbon of river, returning to the boundary of pine behind us, and suddenly I felt such a sense of longing rise within me. Here, I believe, I can view the world undetected and whole, where people would not question my reason for doing so. This was my homeland; this is my homeland. And I cradle this gift, given so freely by Albert and Delphine, with a ferocity that takes me by surprise.

Adoption. There is my experience, and there is how I should feel. My experience is that when I was removed from my blood family, then my birthrights, my membership in a family and a community, and the sense of who I was in the world were also removed from me. Therefore, while I was growing up, the positive and negative aspects of my adoption became both the most obscured and most visible. How I should feel, brought about by cultural pressure from the society in which I was raised, is typically stated in these ways: “Everything happens for a reason” or “There’s always two sides to adoption; you can’t just look at the negative.”

The spiritual reason for my adoption escapes me. I don’t know why I was taken from a chaotic family filled with alcoholism and dismembered relationships and placed in a family filled with alcoholism and dismembered relationships. And despite Mom’s efforts to protect me, I heard the murmurs of total strangers, who described Indians as lazy, dirty people who lived off the government. It was devastating to be a child alone and isolated in a world that saw little if any value in me as a human being because of the color of my skin. But it may well have been just as devastating to live here in this family. I have no idea how to weigh, judge, or give value to the choices made on my behalf. So the questions keep circling, and the answers are elusive, and the currents continue to rotate in on themselves.

Has this line of our family always struggled? Or was this a particular struggle of the past two generations, with our permanent placement outside of the family the result? When did our family get placed in such jeopardy? When we lost the horses? Was that the beginning of the end?

Regardless of what Albert said that first day I met him, about my luckiness to “get out,” I have difficulty agreeing with him. As I look out on the landscape, I consider the people I came home to, watching their traditional practices like a third-string player on a first-string team. No, I don’t feel lucky. I feel cheated, and I can’t explain or defend the sadness, the emptiness, that engulfs me when I’m here or the wistfulness I feel when I’m gone. So I don’t try to explain, and that topic remains silent between us. I imagine it is a wall that makes its presence known only to me.

I am brought back to the present by Albert’s hand on my shoulder. “The other house,” he says, pointing to the flattened area to the north, not far from where we stand, “used to sit over here, in this area. It was a one story, smaller than the first, but larger than Mom and Dad’s.”

I nod. My head is filled with half-recreated images of half-recreated selves, and I’ve stopped asking questions. The silence sways between us, and Delphine, as if reading the tension, asks, “Ready to go back?” Her gentle voice beckons me to agree, and I do so with a nod filled with exhaustion. She smiles and walks with me, saying, “I think they said they were going to look at photos, and I don’t want it to be too late before we get home.”

The interior of the trailer is large and filled with the familiar trappings of a modern life. The living room holds a dining hutch, a grandfather clock, and comfortable couches that I can see from where I lean against the kitchen counter. This is where we stand and talk about our experiences off the reservation. Linda asks me about my research with other American Indian transracial adoptees, and I begin telling the small group how difficult it has been for us to come home and the reasons for it. It is easy to keep the academic tone out of my voice, because I am really talking about me.

However, in the midst of my telling, Pete launches into a story of when he left the reservation to go work elsewhere. “I think they called it ‘relocation,’” he explained, adding that when he came back, no one here welcomed him home. “It was really hard to come home.” Even now, forty years later, his voice holds a distinct hint of anger, of hurt. “Because we left, and lived in the larger world, when we came back we were different. These people didn’t necessarily see us as being family anymore, let alone part of the tribe.” His voice rises in frustration, and I don’t interrupt; I don’t want to turn this exchange into an argument of “who lost out more.” Because here, in this no-man’s-land of nonbelonging, there are no winners.

But I want to say, at least you were here. You were part of your family; people who knew you as part of the family, as one of the tribe, watched you grow up; they had memories of you in school; they knew who you married. You also had memories of your family, your friends, your community. You, my dispossessed cousin, at least had a chair and a place card at the table. You lived and breathed and came of age in this family’s memory, this community’s memory, this tribe’s memory, not somewhere far away. You lived here all these years, and then you left. No one put you in a car and drove you away before your memories could even solidify, before your community’s memory of you could solidify.

What I do instead is tell a story, my story. “I tried to come home on many occasions, but I had no idea who my family was. No one would tell me that information. Until I was given a file. Only then did I have a family name.” I told them the earliest time I tried to make contact was the summer after graduating with my bachelor’s in anthropology in 1983. I wanted experience doing archaeological fieldwork. I knew the reservation’s lands were getting “loved to death,” as more and more people hiked its mountain trails and fished its rivers. On a whim, I contacted the president of Salish Kootenai College and offered to map cultural sites, not the sacred sites, I clarified, but sites of everyday human habitation, so the tribes could have record of them before the old people who remembered these sites, had stories of these sites, had passed on. He and several other people thought this was a great idea, and I was encouraged to meet with this person, call that person, introduce myself to others. With each contact I mentioned that my family was the Plants, that my mother (I didn’t mention she was my birth mother) was Clara Victoria Plant. Did they know any Plants? No one indicated they were familiar with the names, but I kept providing them, hoping word would somehow get back to anyone in the family that I was looking for them. I was depending on the Moccasin Telegraph to do its magic.

