Flathead Indian Reservation, Polson, Montana, June 2013.
I am here, at the condo on Flathead Lake, to write what will be my memoir. It is quiet and away from the day-to-day events that would typically pull me away: housework, gardening, lunch with friends. But it is also away from the people who could provide the most support, as I examine my life and the events that framed it.
On the first day of my arrival, I question my decision to do this alone, but it is too late. I am here. I soon realize I need no alarm clock. I wake consistently at five each morning, when the darkness becomes confused as to whether it is coming or going. Each morning I pad into the living room and draw the white accordion shade, revealing the Mission Mountains, large black mounds silhouetted against a dark-lavender sky. Within a half hour the sun will come out of hiding, giving me time to boil water for tea, pull on a pair of shorts and a sweater, slip on sandals, and brush my teeth.
Then I start my day.
As the sky turns a light violet I head to the dock. Along the way I see minnows darting in the protective water as well as the beginnings of plant life establishing itself on the sandy bottom. Few boats are moored in the spaces along the wooden arms that are shaped like an E. I settle myself at a picnic table on the farthest edge. I’ve brought my mug of steaming Earl Grey, my iPhone, a pen, and my green leather writing journal that I’d purchased specifically for this trip. The cover is embossed with Celtic crosses and braided designs, and just holding it provides a sense of calm. I wrap my hands around the hot mug of tea and watch the steam swirl in the cool morning air. Then I close my eyes, and I can hear the world awaken: the quiet hum of cars on the nearby highway, the wings of birds whispering in the disappearing darkness, the gentle talk of ducks from an unknown distance. I pull the morning air deep into my lungs and whisper a prayer of thanks to the Creator. The mountains wear a halo of gold as the sun inches upward. I put down my tea and take up my pen and my journal and begin to write, looking up every so often to see the world change as the sun rises over the Missions.
A colony of insects spins itself into a dust devil, hovering above the water, which froths, as a school of fish spies the column of insects. Nearby small dark birds dip and sway in pairs, gliding above the pane of liquid glass, while overhead an osprey beats its wings, heading quickly for better hunting grounds. All the while tiny minnows migrate along the edge of the jetty near my feet.
When the sun is well up, three families of geese, goslings in the center, swim in front of the condo. The babies are small downy things, their feet paddling easily to keep up with the adults. In contrast, a female merganser’s thirteen ducklings swim frantically around her, wearing themselves down until, one by one, they are allowed to climb on her back, seeking respite.
During my month-long stay, every day, except the stormy ones, start like this.
Who else had been privy to our removal? I’ve turned this question over in my mind long before my arrival; however, now that I’m here, it appears ceaselessly in my thoughts. The first person to ask is Gloria, my sister ten years my senior. She will most likely have remembered something.
Gloria lives in the same tribal housing neighborhood that Vic had lived in. Inside, her house is familiar in that it has the exact same layout. When I knock (such a white thing to do, the white voice reminds me), I am greeted by two kids, a little girl who is perhaps five or six and a boy, about age seven. The boy stares at me, sullen and annoyed.
“Is Gloria here?” I ask.
While neither of them moves, the boy yells, “Grandma! Someone’s here and wants to talk to you.” Then they disappear into the house.
“Well, who is it?” I hear Gloria say, her voice gravelly, like Vic’s.
“I don’t know. Some woman.”
Framed by short white hair, Gloria’s face peers from behind the hallway wall. “Well, hi there, Charmain! Come on in.” She holds the door open as I step inside. In the intervening years Gloria has taken on more and more characteristics of her mom: she looks like her, sounds like her, and moves like her, which is disconcerting. Vic has been dead for five years.
I wrap my arms around Gloria’s thin, petite frame, almost frail in its existence. But her voice reminds me she is anything but frail. It is that voice, coarse and gritty, which she uses to address the two kids, who have come into the living room to stare at me.
“This is your great-aunt Vicki Charmain,” she says, as she taps a pack of cigarettes into the palm of her hand. She takes one, cups the flame, and pulls a deep breath, smoke pouring from her nostrils as she exhales. “She’s my sister.” Each gives me a doubtful stare. I feel awkward under their examination.
