American Spirit Blue

We will never burn out. We are the embers in your lover’s underwear. We are the rich soil and fireweed risen from scorched earth, and we are here together. 

We already lived through the end of the world. Sharpen your heart in our unyielding gaze.

 

 

 

I am watching a big fire continue to burn. It's a late August night on beautiful Mt. Adams, in Glenville, Washington. The mountain sits squarely amid a spectacular and ragged Cascade chain, wide-hipped and watching, as the Perseid showers of late summer fleet before a flaming backdrop of red and black. This giant fire blazes, and it will continue to burn until it consumes some forty-five square miles of Indian land. I watch the night sky falling, dipping to meet the rise of the burning. The pain and frustration of standing by while the planet is consumed and burns. Is it the end of the world?

Tribal territories are most often in the least desirable climes, and the Pacific Northwest is no exception. Tribes to the east of the Cascades have water shortages, drought, and massive land fires only growing worse. Currently there are multiple fires blazing across the Indian countries in Washington and Oregon. I think of how few Indians there are, statewide, to fight the fires. While Yakama and Cowlitz territories burn, Warm Springs is also ablaze, and now I hear Colville is, too. At Warm Springs, the wild horses are running frantically every which way like the winds, which refuse to prevail and scatter the fire in all directions. Unpredictably. 

Mt. Adams is no mere mountain to me. It's a mountain I travel for ceremony in the spring and summer, to dig and pick traditional foods. I drive well-worn paths to meet and gather with family, to respectfully harvest roots and the huckleberries that still grow. They are our nourishing grandmothers. It's a place that's been traversed for millennia by so many ancestors.

Fire lights the night dimly, and the smoke is thick. I cough up phlegm, dark with ash from the smoke that I breathed all night, and I watch the Cougar Creek fire compete on the hillside with the beauty of a meteor shower. Tonight the animals are burning, Owl cries out. It prickles my skin and lights my deepest knowing. She wants my attention now.

Her flight is silent. 

I see Owl, but she isn't willing to talk to me. Still her silence is true, and I know that talking is not what she does. She reveals, shows, and communicates telepathically, so if I want to talk to her I have to ride a different channel. What do I need to show her? Give her? Does she need me to take wing? 

I can't find the sage and cedar I've brought for offering, so I scrape up the pieces of needles that line the bottom of my backpack. I scatter them, along with dust, paper bits. Somehow, it feels more gritty and real than greeting her in the best way, ceremony-ready. I am cool with it. 

Owl wants me to listen. But she's silent. Her flight is silent. She wants me to listen; she wants to tell me who she is. She says she is seer, translator, skyward, mother-slayer, mother, slayer. What or whom does she slay?

She flies past me, close, a whisper in the air. She swoops, then lands on a low hanging cedar bough. Now she will talk. Now I will ask.

Owl, is your cry of significance?

What do you eat?

Okay.

Thank you for doing those things.

She flies off. I stand among the trees and the dark, smoky sky. Unsure, I go to bed. Owl carries the moon over the mountain to shine the way for the walkers. Owl is the meteor lit before the fire, among the shower of our sadness. Sacred seer. Cut through our night, be clear.
 

 

Shea, my youngest child, told me recently about hearing an owl call as he walked an evening route to grab some last-minute items for dinner. It didn’t seem like the owl was in trouble or anything, he mused. Shea is friendly to owls, and they often present themselves to him, usually when he’s wandering forests looking for antler sheds, but less so in the city. He told me he walked past the calls, and then—just steps away from the sound—something hit him hard on the back of his head. Startled, he saw an owl inches from his skull, flying away. 

“I told the owl it wasn’t cool. I mean, she knows I come in peace, so what the hell?” He redressed the owl, pulled his skullcap down further, and anxiously walked on toward the store. 

Seconds later, the owl flew toward him again and smacked him in the same place, on the back right of his head. He was startled, a little shaken, and watched keenly as the owl flew to a utility wire and joined a mate. It bobbed its head and called repeatedly. 

“What do you make of it?” I asked. 

Shea figured the pair must have been guarding a nest, though I am pretty sure late November is not when owls breed and sit on eggs. He said it seemed like they were a vested pair. It was not a friendly smack on the head.

My grandma taught me that Owl is a night seer, lifetime mate, and spirit guide—sacred breaker of the law. Owls exist in both physical and spiritual worlds. Does it matter if the pair hit him in the head? Is it an ill omen, a good omen, or just a bit of natural nonsense during an evening walk?
 

 

It’s spring and we are outdoors, wrapping up at a modest restaurant. It’s been a companionable first gathering with your fiancée’s parents. The two of you recently told the four of us that you intend to marry, and so you wanted us all to meet. The conversation’s been easy, but not banal. Your fiancee’s dad talks growing up on the east coast, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn, and the pressures of being a first son. Food comes up, of course, and the best way to prepare a latke. Textiles and traditions of weaving, too. I’ve been writing about ancient looms and goat wool traditions of our tribe, and your fiancee’s mom is an artist so she’s curious. All of us wonder aloud what traditions you’ll bring to your wedding: a blanket wrapped tightly around your shoulders, a crushed glass underfoot?

