ROOT FEAST

Then it was dawn, my daughter hunched asleep on the seat beside me, and we were driving toward the sun, up and over the slope of Mt. Hood into the desert. I had been invited to the Root Feast, and I brought Rosemary to learn there among the Warm Springs people, the Wasco, and the Paiute. Somewhere in the forest, as we drifted east, she rubbed her eyes and looked around.

“Dad,” she said, coming out of a dream, “I always think boys are stronger, but girls remember better. Boys are tough, but girls remember. That’s fair. We each have one thing to do.” Cedar and hemlock shadows flickered across her face as we traveled.

At Warm Springs, inside the longhouse, things started slowly by not really starting at all. It seems we awaited the seventh drummer. The long dancing floor at the center was open, and people sat in knots of two and three around the perimeter. Somewhere, just out of sight, there was a bustle of people very busy preparing the feast. The old women had been at work for days, digging, and even the inmates at the jail had pitched in to help peel the roots for us. But in the big room, we looked at each other and smiled. On my lap, Rosemary pulled down my head to whisper.

“Dad, why did the men with guns come and take this world from the Indians? I guess they wanted to have the whole world to theirselves!” She thought for a time. “But there has to be a place for everyone to live—with peace, and harmony, and care, and love. Those four things for everyone.”

Then the drums started and five dancers, a men’s line of two and a women’s line of three, facing each other, began to spring-step around the hall, twirling their bodies into the line like ouzels entering a sacred river, and passing before us, their eyes inward, cast down. The heartbeat drums shaped the hall inward. We slid together into that older rhythm than history.

The drumming stopped. An old man stood at the microphone, held it two-handed like a staff for support, then raised his right hand and spoke.

“Our children, where are our children? They have gone from us into the wilderness.” His hand swept away toward the west. “Into the wilderness, and we don’t know where they are. We don’t know how to help them there. If they would come back here”—his arm curled inward to embrace the circle we made—“we could feed them, and take care of them. Back to us here.”

My mind followed his hand outward, and back. When he said “the wilderness,” I knew he meant the city of Portland, my city, the hard streets where the tribe’s children wandered and faltered. When he said “back here,” I knew he meant the desert, the dry, open land my country allowed to his people. Within this circle, the children could be raised.

Then hours of dancing, and prayers, speeches in English and in Sahaptian. I wondered what all this would mean to my daughter. What would she understand, or remember? After four hours of drumming, dancing, and prayers, Rosemary looked up at me.

“Dad,” she said, “I’ve gotta have a Pepsi.” So we got her a Pepsi. And then she sat still for another hour and watched the dance.

The drums stopped in unison. The dance floor cleared. There was a great bustle as the long mats were unrolled across the floor, and a clatter as plates were put down, cups, napkins along the length of the mat. It was another kind of dance, as women came in a file to set our places, serving the places. It was time, and the women came dancing in a row, all in beads and otter fur, each who had helped, from young to old, each with their platters of camas roots, bitterroot, wapato, huckleberries, chokecherries, and other wild foods I did not know. Behind them, the men came dancing with their platters of salmon and venison. All the bounty of the wilderness—the generous wilderness of the reservation land—was spread on long mats across the floor. My daughter knelt beside me, and everyone settled in double rows, facing each other across the feast. Then an old man was saying a blessing, and a mother beside me began quietly translating for me: “Blessing fish, blessing berries, and roots. . .God in the roots we walk on, as we dig them up. . .children will know. . .blessing. . .dancing. . . .” Then a woman at the microphone was giving a prayer in words I could not understand, and everyone was busy. The mother saw my trouble.

“This is the ritual tasting,” she said. “Taste the bitterroot, and give your daughter some. Taste the huckleberry, and give your daughter some. Now taste the salmon, and give her some. Now taste the venison, and give her some. Now. . .now pig out!”

I looked around. Everyone was feasting. I learned by watching how to join salmon and camas in a single bite with my fingers, to dip bread in fat. I had never seen such feasting, and as we ate, women behind us kept advancing, placing more food over our shoulders to the mat, spilling candy, bread, and oranges to fill any empty space. And finally, there was a distribution of gallon-size ziplock bags. Everyone was gathering what was left.

“We had a death,” the woman said to me, “coming back from California. We got a funeral now, upriver. Grandpa’s left. Our old man everyone knows. We are all going.”

Everyone rose, and we filed out in a circle around the longhouse for a final prayer. The sun beat down. Wind riffled through the ribbons on the shirts of young boys, and jingled the bells on the dresses of the girls. And then it was done. Together, we cleared the floor. As I turned to go, a boy caught my eye and threw me a chocolate kiss wrapped in silver foil.