Gloria lets them stare a bit longer, then tells them to “Go play, or watch TV.” The boy throws himself on the nearby couch, grabs the remote, and turns on the living-room set. “Go watch in your room,” Gloria growls and stares him down.
“But I want to watch in here,” he counters, throwing me a sharp look.
Her look is sharper. “Go watch in your room.”
Quiet settles into the living room, and I sit on the couch while she sits on the lounge chair. We chat briefly about my travels. I finally ask Gloria the question that has dogged me over the past several months. “Were you at the house when social services came to take Ronni, James Allen, and me?” She pauses before shaking her head. She puts a bottle of beer to her lips and soon after pulls another cigarette from the pack.
“I wasn’t there,” she says. “I wasn’t even aware you’d been taken. I was living in Washington at the time, with another family.”
I hide my disappointment. This is really the only missing piece of the puzzle; I’ve struck out.
Gloria’s attention becomes focused on a photo across the room. She hoists herself out of the easy chair, complaining of arthritis in her back. She tells me she’s on painkillers to deal with that pain. Bent and stiff, she crosses the room and pulls a glossy photo from the corner of the frame, which holds her tenth-grade high school picture, in which she is young and beautiful and without arthritis.
“Have you seen this picture?” she asks, showing me the photo she’d removed. I stand up and reach for it. “I had a larger one, but I loaned it to Vern. He never gave it back!” She sounds astonished at Vern’s gall and looks at me, her brown eyes wide in disbelief. I can’t tell if her annoyance is real or feigned.
I return my gaze to the photo and furrow my brow. I don’t have any memory of this picture being taken, yet there we are, Gloria, Rosa, Ronni, me, James Allen, Roberta, and Vern. “When was the picture taken?”
“Ma’s funeral, in 2008,” she answers. “The only one missing is Vern’s older brother.”
And Robin, but she’d died.
All of us are smiling against a background that looks like winter, except it was in mid-March when snow blew harsh against my skin. I am not really surprised I don’t remember this photo. It turns out I hadn’t remembered much of anything that happened for the three months following Vic’s funeral.
Vic’s funeral was in March. In June my father-in-law celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in Colorado Springs, along with his wife, one of his brothers and his brother’s family, Rick’s siblings and their families, and Rick and me and our sons. I remember standing in the foyer of the upscale restaurant, holding a glass of wine while talking with Rick’s sister, Laura, and her youngest daughter, Kendra.
“It is so good to see you!” I exclaimed. “It’s been a long time.”
“No, it hasn’t.” Kendra said, giggling. “We just saw you.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, smiling. “It’s been, what? A year?”
They exchanged a look of concern before looking back at me. “We were at your house two months ago,” Laura added, as if prodding my memory. She chuckled, thinking I was teasing.
“No, you weren’t.” My smile faltered, as I grasped around for a memory that would match up with what they were telling me. But none existed. Laura looked from my face to the wine glass and back again, worry etching her features.
She spoke to me, carefully, as one might a child. “No, we were there. Remember? Kendra and I came to visit . . .”
Nothing.
How could I lose two months of time?
The following October I called Laura. “I think I know why I don’t remember you visiting last spring. Vic, my birth mom, had died just two weeks before you came up. And from that point on, I really don’t remember much of anything, until Bill’s birthday celebration. It’s as if two months totally disappeared off the radar.”
The photo revealed our family in so many ways. Sisters leaned in toward one another; Vern, the protector, was in the back. James Allen wore a broad smile. But my unease was visible, with my stilted body language, arms close to my body, hands folded over my abdomen.
As always, I skim these faces for family similarities. Gloria looks the most like Vic. Vern and his sister, Roberta, are clearly related, with Ronni looking more like them than anyone else. Rosa is a mixture: her eyes are like Gloria’s but the same dimples that crease Ronni’s and Roberta’s face crease hers. Only James Allen and I don’t fit quite as easily into this reunion, neither to each other, nor to our siblings. James Allen’s face is sharply angular with a strong chin and high cheekbones, his eyes dark and intense. Me? I’m not sure. I’m slightly darker. I have the same nose as several of my siblings. Our eyes are similar, kind of. Then I wonder if I’m just searching, just trying to find something that is the same. I want to see us as related, but it’s difficult being outside of this circle. They’ve known one another, grown up around one another, been used to seeing one another. All that has been overlaid with the concept of sibling, and whether they are full or half siblings, they don’t care. They accept the complicated relationships without question. I’m the only one who cares about such labels.
