“Some shit just went down in the bathroom,” Orvil tells Loother when he gets outside Target.
“Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?” Loother says.
“Shut the fuck up, Loother, I’m serious,” Orvil says.
“What, you didn’t make it in time?” Loother says.
“I was sitting there in the stall, picking at that thing. You remember that lump I got? I felt something poking out of it. So I pulled, like, I just pulled one out, put it on some folded-up toilet paper, then went back in and got another one. Then one more after that. I’m pretty sure they’re spider legs,” Orvil says.
“Pfffffft,” Loother says and laughs. At which point Orvil shows him a neat pile of folds of toilet paper.
“Let me see,” Loother says.
Orvil opens up the folds of toilet paper and shows Loother.
“What the fuck?” Loother says.
“Right outta my leg,” Orvil says.
“Are you sure it’s not, like, splinters?”
“Nah, look where the leg bends. There’s a joint. And a tip. Like the end of the leg where it gets skinnier, look.”
“That’s fucked up,” Loother says. “But what about the other five? I mean, if they are spider legs, there should be eight, right?”
Before Orvil can say anything else or put away the spider legs, Loother’s on his phone.
“You looking it up?” Orvil asks him.
But Loother doesn’t answer. He just taps. Scrolls. Waits.
“You find anything?” Orvil says.
“Nah. Not even a little bit,” Loother says.
When Lony comes out with his bike, Orvil and Loother look down at it and nod. Lony smiles at their nods.
“Let’s go,” Orvil says, then puts his earphones in. He looks back and sees his brothers put theirs in too. They ride back toward Wood Street. As they pass the Target sign, Orvil remembers last year when they all got phones at Target on the same day as an early Christmas present. They were the cheapest phones they had, but at least they weren’t flip phones. They were smart. They do all they need them to do: make calls, text, play music, and get them on the internet.
They ride together in a line, and listen to what comes out of their phones. Orvil mainly listens to powwow music. There’s something in the energy of that big booming drum, in the intensity of the singing, like an urgency that feels specifically Indian. He likes the power the sound of a chorus of voices makes too, those high-pitched wailed harmonies, how you can’t tell how many singers there are, and how sometimes it sounds like ten singers, sometimes like a hundred. There was even one time, when he was dancing in Opal’s room with his eyes closed, when he felt like it was all his ancestors who made it so he could be there dancing and listening to that sound, singing right there in his ears through all those hard years they made it through. But that moment was also the first time his brothers saw him in regalia, dancing like that, they walked in on him in the middle of it, and they thought it was hilarious, they laughed and laughed but promised not to tell Opal.
As for Loother, not counting himself, he listens exclusively to three rappers: Chance the Rapper, Eminem, and Earl Sweatshirt. Loother writes and records his own raps to instrumentals he finds on YouTube and makes Orvil and Lony listen to them and agree with him about how good he is. As for Lony, they’d recently discovered what he’s into.
“You hear that?” Loother had asked one night in their room.
“Yeah. It’s, like, some kind of chorus or choir, right?” Orvil said.
“Yeah, like angels or some shit,” Loother said.
“Angels?” Orvil said.
“Yeah, like what they have them sound like.”
“What they have them sound like?”
“I mean like movies and shit,” Loother said. “Shut up. It’s still going. Listen.”
They sat for the next couple of minutes and listened to the distant sound of the symphony, of the choir coming through an inch of speaker, muted by Lony’s ears—ready to believe it was anything, anything better than the sound they had the angels make. It hit Orvil first what the sound was, and he started to say Lony’s name, but Loother got up, put a finger to his lips, then went over and gently pulled Lony’s earphones out. He put one of them close to his ear and smiled. He looked at Lony’s phone and smiled bigger and showed it to Orvil.
“Beethoven?” Orvil said.
They ride up Fourteenth toward downtown. Fourteenth takes them through downtown to East Twelfth, which gets them to the Fruitvale without a bike lane, but on a street big enough, so that even though cars get comfortable, swerve a little, and go faster on East Twelfth, it’s better than riding the gutter-edge of International Boulevard.
When they get to Fruitvale and International, they stop in the Wendy’s parking lot. Orvil and Loother take out their phones.
