The Dance Boots (2 page)

“That Patsy!” She laughed. “But you probably know lots of things those professors don't know! You just tell them if they need educating!”

“Biology's hard, though. They say that almost half the people in the class fail it.” It was my second try; did that mean that the mathematical odds were against me, or were they in my favor?

“Don't you let them chase you out of there; that's just what they want. We don't let them do that to us anymore. And do you know why, my dear?” She hiccupped. “It's because we're strong.” She paused, sipped, thought. “No, my dear, you're not gonna let yourself get chased out of there. And do you know why?”

“Because we're strong?”

“That's right; because we're strong. You just keep on going; we're all proud of you. Me and your uncle Jimmy, and your dad, he's real proud of you. You just keep on.” My dad had been smart in school, she said, smart like me. He was a good speller, the best one in the class, and he used to read all the time. “Does your dad still do that? Does he still read all the time?” He could have gone to college or something like that; things were different then, though. “We were in Catholic school together, your dad and me and your uncle Jimmy, and my sisters, too. They were mean to us there, the nuns; they treated us bad, used to pick on us. They even had the other kids making fun of us; can you believe nuns would do that? Oh, they were mean. But you know? That was nothing compared to what my mother went through, and your grandma Maggie. And Louis,
your grandpa, too, there at that Indian school in Harrod. But you know what? They never let that beat them, and you know why?” She yawned. Waited.

“Because we're strong?”

“Because we're strong.” The silvery tinkle of a sand-filled beanbag ashtray lifted and set down again; the metallic tap-tap of cigarette against the small aluminum bowl set into the Campbell plaid fabric of the ashtray.

Because I was cutting grocery coupons out of the newspaper while she talked, it took a second for her story to register. “They all went to the Harrod school?”

“Sure, they did; they all did. Didn't you know that?”

“I thought my grandma went to some mission school.”

“Yes, the girls all did, your grandma and my mother and Auntie Helen; they went to that mission school, St. Veronique's, way up near Canada, when they were just little girls. Some of those girls went through a lot there, some terrible things. My mother told me. And then for some reason I don't know, after a while they all left there and moved back to Mozhay Point, and then the girls went to the school in Harrod. That's where your grandma met your grandpa, there at Indian school. Didn't you know that? Didn't you? Well, they did, and if it wasn't for that Harrod school, you wouldn't be here! Your grandma Maggie was older than Louis, you know, and she used to work there after she was done with school, and take care of him, when he was a little boy. These are some things you should know.” She yawned again, sleepy from the wine. “My dear, I'll let you go to bed.”

“Well, you have a good sleep.”

“You do the same, my dear.” Then she said, “but I'll call you back. I want you to know these things. I want to tell you these things.”

That's where the story started. Why she chose me I don't know.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, how and where
my relatives had been schooled was rarely mentioned and never discussed. Instead, the education of American Indians prior to my generation was a topic to be avoided, a source of secrecy and loss, with an undercurrent of shame. My uncle George told me, when I was a little girl, that he had gone away from home to go to school. This was a “different kind of school” that he didn't like. He advised me that it wasn't good to think much about the past, that we didn't need anybody to feel sorry for us. I thought that he must have done something wrong, and that he must have been sent to reform school. What could he have done, I asked my mother. She told me that he didn't do anything wrong, that in the time before I was born most Indian children were removed from their homes by the government and sent away to boarding schools. Don't ask him about it anymore, she said; the story made him sad and would make me sad, too, if I knew it, so don't bother him about it; just be thankful for the life I had.

I spent my childhood and teen years protected from the sorrows of the past by its invisible swaddling. School involved more than learning to read and count, more than recess and gym; school also involved trying to walk with dignity through the annual “Indian unit” during Thanksgiving week, trying to play the clown through thoughtless children's jokes about scalpings, trying to displace myself into another dimension when a boy imitated the staggering walk and slurred speech of an Indian man he saw going into a liquor store. I was the oldest child, the Indian scout for my family's foray into public school education; I had a responsibility. I owed it to the past to survive in the present, to the mysterious and heartbreaking experiences of my elders to count coup on formalized schooling: get close, tap it on the shoulder, and run in triumph. I almost did it, but that's another story.