I returned. They never really left.
Ronni and I sit in the early morning on the deck chairs off the condo’s patio. The air is still and the water calm, and I watch as a group of Canada geese swim by. There are three adult pairs that surround seventeen goslings. Although I assume these are three separate family units, they are so tightly knit it is difficult to ascertain really which goslings are with which sets of parents. “Don’t you think that’s unusual? That three families of geese would be swimming together like that?”
Ronni looks at me, a sparkle in her dark-brown eyes. “Oh,” she says gesturing toward the group, “those are rez geese.”
We laugh.
I spend the first two weeks of June trying to work up the emotional strength to reconnect with other family members. I tell myself that learning more about them allows me to learn more about me. But within the first couple of weeks the goal sounds hollow, forced. I catch up on their lives through other family members, hearing about their ongoing problems with alcohol or drugs. Some are in domestic-violence situations with no intention of leaving; some have lost their own kids to the social-work system, and consequently their grandkids are at risk as well. Some try to be good parents, or grandparents, to fill in the gaps but end up falling back into their old ways of coping under pressure, their own substance use taking a central role in their lives. Some have attempted suicide. Some sell their medications to make ends meet.
I want to scream: You are repeating the patterns that got Ronni, James Allen, and me removed from this family, and you are doing it willingly, with full realization! You are destroying yourselves and destroying your children, your future. Our future, as Indian people! Don’t you realize another generation is in danger of being removed? Of leaving? Are you prepared that when they come home they’ll come home filled with confusion, hurt, and anger? Like me? Or worse, what if they don’t feel anything at all?
With each story I am overwhelmed by such sadness, such hopelessness. And the dysfunctional strings are so intertwined, they look like macramé gone wrong, with no way to resort them and fix the problem. At times like this I feel a twinge of survivor’s guilt.
One day, halfway through June, Ronni and I drive the gravel back roads of the reservation, dust boiling behind us, rising on the breezeless air, obliterating everything from the perspective of my rearview mirrors. This road is unfamiliar, as it snakes through the southwest corner of the reservation, where there are no markings to indicate whether I am on tribal land, private ranch land, or government land. Sagebrush carpets the rolling arroyos, while bluebirds and trilling meadowlarks sit on fence posts surveying the land, their voices carrying easily through my open window.
I slow down as I come to a bridge tagged with paint, whose reds, blacks, and blues argue with one another, asserting the importance of their messages, loud and harsh, against the mundane background of concrete. Ronni tells me this is Sloan’s Bridge, a concrete kaleidoscope of names, notes, and initials that memorialize the men, women, and children who died in the various ways people die here. No surface is unmarked, a testament to the reservation’s high mortality.
A souped-up Ford F-150 is parked midway on the bridge, and I pass it slowly, looking at the two young men who stare, unsmiling, as I drive past. Old habits die hard, as I become acutely aware of the eagle feather, a gift from Ronni, that hangs from the rearview mirror. The movie Deliverance comes to mind as we watch one another, the green water below swirling in dangerous eddies. I’ve been conditioned to fear being marked as Indian in an unfriendly white world.
Over the ensuing days depression settles around me like a wet wool cape, as I think about the way old patterns rework themselves into new generations. In this state I don’t visit family; I can’t witness the destruction. My heart, already so bruised, shatters as I watch the blind acceptance of living a seemingly predetermined life.
In addition, the condo feels small, and my words, my pages, stack up and cramp my movements, my thoughts. All this simmers into anger, anger at myself for wearing such rose-colored glasses and moving here with no forethought of what was really going on and anger at the family I was born into because, over the years, I had convinced myself we were made of stronger stuff. But now I feel the oppressive nature of the reservation, and more than anything I want to pack my car and drive away from this place, with its wounds and spilled blood, the social body reeking like a gangrene infection.
But I don’t.
Deep into depression, I phone Gyda, a psychologist and fellow tribal member. I figure she’ll understand where I am and give me direction—because the direction I’m going has bled me out.