Our waiter just grabbed the last plate, and you’re rising from the table to smoke. As you stand, your Ashkenazi father asks you, “What tribe are you with, Shea—Jew or Indian?” He is Jewish, I am Native American. You are a complicated product of ours, and I have always considered your multiracial, ethnic, cultural self to be a sort of promise in the world. Your complexity is a question to be deeply considered but not necessarily answered.

Oh, the look on your face as he asks this. So instant and pale. So fragmented, but I see your eyes dart between us, to your in-laws, back to your dad. Fear and sadness. You love him. You’ve long sought his approval, and he has long been stingy with it. 

I am struck hard and angered by your dad’s question. I find it divisive. It is asked under unfair and skewed circumstances around a table with your Jewish in-laws whom you hope to impress. Everything is so still and slow in that moment as all the heat in me rises fast. 

“Jews, all the way,” you respond. 

In a heartbeat, I excuse myself, then rise from the table, incinerated by rage into smoke. All I hear drumming in my ears is FUCK INDIANS.

You are walking fast to keep up, pattering footsteps following me to my car, your cigarette unlit and bobbing on your bottom lip. I am so upset I float above myself in sublimated tendrils of poison, and you’re so tied to me that when I fly you follow.

“Mom, is everything okay?”     

I pivot and spit out, “You’re Jewish, yes, and you’re an Indian, and you’re a citizen of your tribe.” 

You indicate your fair skin with a sweep of your hand. “If I am Indian, then obviously I’m not enough.”

At that, I lose it. I evaporate, my whole self dissolving in anger.

“No, Shea. You are Indian. You are an enrolled Cowlitz citizen. It matters that you got that cigarette on our tribal reservation at half price with your Indian card. If you’re not Indian, then why are you taking all the perks, stealing cigarettes from your own people who’ve already paid the price time and again?”   

I’m in a blaze, and there’s a firewall between us now; the anger that rolls from me in heatwaves, searing.

Your eyes are far away. You’re scrambling inside to figure this out, relieved to know what I’m angry about but scared, too. 

Jews, all the way. What the actual hell, Shea? I am pretty sure I say this out loud, too, because you answer me aloud.

“It’s very confusing. How to be a Jew, that’s just kind of readily available to me,” you say, lighting on the idea. “I'm sorry, but yeah. Most of my friend group is Jewish. When I say I’m Native, I get that raised eyebrow look … like I’m a pretendian.”     

It’s not your lie but you believe it, and it surprises me. I expect more of you.

“So it’s easier to choose being Jewish, because there are no ‘raised eyebrows,’ no having to explain, and really no consequence. You never have to out yourself as Jewish, and nobody will blink if you do.”     

I pause.

After a few moments have passed I say, “You don’t get to choose your tribe. We chose you. You can turn away, but history as it is doesn’t pull you away, it tears. Cauterizes.”

 

Months later, when I think about this moment, I’m calmer. It's not who you claim, it’s who claims you. It all feels so vulnerable—our people, this planet, all people. Us. We must stay together; the world is burning. It’s hard not to take your answer—Jews, all the way—as a rejection. Not a rejection of me, though of course it feels that way at some level, but a rejection of our personal, lived history. Of your connection, of our people. It lands all at once, personally, planetarily, apocalyptically. 

Your ideas are misguided, off their flight pattern. You are defining yourself by the terms of the oppressor and ignoring your own culture. Smoke obscures your understanding. Both cultures, Cowlitz and Ashkenazai, are available to you. The differences are important, and I would love to see you more fully understand both. 
 

 

We lived through the end of the world. There is no end. 
 

 

Today we are walking, my child and I, puzzling about why he suffered an urban owl attack. 

I remember something funny.     

“Do you remember the linguist with whom I worked closely for a couple years, Dr. Dale Kinkade? He was an older, cranky White guy? ”

“Maybe?”

“It was in Chehalis, with my friend Marla? She was the language director at Chehalis Tribe?”

“Yes.” 

“Well, Dr. Kinkade once told me the story of two Chehalis women driving one dark and rainy evening. As they progressed north on Interstate 5, an owl swooped by their windshield. It didn't hit the glass, but it was really close. He said they could see the shine of the car's headlights in its eyes. 

“One of the women said, ‘An owl. Do you know what that means? Death!’

“The other woman was silent for a moment, and then the owl swooped in again, hit the windshield with force, and rolled off, dead.

“‘Ha,’ Dr. Kinkade said. 

“Not just ha, Shea—but laughter. He just thought that story was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He was such a serious guy. I think that might have been the only time I really heard him laugh.”     

My story is met with silence. I remember that Kinkade died a couple months later, but not before he completed our Cowlitz dictionary, despite his brain already muddled with cancer. It was hard to tell, but I think he liked me. We had some quiet attachment. 

I think he knew it was important to finish our tribal dictionary before he died. He said as much, but he was humble, too. I think about him. Often.

“Huh,” Shea says.

We walk and walk.
 

 

Death comes to all, fanged and feathered, scaled and skinned.     

I have learned the owl's call is impartial, but not everyone sees it as I do. And I desperately want tribes to live, thrive, rise up, raise us up. When tribes die, identities die, and options die. Like a mono forest, with thick and choking undergrowth and laws that strike a match to flame. If we allow others to define what we have managed for millennia, all will be worse for it.

It's not who you claim, it’s who claims you. Both cultures are available, and it is fine to opt out of your society; however, if you are hellbent on making a political statement, your mere existence is waiting for you.

And we keep on walking.