“Guys. Seriously? Orvil had spider legs in his leg? What the fuck?” Lony asks.
Orvil and Loother look at each other and laugh hard. Lony hardly ever curses, so when he does it’s always both super serious and funny to hear.
“C’mon,” Lony says.
“It’s real, Lony,” Orvil says.
“What does that mean, it’s real?” Lony says.
“We don’t know,” Orvil says.
“Call Grandma,” Lony says.
“And say what?” Loother says.
“Tell her,” Lony says.
“She’ll make it a big deal,” Orvil says.
“What’d the internet say?” Lony asks.
Loother just shakes his head.
“Seems Indian,” Orvil says.
“What?” Loother says.
“Spiders and shit,” Orvil says.
“Definitely Indian,” Lony says.
“Maybe you should call,” Loother says.
“Fuck,” Orvil says. “But the powwow’s tomorrow.”
“What does that have to do with it?” Loother says.
“You’re right,” Orvil says. “It’s not like she knows we’re going.”
Orvil leaves a message for his grandma when she doesn’t pick up. He tells her they got Lony’s bike, and then about the spider legs. While he leaves the message he watches Loother and Lony look at the legs together. They poke at the legs, and move the toilet paper so that the legs bend. Orvil feels a pulse in his stomach, and like something falls out of him. After he hangs up, he takes the legs, folds up the toilet paper, and stuffs it in his pocket.
* * *
—
The day of the powwow Orvil wakes up hot. He covers his face with the cold bottom of his pillow. He thinks about the powwow, then lifts the pillow and tilts his head to listen to what he thinks he hears from out in the kitchen. He wants to minimize their time with Opal before they go. He wakes his brothers up by hitting them with his pillow. They both moan and roll over, so he hits them again.
“We gotta get out without having to talk to her, she might have made us breakfast. We’ll tell her we’re not hungry.”
“But I am hungry,” Lony says.
“Don’t we wanna hear what she thinks about the spider legs?” Loother says.
“No,” Orvil says. “We don’t. Not now.”
“I really don’t think she’ll care we’re going to the powwow,” Loother says.
“Maybe,” Orvil says. “But what if she does?”
* * *
—
Orvil and his brothers ride their bikes down San Leandro Boulevard on the sidewalk in a line. At the Coliseum BART Station, they lift their bikes and carry them on their shoulders, then ride across the pedestrian bridge that gets them to the coliseum. They slow to a roll. Orvil looks through the chain-link fence and sees the morning fog clearing to blue.
Orvil leads his brothers clockwise around the outer edge of the parking lot. He stands and pedals hard, then takes off his plain black hat and stuffs it into his hoodie’s front pocket. After gaining some speed, he stops pedaling, takes his hands off the handlebars, then grabs hold of his hair. It’s gotten long. Down to the middle of his back long. He ties his hair back with the beaded hair clip that he’d found with the regalia in his grandma’s closet. He pulls his ponytail through the half circle on the back of his hat, which latches with the snaps of six small black plastic buttons in a line. He likes the sound, the feel of it when he can get them to snap down perfectly in a row. He picks up speed again, then coasts and looks back. Lony’s in the back with his tongue sticking out from how hard he’s pedaling. Loother’s taking pictures of the coliseum with his phone. The coliseum looks massive. Bigger than it looks when you see it from BART or driving by on the freeway. Orvil’s gonna dance on the same field that the A’s and the Raiders play on. He’ll compete as a dancer. He’ll dance the dance he learned by watching powwow footage on YouTube. It’s his first powwow.
“Can we stop?” Lony says, out of breath.
They stop halfway around the parking lot.
“I gotta ask you guys something,” Lony says.
“Just ask then, homie,” Loother says.
“Shut up, Loother. Whatsup, Lony?” Orvil says, looking at Loother.
“I been meaning to ask,” Lony says, “like, what’s a powwow?”
Loother laughs, takes off his hat and hits it against his bike.
“Lony, we’ve seen hella powwows, what do you mean what’s a powwow?” Orvil says.
“Yeah, but I never asked nobody,” Lony says. “I didn’t know what we were looking at.” Lony tugs at the bill of his black-and-yellow A’s cap to pull his head down.
Orvil looks up at the sound of a plane passing overhead.