Gyda and I agree to meet two days later at the little Victorian restaurant in downtown Missoula. It’s clearly the type of place where university professors and urban professionals gather to talk about projects, in progress or upcoming. I listen to their conversations as I wait for Gyda.
She arrives, wearing that familiar beautiful smile that makes the clouds lift. “How are you?” she asks with a flourish, as she slides into the booth, ordering coffee from the server who hovers nearby.
“Fine.” I smile, but my smile is forced. I don’t want to say anything more because my voice will crack. And there is this facade I have to maintain. We’re fine. Everybody’s fine here. We’re all fine. We order breakfast and chat about inconsequential things, my family, her family, our vacations. But once the plates are cleared away and we sit with our respective cups cradled in our hands, Gyda asks how things really are. I wince. She’s able to read me with an uncomfortable accuracy. And like the deluge of the rains I’ve watched over the lake in the past several days, I tell her. I tell her of my quest to find witnesses to our removal; my need to connect with, while at the same time distancing myself from, family; and the painful psychic lacerations that happen in the aftermath. Tears form and I look out the window at the cars going by, concentrating so hard on anything else but the heavy heart that keeps me in this booth.
“I wanted to be strong,” I say, the tears flowing despite my best efforts. “I’d wanted to prove I was strong, that I was doing the right thing in being here. But the devastation is heartbreaking, and I can’t watch the self-destruction because it is heartbreaking. More than anything I wanted to be in this space to prove I belong here, but I don’t. There is such pain. I can’t witness the pain.”
I stop because I can’t continue. I breathe deep, take a sip from the cup shaking in my hands, and get myself under control so I can meet her gaze. I feel like such a failure, with my naïveté and Pollyanna ideas of how things should be. When I finally look at her, she gives me a gentle smile, wistful, and her black eyes are liquid. She lifts the cup of coffee to her lips and sips before she answers.
“Oh, I know,” Gyda says. “I know exactly what you’re describing. Being in love with the reservation is like being in love with a drunk. You can’t help but like the place and the people; they’re loveable characters, kind and well-meaning, but it’s all so damned dysfunctional.” She glances out the window and returns her gaze to me, her smile tender. “But you can’t spend your life here, or you’ll just become part of that pattern. You’ll drown.”
My heart fractures at the truth of her words. I now understand there is no place for me here. It will destroy me. It has already begun to do so.
Gyda suggests I meet Victor Charlo, a Salish poet. The universe worked its magic, and the following weekend Ronni and I happened to run into him at a local diner, where we’d gone to have breakfast. We invited him to join us, and he did so, happily. He has published a book of poetry, Put Sey (Good Enough), about his life, his family, and his people’s experiences as Native people. Born in 1938, Victor lived through many of the policies that ripped us asunder: child placement, boarding school, relocation, and termination—the proposal by Congress to end all relationships between the United States and American Indian tribes. In his poem “Bad Wine” he describes our history, our pain:
You can love a dying Indian,
But when he drinks bad wine
And breaks your best glass
You give him to the wind.
Before Ronni and I leave, he tells me, “When I wrote this book of poetry, it was to tell myself that I was good enough. We are good enough.”
Despite these introductions my depression finds a home, digging in as I write page after page, day after day, night after night. Even my trips with Ronni along the back roads of the reservation, or my lunches with Vern, or my visits with friends never hold it at bay for long. It always comes crawling back when I sit in the condo and throw my experiences on the virtual page for sometimes eight, ten, twelve hours at a time. At the end of those days, I flop on the leather couch and turn on reruns of Law and Order: SVU, watching episode after episode after episode, downing a beer, eating a sandwich and chips, and remembering nothing about the storyline, not really even caring about the storyline.
“Why do you watch that?” Evelyn asks one evening, laughing, when I tell her how my days are going. “That’s filled with awful stuff.”
“So I can watch someone else’s life go to hell for a change.”
Ronni provides a foundation for me as we spend days driving the dirt roads of the reservation. We visit the tribally owned Kerr Dam and marvel at the Flathead River’s steep, rugged channel cutting through the wide, flat landscape on either side. We tour the reservation’s southwest corner, which lies seemingly forgotten among the sagebrush-covered hills, where the road zigzags and twists in the ripples of ancient Lake Missoula.