I don't know why she chose me. Maybe she thought I could survive to tell the tale. What I do know is that my aunt Shirley had
watched and listened to what was going on around her all of her life, that she had saved and cared for what she had received of others' lives, and that she didn't want the story buried with her when she died. When she began the story, I was in community college and Shirley was driving for Indian Health Services; the last day of the story, that day my dad and I visited her in her trailer, I was in graduate school and Shirley had retired and was dying. Over the last decade or so of her life, she would call, sometimes every few weeks, sometimes after several months, to tell me another part of the story. Eventually, having heard the rhythm and pattern of repeating and echoing, re-echoing and returning, I felt the story taking root in my brain and in my heart and saw that the day was coming that I would continue Shirley's task of listening and watching, remembering, and then doing my part to pass on and continue the story. When she started I was a young mother; when she finished, a grandmother.

In the meantime, Shirley went into treatment twice; to keep her company during her second thirty days of absence, I practiced controlling my thirst and sorrow. The next year, her first year of sobriety, I began to dance. My dress, dark blue with red ribbons, was sent to me by Aunt Shirley in a dream.

The story she told me is a multigenerational one of Indian boarding schools, homesickness and cruelty, racism, and most of all, the hopes broken and revived in the survival of an extended family. From the beginning of her story, when my grandmother was sent to a Catholic mission school in Canada, to the heyday of boarding schools in the 1910s and 1920s, through the 1930s when the Indian Reorganization Act provided money incentives for local school districts to admit Indian children, I experienced through Shirley my family's role as participants in and witnesses to a vast experiment in the breaking of a culture through the education of its young. She would talk for an hour or so, until she had shared enough of our story to become tired and until I had absorbed enough to become
sleepless. Drained by the tale and honored with the burden, I lay awake for hours, knowing how hard it was going to be to get up in the morning to get ready for work. To pass the time, I would repeat the story to myself, silently, to the rhythm and drone of Stan's and the girls' snores and sleep sighs. I was learning by rote but not yet by heart.

One morning the feeling of my littlest girl's fine, straight hair in my hands as I braided then crossed and tied her braids in ribbons behind her ears brought to mind that she was the age my grandmother had been when she left home for boarding school, just five years old. I would be walking my own five-year-old to school; we would see each other again that same afternoon after I finished work. I began to appreciate more the struggles and tenacity of my family as well as of all Indian people, whose valuing of family and tribal culture made it possible for people like me to live with our own families and have our children experience an education that is in so many ways so different from that of our grandparents. I began to see that as Indian people our interactions with society and with each other include the specter of all that happened to those who went before us. As their schooling experiences defined too much of their lives, so that legacy continues to define much of ours. Yet without it, we disappear.

The last time we visited Aunt Shirley at home, my dad and I, she was waiting for us and opened the screen door as soon as we got out of the truck in front of her trailer. She stood in the doorway, waving and smiling while we walked over the boards laid over the muddy yard and up the stairs to the vestibule outside the kitchen.

“Buster! Artense! Come in; biindigen! Come on in!”

Above the reddened dryness of her high, high cheekbones, stars rose in delight from the dark, dark depths of her eyes and danced. “Boozhoo, boozhoo! N'madabin; have a chair!”

Her appearance was not shocking: she was thin, and a little pale,
like she'd been up all night. And she acted the same, not as though she was dying, which she was, and which was the reason for our visit. This might not have been real. She might have only been dieting, and our visit only social; perhaps her death was not grinning at us from the corner of the room, where he leaned with the patience and anticipation of inevitability. Maagizhaa; maybe.

