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So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
---Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation
I stand there Sunday in the small rec center with my boys, wanting to cry. The oppressive heat is as inappropriate for this time of year as the enclosed metal building is for a gathering of tribes. I hadn’t thought much about it when I heard that the annual powwow would not be held in the big field by the river, but now I feel terribly wrong and sad.
This story begins long before Sunday, though. It goes even further back than my Oklahoman grandmother’s love of herbs and plants, further back than her knowing how to sit so still that deer and raccoons would eat right out of her hand. It begins with two men named Elenipsico. The first was the son of Cornstalk—murdered along with his father in the year of three sevens. The second was Elenipsico Givens, grandfather of my grandmother, whose journey traced one of the fingers of the forced Indian paths that led to Oklahoma from the east. It is the beginning of the story that threads through two centuries and over a thousand miles to a single hot October afternoon.
The gourd dancers stop and I begin looking around. The younger emcee is a Lipan Apache with long dark hair that reaches the middle of his back. He’s pudgy in that way that comes from too many tortillas and too much beer, an instantly recognizable sort of South Texas fat that doesn’t bother us much down here. Good time fat, my mother calls it. I think to myself that he has a beautiful smile. He wears a western shirt made of stars and stripes without any irony whatsoever. He’s a veteran, as are many of the men. He’s urging the smaller kids to gather up the candy that’s been tossed in the middle of the gym around the drum circle. My older boy doesn’t want to go. He’s too old, he tells me, pushing my arm away.
A beautiful woman who looks to be in her fifties catches my eye. Her hair is braided with beads and conchos. Her skirt is the color of light butter and her blouse is just a shade off from the folded square of fringed robin’s egg blue to her left. She is a blanket dancer. If I were to give her a name in my head it would be Blue Sky Woman, but I do not know her name. It is probably Shirley or Betty, something that does little justice to her graceful nature. She smiles gently and motions for me to send my son into the circle. He thinks he’s too big, I motion back to her, shrugging my shoulders a bit. We both nod in the way of mothers who understand too much and too little of their sons.
I start to direct my attention back to the ring, getting ready for the next group of dancers, but in this brief exchange I see her gaze linger on me. It’s in this one instant that my part in the story begins. I see her looking at me and I turn my head toward the ring, feeling the lump in my chest crawl up into my throat until it stings my eyes with tears. I feel like I carry a shadow and I wonder if she sees it in me.
I want to take her hand and put her palm on my chest and ask her. Do you see me, sister? I want to ask her if she recognizes any part of my people in the lines of my face, in the shape of my eyes, in the way I hold myself without thinking. I want to ask her if she still recognizes something of them in me. I have never missed my braids so much as now—not because they would show her who I am (for they were as much Dutch and Irish braids as they were Shawnee), but because the weight of them against my back would have reassured me, made me feel less naked. I watch the dancers and listen to the drums, blinking back the water in my eyes.
This metal building traps the drum songs. Everyone looks wilted like flowers. I want to weep at the sound of so many muffled spirits. I want to break the circle, running into the middle of it. I want to stop everything. I want to tell everyone that I carry the whisper inside me of Elenipsico, son of the great warrior Cornstalk. All my Shawano people are here, I want to say, hidden in this thick Irish blood. Let’s go outside, I want to say. I want to take the hand of Blue Sky Woman and together we will tell the others to follow. We will move to the open field by the river, where our songs will have places to go. Instead I say nothing. I stand silently along with many other Whisper People, the ones of us who have the threads of our ancestors’ stories woven through us with strands that may not even be visible to the naked eye anymore.
Maybe Blue Sky Woman wished for the same things too, in the short time that she watched me and my boys so keenly. I will never know, but I will make a beautiful blue blanket this winter, to remind me of her and of the voice I could not find on that day.
---Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation
I stand there Sunday in the small rec center with my boys, wanting to cry. The oppressive heat is as inappropriate for this time of year as the enclosed metal building is for a gathering of tribes. I hadn’t thought much about it when I heard that the annual powwow would not be held in the big field by the river, but now I feel terribly wrong and sad.
This story begins long before Sunday, though. It goes even further back than my Oklahoman grandmother’s love of herbs and plants, further back than her knowing how to sit so still that deer and raccoons would eat right out of her hand. It begins with two men named Elenipsico. The first was the son of Cornstalk—murdered along with his father in the year of three sevens. The second was Elenipsico Givens, grandfather of my grandmother, whose journey traced one of the fingers of the forced Indian paths that led to Oklahoma from the east. It is the beginning of the story that threads through two centuries and over a thousand miles to a single hot October afternoon.
The gourd dancers stop and I begin looking around. The younger emcee is a Lipan Apache with long dark hair that reaches the middle of his back. He’s pudgy in that way that comes from too many tortillas and too much beer, an instantly recognizable sort of South Texas fat that doesn’t bother us much down here. Good time fat, my mother calls it. I think to myself that he has a beautiful smile. He wears a western shirt made of stars and stripes without any irony whatsoever. He’s a veteran, as are many of the men. He’s urging the smaller kids to gather up the candy that’s been tossed in the middle of the gym around the drum circle. My older boy doesn’t want to go. He’s too old, he tells me, pushing my arm away.
A beautiful woman who looks to be in her fifties catches my eye. Her hair is braided with beads and conchos. Her skirt is the color of light butter and her blouse is just a shade off from the folded square of fringed robin’s egg blue to her left. She is a blanket dancer. If I were to give her a name in my head it would be Blue Sky Woman, but I do not know her name. It is probably Shirley or Betty, something that does little justice to her graceful nature. She smiles gently and motions for me to send my son into the circle. He thinks he’s too big, I motion back to her, shrugging my shoulders a bit. We both nod in the way of mothers who understand too much and too little of their sons.
I start to direct my attention back to the ring, getting ready for the next group of dancers, but in this brief exchange I see her gaze linger on me. It’s in this one instant that my part in the story begins. I see her looking at me and I turn my head toward the ring, feeling the lump in my chest crawl up into my throat until it stings my eyes with tears. I feel like I carry a shadow and I wonder if she sees it in me.
I want to take her hand and put her palm on my chest and ask her. Do you see me, sister? I want to ask her if she recognizes any part of my people in the lines of my face, in the shape of my eyes, in the way I hold myself without thinking. I want to ask her if she still recognizes something of them in me. I have never missed my braids so much as now—not because they would show her who I am (for they were as much Dutch and Irish braids as they were Shawnee), but because the weight of them against my back would have reassured me, made me feel less naked. I watch the dancers and listen to the drums, blinking back the water in my eyes.
This metal building traps the drum songs. Everyone looks wilted like flowers. I want to weep at the sound of so many muffled spirits. I want to break the circle, running into the middle of it. I want to stop everything. I want to tell everyone that I carry the whisper inside me of Elenipsico, son of the great warrior Cornstalk. All my Shawano people are here, I want to say, hidden in this thick Irish blood. Let’s go outside, I want to say. I want to take the hand of Blue Sky Woman and together we will tell the others to follow. We will move to the open field by the river, where our songs will have places to go. Instead I say nothing. I stand silently along with many other Whisper People, the ones of us who have the threads of our ancestors’ stories woven through us with strands that may not even be visible to the naked eye anymore.
Maybe Blue Sky Woman wished for the same things too, in the short time that she watched me and my boys so keenly. I will never know, but I will make a beautiful blue blanket this winter, to remind me of her and of the voice I could not find on that day.