On several occasions Ronni and I drive along the western edges of the Mission Valley. Here the land is sectioned like patchwork, agriculture at the center, where mansions, trailers, and log cabins that cave in on themselves exist. Colors, like a blurred Monet, come into focus as short grass, sagebrush, wildflowers, and Victorian gardens follow the land’s undulations. My thoughts continually drift back to Vic, her need to escape using whatever method best served her interests: automobiles, men, alcohol, drugs. I think about violence with her as the victim, the ways she placed herself in dangerous situations: new boyfriends, another marriage, another child, another stab at “normal” when normal didn’t feel comfortable.
We, her children, have paid a high price for her choices. We are still paying the price with our own addictions, our dysfunctions, our need to be a part of something larger than ourselves: the family, the tribe. And the bruising grows deeper and more pronounced. As a result of my musings, I become more and more of a hermit, living in the condo, too exhausted to cook myself a small meal or write or read. Instead, I watch TV, or, on days where my thoughts are too jumbled, I just sit and watch the light move from day to evening over the lake.
One afternoon, on a whim, Ronni and I decide to drive the Jocko Canyon Road. I had checked the road on Google Earth and witnessed its twists and turns as it climbs over a pass through tribal and Forest Service land, eventually intersecting with the Seeley-Swan Highway forty miles later. We stop in St. Ignatius to fill up the car and shop for groceries—sandwich fixings, soda, and chips—and begin our drive along the narrow, paved road, where intersections of culture are the most visible. We pass Mennonites on bikes, the women wearing colorful dresses, their hair drawn neatly into a bun, the strands barely visible under the white eyelet lace caps. We pass American Indian kids walking by the side of the road, laughing. One swings a stick through the tall grass that threatens to grow into pavement. We even pass an Amish buggy, whose occupants are shaded from our eyes beneath the broad, black enclosure.
As we pass a meadow of tall green grass, Ronni points out the window and says, quietly, “This is where they found the body of that woman who’d been missing for several days.”
“I read about the incident on Facebook, but I never heard what happened.”
“No sign of foul play,” Ronni assures me. “But it’s like she wandered off and half fell into an irrigation ditch and died of hypothermia.” She pauses. “That just happened a few days ago.”
The living and the dying exist in the same space.
We drive through dark forests, then stop and cool our feet in the frigid waters of the Jocko River, moving carefully on top of the colorful stones, whose edges had been smoothed by aeons of grating along the stream’s rocky bottom. Driving again, we gain elevation and go through acres of timber, both cut and charred, the latter from fires that had ravaged the high mountain plain many years before. I spot clumps of bear grass, with their ecru cones of densely packed flowers, my favorites, second only to the bitterroot. At this point peace begins to sift into my soul. I breathe easier, my shoulders relax, and a smile, unbidden, unfolds as we move silently through a landscape of mountain flowers, explosions of red, purple, white, and blue. On the fine sand, my tires are silent, and the backside of the Mission Mountains drifts by as if on its own accord.
This is the Montana I love. The people I am learning to dislike and lose respect for don’t exist here: people who hurt one another, who forget about one another, who fail to cherish the existence of one another, who destroy one another. They exist in the mileage behind us, and they’ll exist in the mileage coming up, but right here, on top of the pass, among the bear grass and the lupine, there is no pain.
Before I leave Montana I want to obtain my adoption files, all of my files, from the tribes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. I’ll start with the DPHHS, asking for the files that a tribal judge certified I had a right to access. But I am hesitant, afraid that court order won’t be as strong as I initially believed it would. Currently, all I have is a myriad of documents carefully filed in labeled manila folders that I’ve collected or been given, over the years; these are all the things that tell me about me: copies of my legal adoption records, my enrollment information, ancient per capita correspondence, Vic’s obituary, copies of the letters to the editor that had powered the reunion, and a family pedigree, as well as copies of newspaper articles and transcripts of interviews and podcasts. Some are legal documents; most are interpretations of my life. Although the files are thick, the information is insubstantial. I know nothing about social-worker visits, about decisions, about whether or not Vic had fought, even a little bit, to keep us. These files indicate the end results; I want the introduction.
