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God is Wakantanka
I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause.
Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:
“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”
As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.
“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.”
Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning.
With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying:
“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”
With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences.
The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all.
As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.
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It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.
If Language Were Liquid
I stood at the window of the house, which was nestled into a copse of fir trees, admiring the statuesque conifers that framed the bowl of the valley like a spiky matte. Their heads shot skyward like shuttlecocks that had blasted off and were then frozen in motion. I’d seen the valley during the summer when it was covered with wild grasses and flowers. Now, it was a vessel filled with sugary powder. The incredible thing about the composition framed by the picture window was that it couldn’t have been plotted better if a master painter had composed the scene: the trees directed the eye beyond the valley to the massive peaks that towered in the distance. The stubble of trees and fingering slopes filled in the composition when the clouds moved away, leaving behind them a downy comforter of shaved ice.
One evening we didn’t leave the slopes until the sun was sinking low in the sky. The light dallied with the clouds and dappled the mountain in patches of ripe rosiness interspersed with matte-finished smudges of shadow in palest gray. At certain points along the lift-lines, the aspen trees—their gnarled and writhing fingers gathering ice—gave the appearance they were fiddling with Victorian lace. The conifers on the highest slopes seemed to gather powder to their chests, forming great paws that seemed to want to bat the frosty air. I was always happy when storms left their backwash on the slopes so I was teased for being the group’s powder hound. As I swished through the fluffy granules, I felt as though I were shooting through a crystalline forest. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d seen Snow White guiding a prancing unicorn along one of the trails, the puffs of air escaping its delicate muzzle forming plumes of steam that drifted above its conical horn.
After several runs in deep powder, I was feeling the strain in my legs and my lungs, which weren’t accustomed to the high altitude, so I took a break from the exertion of skiing, popping Suzanne Vega’s cassette Solitude Standing into my Walkman. As I listened to "In the Eye," an idea for a short story started to form, inspired by her lyrics:
“If you were to kill me now
Right here I would still
Look you in the eye
And I would burn myself
Into your memory
As long as you were still alive
I would not run
I would not turn
I would not hi-i-ide…
I would live inside of you
I’d make you wear me
Like a scar
And I would burn myself
into your memory
And run through everything you are…”
The story had as its protagonist a woman named Karrman, who opened her tale with the declaration, “My mother’s maiden name was Karr and she couldn’t bear to give it up but she wasn’t strong enough to keep it herself. I guess that means I’ll be her identity until I die.”
Her newfound love interest, named Martin, asks, “You mean until she dies?”
“No,” Karrman corrects him; “that kind of brainwashing doesn’t die with her, it can only die with me—that is unless I have kids and then it’s a guaranteed right of succession.”
She let out a brash cackle and he knew then and there that if she laughed that way too many times, he’d have to kill her. She did, of course; it was simply who she was, and he snapped one evening—her crassness sending him over the edge. Lost in a blood-pulsing fog, he bludgeoned Karrman to death as Vega’s “Night Vision” wafted into the room from the speakers flanking the record player in her apartment:
When the darkness takes you
With her hand across your face
Don’t give in too quickly
Find the thing she’s erased…
He taped her legs at the ankles as he salivated over the idea of burying her in a snowy field. He decided he couldn’t let her go without a souvenir so he cut a piece of the tape that he’d plastered over her mouth—a symbolic gesture that he had shut her up for all eternity—and placed the scrap in his pocket. He looked out the window of her apartment toward the high-rise next door, the lights from which were casting strong shadows into the dim interiors. No one was watching so he took his time savoring his deed, turning up the volume as "Solitude Standing" pulsed out into the room, while sipping slowly on the glass of wine Karrman had poured him. He rocked back and forth to Vega’s soulful guitar chords and tentatively beautiful voice:
Solitude stands in the doorway
And I’m struck once again by her black silhouette
By her long cool stare and her silence
I suddenly remember each time we’ve met
And she says “I’ve come to set a twisted thing straight.”
And she says “I’ve come to lighten this dark heart.”
And she takes my wrist; I feel her imprint of fear
And I say, “I’ve never thought of finding you here…”
As the word trailed off, he raised the glass, toasting himself, and unleashed a creepy laugh. THWACK! I was startled from my narrative by the sound of skis meeting the ground as a guy dropped his on the snow next to me and sat down to eat an apple. I hadn’t realized I’d been sitting on the bench long enough that my ski suit had nearly frozen to the slats of the wood bench. I took off a mitten to check my watch and it hit me that Jim was likely having a heart attack; I just hoped he hadn’t already called the ski patrol. What a mess that would be! As I pried myself from the frosty bench and jammed my boots into my skis to head down the mountain, I had a picture of him pacing in front of the dressing rooms down below. I flipped the volume higher on my Walkman and let Vega’s “Language” carry me along the power-laden trails:
If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be…
I’d like to meet you
In a timeless, placeless place
Somewhere out of context
And beyond all consequences…
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