I went around asking, “Is there a place I can pay? Can I make donation?” No one would look at me. Everyone was busy, with a clang of pans, and a dance of brooms.

Finally, an old woman stopped beside me, turned her head to hear me.

“Is there a place I can contribute?” I asked her. She looked at me.

“You will find a way,” she said. And she turned away and went into the kitchen.

My child wandered among the people on her own, and I found myself walking down behind the longhouse, to the fire-pit where the salmon had been prepared. I looked over the blanket that had been set up between poles as a wind-break, and saw Verbena, old friend, sitting in a folding aluminum chair with her eyes closed as the wind blew ashes sifting down on her face, her gray braids. She opened her eyes, and squinted through the smoke in my direction.

“Oh, Kim,” she said slowly, “I wrote you a letter, but never sent it. But you’re here, so I guess I didn’t need to.” She looked around for another chair, but I crouched down by the fire. We were quiet for a time.

“Yeah,” she said, “twenty five pounds of roots is a lot of work, you know. Each one is so little. I’m glad our prisoners could help us peel them. We never would have been ready without everyone helping. It’s always like that.” And soon she is telling me of recent sorrows, and their blessings.

“When diabetes took my husband’s sight, and then both his legs, it brought the children home—now he has everything in reach.”

I tell her I had asked how to contribute in some way, and what the woman had told me. “Yes,” she said, “yes, Kim, you will find a way. You will find a way. Maybe not tomorrow, or next week. But you will.” She had bent to lift a fish from the grill over the coals, a whole salmon, wrapping it in foil. She handed it to me, hot.

“This was left over,” she said. “Take it. The head is a delicacy.” I stared down at the bundle in my hands. “Go,” she said, “and tell me sometime about the way you find.” She was laughing as she turned to stir the coals. Then she looked over her shoulder at me with a grin. She waved me away. I turned back, stumbling, to the longhouse.

There was my daughter, tugging on my sleeve. “Dad, do you have some paper? I want to give my phone number to those Indian boys.” She gestured toward a cluster of boys five years older, standing together. I gave her papers. She barely knew how to write, but leaned on her knee and scrawled something on each piece, and gravely handed them around. The boys looked at her, and at each other, then at the papers. Then they looked at me. I shrugged back at them.

We got in the car and started west, up the long slope out of the canyon toward the wilderness of Portland. I was hoping Rosemary would fall asleep again. The evening was warm, and the sun shone down through the windshield.

“Dad,” she said, “stop the car.”

I said what any parent would say: “Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

“No, dad. Stop the car. We gotta climb that mountain.” She was pointing toward the bluff. I looked up the slope. I was tired. I said what any tired parent might say, a guess and a lie: “I think that land is private property.”

“Dad, stop the car.” She had her hand on my sleeve. For a moment, I kept my foot on the gas pedal. The car had just settled into its long-distance lope, climbing the grade. But then I took my foot away, and eased off the road onto the shoulder. We climbed out. Deflected from her first choice of climbing, she pointed to the ditch beside the road, the little ravine filled with styrofoam and tumbleweeds.

“Let’s follow that road,” she said, “and maybe we’ll find gold, or pretty rocks, or Jesus!” She held up her hands to the sky, the way she had seen the elders of the tribe stand tall to pray. “There was one big rock,” she said, “that filled all the world, and out of that rock, Jesus was born! And here God rained all of Jesus’ bones, one for every land.” Her hands sifted slowly down. “This is where they had his wedding feast. And look!” She bent to take up a handful of dust. “Here are his brains.” She held out the dust to me, then bent to take up a rock. “And a piece of his heart!” She took up gravel. “And all his bones!”

She looked at me. “Dad! We gotta take this stuff home!”

“What shall we put it in?” I said.

“Take off one of your shoes, dad.”

I took off one of my shoes. She filled it with the bones of Jesus. We got in the car and drove. She was still. I began the long river of thought that is such a road home. How did my daughter learn to see the sacred in a gully of debris? Where would this seeing lead her? How would I find a way?

But in a few miles, she said again, “Dad, stop the car.” This time I didn’t hesitate. We climbed over a barbwire fence, just east of the Mill Creek gorge, and she led me to a pile of rocks. She wanted to play house among them, showed me which hollow was my room, which was hers, and which was the kitchen. Then for a long time, we sat there, as the wind twitched a little pine tree nearby, and the sun began to slant low toward the west. I could hear the rush of Mill Creek, in the canyon. I remembered how my brother and I had once written to the Tribal Council, asking permission to hike up that creek, across Reservation land, toward the mountain.

“We believe that is a wilderness,” they wrote back. “No one should go there.”

“Dad,” my daughter said, “when you get really old, I won’t move away. I’ll stay with you.”

And we drove west toward the city.