I extract the court order to open my record, beginning to truly appreciate the fact that right now, there are a lot of people who have far more information about me than I have, including the organization that handled my adoption in 1961—Child and Family Services within the Department of Public Health and Human Services. I find their number online, scribbling it on the pad next to me. But instead of dialing, I stare at the number for a long time, gathering my courage to call. What if they say they can’t give me that information? I think of all the ways “no” has been said: no, you shouldn’t be in anthropology; no, you shouldn’t be in college; no, you don’t have any family; no, I can’t give you that information. But this particular “no” matters more than the previous ones.
I dial and take a deep breath. It rings twice, and a female voice answers. I state my name and my request. “Please hold,” she says and transfers me. I am transferred two more times, until I talk with Heidi, the woman who assures me she is in charge of the files I seek.
After listening to my request, she asks, perplexed, “But why do you want them?”
“Because I want to know what’s in those files,” I respond. I had planned on this being a yes-or-no answer, not a question with which I have to defend my need for information.
“But why do you want to know? What exactly are you looking for?”
“I’m looking for information about my adoption.” My face reddens, and I wonder why I am embarrassed for pushing this issue when no one can see me. But I am begging. For my baby information. Who else does this?
“But what are you looking for exactly?” she prods. “Perhaps I can pull the information most pertinent for you.”
“I want the entire file that concerns me and my adoption.” My voice shakes.
“Well, that’s not something we do,” she explains carefully. “I can give you some information, but not an entire file.”
“I have a judge-signed court order that says you can.” I play my ace.
“Which judge?”
“I don’t know her.”
“She’s a tribal judge here on the Flathead Reservation.”
“Oh, I don’t know that we consider that kind of court order official. I would have to look at it.”
“Look, this is what the court order says,” I answer and proceed to read the document aloud over the phone: “Having read the Petition with attachments filed by Susan J. Harness and having heard her statements, the Court finds good cause to authorize the release of any and all records pertaining to the circumstances surrounding her adoption as a child.”
This sounds like a court document the state should honor.
“This is what you need to do,” she advises, when I’m finished reading. “Tell me which documents you want, and I’ll make copies and mail them to you. You’ll need to email me your request and what you would like from the file and send it to me as PDF. I will also need a copy of your photo ID and your current mailing address.”
“Look,” I bargain, “I’m only two and a half hours from Helena. I can be there any day this week, and I can get the information from you then, in person.”
“That’s not how we do it,” she clarifies. “You need to make the request in writing, and I need to mail you the contents. We just don’t hand out those files to just anyone.”
“I’m not just anyone,” I say, my voice rising in frustration. “I’m the person those files are about. And it’s not as if I’m asking for something I don’t have a right to. I received that court order because both my birth mother and adoptive mother signed affidavits that they agreed those files should be open. I’ve met my birth mother. I’ve spoken with her. My adoptive mother agrees that information is mine; it is a significant part of who I am. It’s not as if there are any more family secrets.”
“I’m sorry, just email me the information, and I’ll see what I can do.”
I know I won’t write the email. Not now. I feel defeated. I decide to try to obtain the information through the tribes. I call Evelyn and ask who I should talk with to obtain my files. She gives me a couple of names and the departments to start with—Enrollment and then the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Call them ahead of time so they can have the files ready when you arrive,” she advises. Before returning the signed court order to its manila folder, I once more run my fingers along the raised-letter ridges. Its strength seemed so official, so filled with power. But unless I have an explanation deemed worthy, I am losing hope that it is worth anything.
It is ten miles between my house and the Tribal Complex. In route I contact Enrollment to give them a heads-up. A man answers, whose voice is kind and gentle. I briefly introduce myself and my reason for calling, but then I wince at the dead space of his pause. “I have a judge’s court order, signed by Judge Tanner,” I add.
“Well, I do have a file,” the man at Enrollment explains, not unkindly. “But I can’t give it to you. If you need something specific, perhaps I can find that and have it ready when you get here.”
“No, I’m not looking for anything specific. I just want to see my file.”
“But why? I mean, if there was something you were looking for I could get you a copy.”