In the meantime my project made its way through the labyrinth of people and departments until I finally was able to present to the tribal council.

And then I waited for a response.

But none came—not about my family, not about the project. Not long after that the chatter of the archaeological proposal became silent. There were no phone calls, no emails, no correspondence of any kind. I had no idea why it failed. Finally, I got ahold of a woman who explained, apologetically, that the tribal medicine man had been consulted. The project had been scrapped when he stated, “There will never be an archaeologist on this reservation.” And that was it, kaput. My last-ditch effort to come home had failed. I never tried again.

Delphine and Albert exchange quiet whispers. I stop talking, thinking they have something to add to the conversation. Delphine looks at me and smiles. “Albert has a story about that,” she said, her voice soft.

“Really? Tell me.” I lean forward anxious to hear anything he has to say to fill in the blanks.

Albert smiles and shakes his head. “No, I’ll wait until we go home.”

“C’mon,” I chide gently, thinking he is just being shy.

“No,” he says more emphatically. “I’ll wait.”

An uncomfortable silence stretches until Linda motions us to the kitchen table, and we gather around notebooks of photos. Gently opening the binding, I scan the sepia and black-and-white prints that document the lives and places of this family. I study the photos of the homestead, surprised at how different they are from the images I had created in my mind just hours before. These structures dated back to the turn of the twentieth century, if not before, and their rustic appearance reminds me that someone’s sweat and labor built these cabins. A photo taken in the adjacent yard depicts a young Vic, beautiful and smiling for the camera. Ronni, probably seven months old, stands between Vic’s legs, her hands overhead, clasping Vic’s fingers in a tight grip.

As I flip through the pages I search these faces for familiar aspects of myself: the almond-shaped eyes, the smile, the round cheeks, the abruptly straight hair. There are faces that look back at me that mirror my sons’ faces: their cheekbones, their jawline, their mouths. While my gaze and fingers follow the familiar contours of genetic connection, I become aware that this was a photographic story of a family, my family, and I am absent, even in time overlaps. It is as if destiny had already moved me toward something else.

These people who sit with me at the table are my guides on this journey of self and my relationship to others, who at one time were not others. But like any uncomfortable history, there are land mines. Unfortunately, the land mines are never apparent until stepped on, a badly chosen word, a perceived snub, too much pressure on a fragile relationship. After the blast the devastation left on the psyche is profound, and while one sits in a stupor questioning exactly what happened, the blood rains down on those who’ve witnessed the wreckage.

It is dark by the time we reach Albert and Delphine’s house, and I feel antsy to get back to my sister’s house—my night vision has deteriorated in recent years, and the highway, even on good days, is dangerous.

“What was the story you wanted to tell me?” I prod Albert after sitting for a few moments in one of the living-room chairs. To be honest, I’d thought of nothing else in the interim between leaving Pete and Linda’s and coming to this home. My mind continues to return to his statement, turning the possibilities over like a worry stone.

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, and when he faces me he looks sheepish. “I don’t really want to say,” he begins. The smile is there, but it is apologetic, guarded. His eyes watch me watch him. “I’m afraid that you won’t think as highly of me afterward as you do now.”

A jolt of adrenaline rushes along my chest, but I force what I hope is a genuine smile, an encouraging smile. “Albert, there is nothing that is ever going to change my opinion of you. What is it?”

He sighs and shifts again, clearing his throat, his voice somber. The sudden shift in mood scares me.

“Well, Johnny came to me one day. He told me about this archaeologist who wanted to record sites. We’d had so many bad experiences with people, with scientists taking knowledge and leaving us with nothing.” He pauses and looks directly at me. “I was the one who said there would be no archaeologists on this reservation. I was the one who put a stop to that project. Of course,” he adds, looking directly at me, with pain in his eyes, “I had no idea it was you.”

My eyes cloud with unshed tears, and the familiar frustration stirs. How could he have known? Of all the times I’d been here, stating my name, who I was, who I had been, no one told him I’d been looking for the family. Just as in the summer of 1983, when I tried to offer the only thing I had to offer, my knowledge, no one in the family even knew I existed. My adoption had been closed, the records sealed, like every other adoption in the 1950s and 1960s. My amended birth certificate and my sealed records that could be opened only by a court order effectively erased my existence from this family, from this tribe. The fact that I had no access to my “before” life had forced a separation between him and me. I hate this iron wedge of policy!

My throat is tight with anger, with sadness, with bitter regret. But I smile at him across the space of the room, because none of it is his fault. I smile and shake my head and ask as gently as I can, “How could you have known it was me?”