Her manners were flawless, traditional: She made sure that we had the most comfortable place to sit, on her couch, which she had covered with her good afghan. She accepted the pink-flowered paper plate of peanut butter cookies that my mother had baked that morning and covered with pink Saran Wrap, and she placed it in the center of the dining room table, next to a box of chocolate doughnuts. She offered us tea. She asked how everybody was doing, my mother and brothers and sisters, my husband and children. My dad told her how good her house looked and what a nice place it was. He asked how old was the waterproofing stain on the front steps and said that it looked like new. “Boy, this is a really nice place,” he said again.

I offered the plate of cookies to my dad because I knew that Shirley wouldn't take one until he did. “Patsy made these, hey,” he said. “You should try one. Boy, they're good.”

“My mom said they're supposed to be good for you,” I told Shirley. Could she possibly have any appetite, I wondered. Could the cookies help anything as serious as lung cancer? My mother's peanut butter cookies could be magical, healing. They were not too big, not too small, tender in the middle, crisp around the edges, nearly as light as air. On the tongue, they dissolved into grains floating in a sweet and salty cream. She made them often and kept them in a commercial-sized pickle jar on the kitchen table. She packed them in plastic bags that she had my dad drop by relatives' houses when they were sick. They were light on the stomach, she said, and helped keep your strength up. She advised saying a rosary, too.

Shirley picked out the smallest cookie with her fragile hand,
which was nearly fleshless, just thin and wrinkled skin over bone, and bit a neat scallop from the edge, chewing daintily with her front teeth. I said a Hail Mary silently. “My, these are delicious,” she said, and took another bite.

We brought her a manila envelope filled with photocopies of old pictures. She spread them out on the coffee table, one by one, naming all of the people, until the surface was covered. There was Shirley, a little girl posed with her brothers and sisters in front an elm tree, just half a block from where their aunt, my grandma Maggie, who died before I was born, lived. Shirley's mother, our great-aunt Lisette, and Grandma Maggie posed in a studio portrait with great-aunt Helen and their mothers, sometime in the 1920s. A dozen children, cousins, grouped together next to a picnic table. A hundred boys and girls in uniforms lined up in rows on the steps of the Harrod Indian School, Lisette with the big girls, Louis with the boys, Maggie between the girls' matron and the cook. Shirley in skinny pedal pushers and harlequin glasses holding a little boy in shorts and engineer boots up to face the camera, her ponytail blowing almost straight up in the wind. An old woman in an ankle-length cotton print housedress, Aunt Lisette shaking her finger at the person behind the camera, tucking escaped wisps of hair back into her chignon with her other hand. Shirley in a lawn chair at Aunt Babe's last August, legs crossed, one sandal balanced off her toes, fingers trailing over grass and dangling a cigarette, straw hat casting patterns of sunlight across her laughing face. Her mouth was open; her gold tooth glistened wetly in the light of that late summer day. On the ground next to her was a paper plate of untouched picnic food.

“It's me! Look, it's me!” She held up the copy of a small snapshot of a little girl on a snow-covered porch, smiling into the camera, wearing a knit hood and mittens. “I don't remember this picture! Where did you find all these?”

She was so much thinner than last summer. Her brown hands were twigs, dry and chapped against the freshness of her nail polish as they moved stiffly among the stack of photographs.

“And look at this one; it's Maggie and Dolly. Oh, we used to love to go visit there, when they lived in that apartment in the west end. That Dolly, she was so nice, everybody liked her. Remember that, Buster? Remember how she used to give us kids money?”

It was a good afternoon. We drank tea and ate doughnuts and left on the plate for Shirley the rest of the magical peanut butter cookies that my mother had made especially for her. She showed us the gallon jars of swamp tea that Joe Washington had sent down from Mozhay for her to drink, just a little bit at a time, all day. She was feeling a lot better, she said, felt like she had more energy. She felt cold sometimes, though.