The fatigue, I was fighting the mental fatigue of begging. And I hadn’t expected to do that here. “I just want to see my file. I have a judge’s court order that says I can do that.” I can feel my throat tighten up.
“We don’t typically allow people into the files. Again, if there is a document that would help you find something specific that you’re looking for, I can make copies of that and give it to you.”
My throat hardens to glass. “I just want to see my file.” The line between being difficult and being frantic is thin.
“Look,” he said, as if explaining it yet another way, his voice still gentle, “if there’s something you were looking for, I can certainly pull the information and have a copy ready for you when you arrive.”
“Why can’t I see my file when I have a judge’s order?” My throat shatters, and I wonder why my reasons are not acceptable.
“Do you have the order with you?”
“Yes, I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can find, but to be honest,” he said, almost apologetically, “I don’t understand why, exactly, you want to see your file.”
Tears gather and my throat breaks. “Because it’s my file,” I choke. “It’s about my life.”
He pauses, and his voice becomes quiet. “Okay. Well, I’ll be here, waiting for you.”
And he is. The front-desk receptionist points me back to his office, and this tall, slender man, with a neat braid down his back, stands and shakes my hand. His face is brown, kind, and I am silently grateful he agreed. He returns to his Office Depot executive chair, adjusts his glasses, and examines the court order before placing it in the manila file folder labeled with my legal name. He types in the password on his keyboard, and his virtual files pop up, including my official pedigree. I’d always been told I was half Indian; no one knew, or cared, what the other half was. Actually, the pedigree states, I’m five-sixteenths. “Why is there a difference between what I’d been told by my birth mom and what you have?”
“See,” he said, pointing to the genealogy chart on his computer, “this is where you lost it.” He scrolls over and plants his finger over one of the names. “This is where your family began losing that blood, back here in this generation.” I’m not even sure how long ago that was. I don’t ask. But in our family the quantum has steadily decreased over generations. My children cannot be enrolled; their quantum is too low. I sigh and remind myself the official purpose of blood quantum was to ensure we, as Native people, obtain what was rightfully ours. Unofficially, it ensured we would eventually breed ourselves out of existence.
I stare at the computer screen and process the information that glows before me, my birth family’s records, which stretch back to 1748 and contain ancestors who are Iroquois, Chippewa, Assiniboine, Kootenai, Cree, and French, the latter provided by a Frenchman named Baptiste La Jieux. And here I am, scrabbling to hold onto a fragmented identity someone allows me to have, because those files can’t be given “to just anyone.”
By the time we’re finished, I believe the gentle man in Enrollment understands the importance I have placed on these papers. He offers me a copy of everything he has, which I will add to my files. Before saying good-bye with a formal handshake, he points me in the direction of my next appointment: the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Lands office. It is in the building across the parking lot.
He gives me the name of the person to ask for, and I find her sitting behind the desk in a small, overcrowded office. She is serious; she offers no smile. My gaze wanders over the office, across some small memento that indicates she is a Flathead Reservation tribal member, a photo, and large bound files, until it finds the wall-mounted, framed Certificate of Appreciation for her efforts in successfully moving unending files through probate effectively and efficiently. She takes my court order, glances at it, and puts it aside on her desk. I watch this action with a certain amount of frustration. I’d purchased three copies of this order for ten dollars each, and so far only one person has granted my request.
“So what are you looking for, exactly?” she asks after I explain my mission.
“I’m looking for my file.”
Uninterested, she rephrases her question. “Are you looking for a specific document?”
And the tape hits rewind.
People don’t seem to understand why this piece of paper is so important, that it has the power to unlock a life, an identity, that until now has been inaccessible because of sealed records. They, with their full lives, genealogies, and unquestioned documentation, don’t understand that my life book begins on chapter 3. Chapters 1 and 2 are located in various bureau drawers and file cabinets, three-ring binders, and other people’s memories. The people who are the gatekeepers for my information have all grown up with parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and assorted relatives, who all have snippets of recollections tucked behind their ears like accountants’ pencils. I imagine they heard the sordid family details of breakups, of babies, of boredom, of booze or worse, from family members themselves or from someone who knew the family, who cared about the family. They’ve heard the stories of themselves as infants, probably their first steps; they’ve been compared to parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, or grandparents for their looks, their idiosyncrasies, their characteristics.
