ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ

A plea for continued existence

This quebecois chick with the Grinch finger dreadlocks who called me Caitlyn Jenner backstage claims Metis now. I’ve just finished reading Jake Arrowtop’s chapbook of “unsacred” poetry, Rez Void, which you can order from Bottlecap Press, if you wanna ache like I ache. You can always tell when I’m homesick because my whole apartment starts to smell like thick-cut bacon, spam, and “hiraeth” is one of those words I keep forgetting because it’s more accurate to clumsily stammer my way through this feeling.

Wanting to go home but home doesn’t want you, not really. Home never wanted you. Home was a man who loved you more than anything in the entire world and now he’s dead, his house belongs to some distant cousins of yours who definitely wouldn’t believe you if you said you were related, because since when? Home is a series of memories plus that painting your old best friend did of the man back when he lived here, in Maryland, and home is you trying to retrace his steps like some private detective in a comic, as if echoing his life will bring him back to you.

Coherence is impossible for me to achieve, so I find myself jealous and suspicious of famous Indians whose stories cohere. I know that’s really crabby of me. I also know my pushback against the word “Indigenous” being transformed into some kind of virtuous identity is equal parts warranted and nitpicking, yet another facet of the negative energy I expel from time to time. I wanna be careful, though. I don’t want my Nativeness to be some badge of impunity, make me a god among men, a sage among fools. I’m cooking bacon in my underwear and letting the grease pop my thighs because I miss when we fed the asshole across the street’s starved-out fighting dog. On instinct, I’m pouring all my leftovers in one bowl, like my papa did, only Spike–that’s what we called him, Spike–has probably been dead for almost twenty years now.

The asshole named all his kids after himself. All of them. Even the girl. Before that SWAT team came and took him away, she found out a terrible truth about her father, and I had no idea how to comfort her. We were maybe five or six years old. Probably six, because the Bad Thing had already happened to me, and seeing her cry like that made me uncomfortable. I pulled up all the dry grass in our vast backyard and let it rain down over her head like an itchy baptism while she scowled at me. She had her face buried in the dirt so I joined her. That was the best I could do. The best I can do.

Anyways, I forgot that one Maybe-tis girl’s name. She’d been platinum blonde when we met and talked like Hannah Horvath, but post-pandemic I’ve been informed she has this weird lilting singsong rez voice now. I wonder about the purpose of “Indigeneity” if claiming it means fame but living it means whatever this is. I love the man I’m seeing right now so much because he tells me outright when he’s “cranky” or “grumpy” and puts himself in containment. I’ve started to do that. And I wonder about why GoFundMe campaigns always skyrocket when the person’s got skeletons in their closet but barely break a thousand when it’s someone who actually needs it. I gotta be careful with that, too. Like I don’t wanna moralize poverty and who deserves what.

A guy who may or may not have sexually assaulted me, once upon a time, taught me how to make what he called “Hollywood eggs.” I cut out a little rectangle from the center of my Aldi’s brand gluten free white bread. Then I eat the rectangle even though you’re not supposed to do that, because fuck him. I was too drunk to remember which way it went. I’d been one of those girls who shot whiskey and twirled bourbon like I was some grizzled old white man. I ease the oversized egg into the hole and wince as gravity pulls some of the egg white from its cradle. It bleeds across the flesh-speckled pan and I remember how, the morning after, I poured all of my apple cider vinegar into our claw foot tub so I could burn whatever he’d given to me out of my body. I’m getting deja vu recalling this, maybe I’ve already told you this story. Forgive me. They’re really good eggs when you cook them right.

Growing up, our mother always called Walmart “the Evil Empire” and told us never to shop there. Yesterday, I bought a gold plated spatula from the West Baltimore Walmart and a matching gold-rimmed baking pan, one of those stoneware pieces that probably has more carcinogens than we have names for. While my friends helped me put all my groceries and new cookware away, I paused, regarding my other golden things with a haughty stare.

“Good lord,” I said, “I’m so tacky.”

I flip my Hollywood egg with my brand new golden spatula and wince again as the yolk slips free. Vulgar as ever, I clench, like doing ten kegels in a row will magically suck my food back into place. I tilt my head and realize with a soft, “huh,” that it actually has, and somehow the egg’s still intact.

