Sonny and Cher and the North Dakota Getaway

One of the things that really compels me is the problem with history, especially the history of indigenous people. Then last my own history, where do I fit in as a native woman? How does my experience and the experience of a native individual speak to the group as a whole.

As a Cowlitz woman my position is not unique and yet highly unique because the Cowlitz are a highly adapted group. They never cut a tree. They never had land and so to survive they had to blend in. They got jobs, they roamed, lived in different places and yet throughout time, and we're speaking over 150 years, they managed to keep it together as a group and keep it together as a people. But as young people I think my experience is that the Cowlitz group is very characteristic as a whole. Asking how do we make it happen, how do we fully become Cowlitz and how do we attach to a people? So I wrote this little piece piecing together my identity. It's called Sonny and Cher and the North Dakota Getaway. In other words being one of the next generations of Cowlitz way back in the 70's.

In my family, it was the women of my mother's side who were demonstrably ãIndian,ä but my grandmother and great grandmother could not be bothered with explaining what it was to be Indian. They were too busy being Indian, or rather, forgetting to be Indian. It was my mother, Sharon, who most clearly remembered for me how she was Cowlitz, but not through tribal meetings, or ceremony, or even the white man's genealogies. Although I was raised by my great-grandmother and my mother to be proud of my native heritage, none of the traditions and lifeways of my tribe were explained to me or contextualized for me. My mother had no ãlanguageä to describe our native lifeways and, hence, no direct way to describe our experience, and yet and though I was raised with a quiet awareness of belonging, one I am still trying to understand. I grew up fishing, hunting berries, eating venison, digging clams, and picking fern. These were merely the motions of my everyday life, caught and woven into the memory. My mother never talked about these common acts as ãtribal,ä though I do believe that they were and I do believe that they are. She taught me through the radio instead, the popular culture of the mid 1970s: through resistance to Paul Harvey's conservative radio rants, through admiration of the Cherokee Armenian superstar Cher, but not her husband, Sonny. As James Clifton has noted, the 70s brought a native renaissance, and my mother seemed to respond to it. In 1974, as we drove to North Dakota to visit my Norwegian stepfather's relatives, the memory of Dennis Banks still fresh: brave in deep Dakota, holding off the Feds with a pitchfork, as ãCherokee Peopleä blared on the radio. The long, straight stretches of an endless Montana seemed to hum, ãCherokee people will return.ä I was nine or ten. I liked thinking I was an Indian who would return. But Where? I was never sure. Thinking he was steeling her for the hatred that ran thick as blood in the Dakotas those days, red versus white, I remember my father saying to my mother, flat-out, ãdon't tell them you're Indian.ä His remark was essentially heard as a challenge by my mom who was paler than my grandmother and able to ãpassäfor white. Later in the trip, we visited my stepfather's best friend, a Sioux man, living on government land he had inherited. I played in a river near his property with his chubby blonde children, slapping the water with the back of my hand. It fractured airborne, breaking in drops, reflecting the day, the blue white sky and the red earth.

My mother also taught me about being Indian through pithy aphorisms. She likes to think she's a squaw, still thinks the word ãsquawä is okay, and she's famous for spouting essentializing indignities like ãthose Cree Indians, they were mean as hell! That's why we're mean; we got this streakä (like so many natives, we are a mix of Indian blood and so we are also Cree not just Cowlitz). Sometimes it was a quieter, but perhaps more authentic knowing she passed, as when she'd tell me about growing up in Washington near to the land her native kin, the land that we had been on for thousands of years, in a place called Pigeon Springs. She'd share stories of Great Aunt Lucy out by the well singing a song in the Salish language. "It was pretty, it was haunting,ä my Mom would recall, and I would embroider the memory, as it seems my place to do, imagining Lucy's lost song twining above the pine of Pigeon springs, lilting · and eventually silent. In the silence I began to listen and ask questions. I began to construct my identity as Indian. It was there, and like others of my age and generation in the Cowlitz Tribe, I began to see through its seeming opacity. I began the process of learning what it was and what it might be, to be a ãCowlitz Indian.ä