When considered from this perspective, their questioning seems innocent. What could these files possibly contain that was so important? Yes, they might think only portions of that file are pertinent proof of a lived experience, but whatever reason I provide is not deemed good enough.
“The file is still in probate,” the woman continues.
“I thought probate was for when you had an estate. Vic didn’t have anything.”
“Perhaps she had an allotment. I don’t know. But after it goes through probate it will go to the Clerk of Courts Office. Just make sure they have a current address, and they can mail it to you.”
“How long will that take?”
“I have no idea. Just make sure you have an updated mailing address and leave it with the Clerk of Courts Office.”
And just like that, I am dismissed. As I leave, I glance at the court order that sits forgotten on her desk, and I wonder where it will end up.
I once more make my way through the maze that is tribal headquarters to the Clerk of Courts Office. I stand at the window and am glanced at briefly by a young Native woman behind the desk. The Native woman who eventually addresses me, not the woman behind the desk, is brisk, and I feel as if I am taking up her time with such a frivolous request. She leaves in an officious manner and disappears behind a row of files; the woman who now faces the window actively avoids my gaze. There are no smiles, at least toward me. But these women smile at each new person that comes to the window, and there is an exchange with marked differences: there is recognition, interest.
“Hey, Doris,” the gaze-avoider greets a newcomer to the small room. “No, Charlie just left. Yeah, I heard he won two hundred bucks at the casino! What are you looking for?”
I had been helped with a short, concise “What do you need?” My reply had required no further interaction. My blood pressure rises, and I feel a familiar headache begin at my temples. The longer I remain in this building, walk these halls, knock on doors, talk to strangers about why they have the information I need with no success of actually obtaining anything useful, the more frayed my nerves become. And as I stand here watching people ignore me, step around me, avoid me, I realize something disconcertingly important.
I don’t want to be here. I want to get in my car and drive to Polson, where I can enter the white-owned business near the condo where I live and talk to the owner about trivial things, and I know what the rules of those discussions will be. When I walk in, I will be greeted; I will extend greetings in return. I know when I see him slip his hands easily into his khaki pockets, he is relaxed, and we’d talk about the weather, about the summer traffic, about the noise of the boats on the lake in the morning. I know when he frowns he’s considering my request for information and how he can fulfill it; it will not be because he is annoyed I’m in his store. And once these niceties are completed, we’ll get down to the business of sending a package or pricing shipping options or whatever it is I’m there for.
I know this because this interaction is culturally defined. I’ve spent my life learning it, using it, perfecting it. I can translate people’s facial expressions, body language, subject matter, with amazing clarity. I’ve spent a lifetime doing it. In the white world. But here on the rez, I know nothing. I can’t read these faces; I can’t read their body language. I can’t interpret their responses or lack of responses. I can’t read between the lines of what is being said because I’ve never been taught how to. Those within this culture don’t see these ways of communicating as unique; they just are. I imagine the people I find myself surrounded by at this moment may feel as uncomfortable in my world as I do in theirs—we are outsiders together but for different reasons. I am not only an outsider within this group; I am located so far at the edges of the margins that I will never be fully accepted by the core. I don’t have the master key.
During the 1960s and 1970s the whole purpose of placing Indian children with only white families was to force us to become assimilated, to become white. If this social program was proven successful, we, as children, couldn’t afford to be around the people most influential in “holding us back,” that is, family members or tribal members. Therefore, we were not encouraged to play with American Indian children or otherwise engage with American Indians in general. We were not introduced to Native people. If we traveled to the reservation, it was clear we were on “their” land, not ours. Yes, we were outsiders within.
Thinking back to the three families of geese that swam each morning in front of the condo, I am stunned with the care that existed within this small flock: the group was always together, the goslings swam within the pairs of adults, and the goslings were never out of the parents’ sight. Any sojourns goslings took onto shore to graze the healthy green grass were heavily monitored by the adults. It was amazing that in the three and a half weeks I’d been there, the parents hadn’t lost a single gosling.
These were definitely not rez geese.