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285 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 2022
“… and have you ever tried to walk in such a time of great rupture?”
“Mom had no money, and I knew better than to look. What money she ever came into she blew. Money—it was everywhere but nowhere.”
“You from the rez?” he said.
I didn’t look too Native, and so I said, “Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Your shirt says ‘Native Pride.’”
At the bridge to the reservation, the river was still frozen, ice shining white-blue under a full moon. The sidewalk on the bridge hadn’t been shoveled since the last nor-easter crapped snow in November, and I walked in the boot prints everyone made who walked the walk to Overtown to get pot or catch the bus to wherever it was us skeejins had to go, which wasn’t anywhere because everything we needed — except pot — was on the rez. Well, except Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond, but those Natives who bought 4K Ultra DVDs or fresh white doilies had cars, wouldn’t be taking the bus like me or Fellis did each day to the methadone clinic. That's another thing the rez didn’t have: a methadone clinic. But we had sacred grounds where sweats and peyote ceremonies happened once a month, except since I had chosen to take methadone, I was ineligible to participate in Native spiritual practice, according to the doc on the rez.
Natives damning Natives.
She’s dressed nice. Casual. A white T-shirt and black yoga pants and white sneakers. She doesn’t do yoga. All the white on her makes her look more Native, more Indian (she hates that word — Indian). But nothing makes her look young. She’s Native, and she has trauma. So do I — I’m the one who saw it — but she thinks she has more. She doesn’t say that, but she thinks it. Maybe she’s right. Maybe older Natives have more trauma than younger ones.
How’d we get here? That’s Fellis’ question, but it’s mine too. How’d we get here? I’m starting to think that each time I ask it, each time I consider an answer, I wind up further from where I should be, from where I was. Where I had been. I left a lot of things behind. Or maybe that’s not it — maybe it’s that a lot of things had left me behind. Friends. Family. Relationships. The future.