“I mean, why does everyone dress up, dance, and sing Indian?” Lony says.
“Lony,” Loother says in that way an older brother can take you down by just saying your name.
“Never mind,” Lony says.
“No,” Orvil says.
“Every time I ask questions you guys make me feel stupid for asking,” Lony says.
“Yeah, but, Lony, you ask hella stupid questions,” Loother says. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say.”
“Then say it’s hard to know what to say,” Lony says, squeezing his hand brake. He swallows hard, watching his hand grip the hand brake, then leans down to watch the brakes grip the front tire.
“They’re just old ways, Lony. Dancing, singing Indian. We gotta carry it on,” Orvil says.
“Why?” Lony says.
“If we don’t they might disappear,” Orvil says.
“Disappear? Where they gonna go?”
“I mean, like, people will forget.”
“Why can’t we just make up our own ways?” Lony says.
Orvil puts his hand across his forehead the same way their grandma does when she’s frustrated.
“Lony, you like the taste of Indian tacos, right?” Orvil says.
“Yeah,” Lony says.
“Would you just make some food up of your own and eat it?” Orvil says.
“That actually sounds pretty fun,” Lony says, still looking down but smiling a little now, which makes Orvil laugh, and say the word stupid in the middle of his laugh.
Loother laughs too, but he’s already looking at his phone.
They get back on their bikes, then look up and see lines of cars streaming in, hundreds of people getting out of their cars. The boys stop. Orvil gets off his bike. These are other Indians. Getting out of their cars. Some of them already in full regalia. Real Indians like they’d never seen before if you didn’t count their grandma, who they probably should count, except that it was too hard for them to tell what was specifically Indian about her. She was all they knew besides their mom, who’s too hard to think about or remember. Opal worked for the post office. Delivered mail. She liked to watch TV when she was home. Cook for them. They didn’t know much else about her. She did make fry bread for them on special occasions.
* * *
—
Orvil pulls at the nylon straps of his backpack to tighten it and lets go of the handlebars, lets the front wheel wobble, but balances by leaning back. In the backpack is the regalia that barely fits, his XXL black hoodie, which was too big for him on purpose, and three now squished peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in ziplock plastic baggies he hopes they won’t have to eat, but he knows they might have to if the Indian tacos are too expensive—if food prices are anything like the food at A’s games when it’s not dollar night. They only knew about Indian tacos because their grandma made them for their birthdays. It was one of the few Indian things she did. And she was always sure to remind them that it’s not traditional, and that it comes from lacking resources and wanting comfort food.
To be sure they’d at least be able to afford an Indian taco each, they rode their bikes up to the fountain behind the Mormon temple. Loother had just been there for a field trip to Joaquin Miller Park, and he said people threw coins in for wishes. They made Lony roll up his pants and gather all the coins he could see, while Orvil and Loother threw rocks at the community building at the top of the stairs above the fountain—a distraction they didn’t see at the time might have been worse than the fountain scraping itself. Going down Lincoln Avenue after that was one of the best and stupidest things they’d ever done together. You could get going so fast down a hill there was nothing else happening in the whole world but the feeling of the speed moving through you and the wind in your eyes. They went to Bayfair Center in San Leandro and scraped out what they could from that fountain before being chased off by a security guard. They took the bus up to the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley Hills, where there was a double fountain, which they knew would be practically untouched because only rich people or monitored kids on field trips went to that place. After rolling up all the coins and turning them in at the bank, they came away with a total of fourteen dollars and ninety-one cents.
* * *
—
When they get to the entrance at the coliseum, Orvil looks back at Loother and asks if he has the lock.
“You always bring it,” Loother says.
“I asked you to get it before we left the house. I said, Loother, can you get the lock, I don’t want it messing up my regalia. You seriously didn’t bring it? Fuck. What are we gonna do? I asked you right before we left the house, you said, yeah I got it. Loother, you said, yeah I got it.”
“I must have been talking about something else,” Loother says.
Orvil breathes out the word okay and signals for them to follow him. They hide their bikes in some bushes on the other side of the coliseum.
“Grandma’ll kill us if we lose our bikes,” Lony says.
“Well, there’s no not going,” Orvil says. “So we’re going.”