Around the time I was maybe assaulted, maybe not, one of my friends asked me to explain a cleansing ceremony on camera. After a few takes, they shook their head, beyond patient with me, and asked why I was so confident off camera but all “ums” and “uhs” and “well, like,” on. We never did get a good take, which is probably for the best, since you’re not supposed to film ceremony.

We spent summers in Browning, Montana, but they’re not our people. I’m enrolled White Earth Ojibwe, but I’ve barely been there. Today I called Hayward High School and realized the only voice I recognized was Craig Olson’s, on the answering machine, telling me to dial my party’s extension now. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still in high school, all of my seventeen years poured into a five-foot-ten frame and crumpled in those cramped formica desks, my eyes on the clock, my breasts mottled with gooseflesh as I push them up into the sizzling fluorescent light. While committing to the process of returning to school, this time in pursuit of a law degree, I’ve held my 2.555 GPA in my two hands and Googled “555 angel number,” as if that’ll make it look any better to the admissions office when it inevitably comes across their desks that I somehow ended both my prior school careers this way. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Slinking off into the shadows like the amputated snake fled the ruins of Eden.

I had been a bad student because I had bad dreams, dreams of social, economic, environmental collapse. Dreams of fascism. Wendigo dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up grasping at my own throat, which clicked and whirred and ground itself together like there were teeth all the way down. I thought, why should I make an effort if it’s all already over? If we’re already dead? But as the future breathed down the neck of the past, as the present unfolded in a miasma of burnt bridges and sudden selfhood, I realized I needed to be someone, do something.

So I became an actor. A model. A writer. I never fully committed to any of those labels, I mostly dabbled. You know me, some of you, you might have found my old name when you Googled up “Native actors,” “trans actors,” “Native trans actors,” “two spirit writers,” and the like. The day I found my Google panel was one of the scariest days of my life. I used to look myself up whenever I needed to write a bio for a project because I was bad about keeping score. One day, there I was, arms outstretched, “Protect the Caribou” written across my black leather wingspan in dentalium and bone. Dad used to say we just Forrest Gump our way through life, but now I’m here and I don’t think I can anymore.

Absent of a marketable past, then, I look to the future. The college I want to go to, the one I’m doing all this work for, it’s just down the road a bit. I’ve got all this paperwork filled out. When I first told my Auntie Mary about this prelaw program, she went, “Oh, yeah? You wanna be a lawyer?” and I stammered because not really, but also not no. It’s not that simple. I feel like–

I don’t want anything. Which isn’t true, obviously. I want food. I want warmth. I want sex and love and romance and happiness. I want to bulk up a little bit. I want money. I want to go for a long walk in the woods and I want to be forgiven for every bad thing I’ve ever done to the people I love or maybe I want to be punished for it, not by God but by them, directly. Just one big, cathartic slap would do. Like how when you hit your sibling and to keep them from crying you say wait, wait, no, you can hit me back. I want to meet the other person in Baltimore who moved here from Bemidji and ask why we both made the same decision. I want to see every photo that’s ever been taken of me by strangers in public and I want to be paid for the labor of being beautiful and unprepared. I want a real job, or an agent, someone who can manage all this money shit for me and has my best interests at heart. I want to prove myself because it feels like all this snaking around has rendered me untrustworthy, like I’ve built a house of leaves around myself and now everything that must be seen is camouflaged and the rest of my flesh shimmers. Copper wire all exposed after it’s torn from a condemned building. The rich get richer and the poor get wretched, have breakdowns day after day and dance on the edge of a knife.

I want you to stay here, with me, in hell. I know what I’m asking. I know the weight of it. I want you to stay with us just a little bit longer. I know it hurts. I know it’s the worst it’s been, I know there’s this godawful rift opening up, jagged and raw and bloody as an open, gangrenous wound. I can’t promise you a dawn after this darkness. I can’t promise you anything. Just stay. Crawl with me through this muck, Eden behind us, burning. Bury your face in the dirt and let the dead grass rain down over you.

It’s the best we can do.