Interlude
What strange phenomena we find in a great city,
all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.
Life swarms with innocent monsters.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Powwows
For powwows we come from all over the country. From reservations and cities, from rancherias, forts, pueblos, lagoons, and off-reservation trust lands. We come from towns on the sides of highways in northern Nevada with names like Winnemucca. Some of us come all the way out from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Minnesota; we come from Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, New York City, Pine Ridge, Fort Apache, Gila River, Pit River, the Osage Reservation, Rosebud, Flathead, Red Lake, San Carlos, Turtle Mountain, the Navajo Reservation. To get to powwows we drive alone and in pairs on road trips; we caravan as families, piled in station wagons, vans, and in the backs of Ford Broncos. Some of us smoke two packs a day if we’re driving, or drink beer continually to keep ourselves occupied. Some of us, who gave up that tired life, on that long red road of sobriety, we drink coffee, we sing, pray, and tell stories until we run out. We lie, cheat, and steal our stories, sweat and bleed them out along the highway, until that long white line makes us quiet, makes us pull over to sleep. When we get tired we stop at motels and hotels; we sleep in our cars on the side of the road, at rest stops and truck stops, in Walmart parking lots. We are young people and old, every kind of Indian in between.
We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other.
We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.
Big Oakland Powwow
In the Oakland Coliseum parking lot, for the Big Oakland Powwow, there is one thing that makes many of our cars the same. Our bumpers and rear windows are covered with Indian stickers like We’re Still Here and My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony and Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask an Indian!; Custer Had It Coming; We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors, We Borrow It from Our Children; Fighting Terrorism Since 1492; and My Child Didn’t Make the Honor List, but She Sure Can Sing an Honor Song. There are Schimmel Sister stickers, and Navajo Nation stickers, Cherokee Nation stickers, Idle No More, and AIM flags duct-taped to antennas. There are dream catchers and tiny moccasins, feathers and beaded miscellany hanging from rearview mirrors.
We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.
Blood
Blood is messy when it comes out. Inside it runs clean and looks blue in tubes that line our bodies, that split and branch like earth’s river systems. Blood is ninety percent water. And like water it must move. Blood must flow, never stray or split or clot or divide—lose any essential amount of itself while it distributes evenly through our bodies. But blood is messy when it comes out. It dries, divides, and cracks in the air.
Native blood quantum was introduced in 1705 at the Virginia Colony. If you were at least half Native, you didn’t have the same rights as white people. Blood quantum and tribal membership qualifications have since been turned over to individual tribes to decide.
In the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein commissioned a Quran to be written in his own blood. Now Muslim leaders aren’t sure what to do with it. To have written the Quran in blood was a sin, but to destroy it would also be a sin.
The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?
When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like “sore losers” and “move on already,” “quit playing the blame game.” But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.” This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.
If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.
Last Names
We didn’t have last names before they came. When they decided they needed to keep track of us, last names were given to us, just like the name Indian itself was given to us. These were attempted translations and botched Indian names, random surnames, and names passed down from white American generals, admirals, and colonels, and sometimes troop names, which were sometimes just colors. That’s how we are Blacks and Browns, Greens, Whites, and Oranges. We are Smiths, Lees, Scotts, MacArthurs, Shermans, Johnsons, Jacksons. Our names are poems, descriptions of animals, images that make perfect sense and no sense at all. We are Little Cloud, Littleman, Loneman, Bull Coming, Madbull, Bad Heart Bull, Jumping Bull, Bird, Birdshead, Kingbird, Magpie, Eagle, Turtle, Crow, Beaver, Youngblood, Tallman, Eastman, Hoffman, Flying Out, Has No Horse, Broken Leg, Fingernail, Left Hand, Elk Shoulder, White Eagle, Black Horse, Two Rivers, Goldtooth, Goodblanket, Goodbear, Bear Shield, Yellow Man, Blindman, Roanhorse, Bellymule, Ballard, Begay, Yazzie. We are Dixon, Livingston, Tsosie, Nelson, Oxendene, Harjo, Armstrong, Mills, Tallchief, Banks, Rogers, Bitsilly, Bellecourt, Means, Good Feather, Bad Feather, Little Feather, Red Feather.