I had some time to kill over a long holiday weekend not too long ago. Being a day-trip away from upstate New York, I decided I would follow up on a discovery made by my uncle while mapping out the family tree. My great- great-grandmother had been an Iroquois healer, a 6 1 behemoth of a woman that married a white man from Europe. She took his white name, Dodge, and died with it, leaving behind no easily traceable record of her birth or what her made-up injun name had been before the ceremony. Sylvia Dodge. I was hell-bent on tracking down records that would prove that Im her direct descendant, just enough Iroquois to get my hands on some of that government college cheese earmarked as reparations to the people they had indiscriminately annihilated.
I got to the reservation and milled around for a bit, underwhelmed at how white, and insignificant everything seemed to be. I mean to say, I wasnt expecting war parties riding bareback into the hills to scalp the French, or masses of red-skinned bucks dancing around a fire, beating on drums. Well, maybe the dancing and the drums, but all I saw were native Americans in jeans and flannels doing as I was doing: milling around waiting for something significant.
I walked into a little convenience-type store selling cheap handmade arts and crafts to dumb whites like me, here reaching for some kid of cultural identity beyond fast food chains, MTV, and base consumerism. I bought a bottle of whiskey (they didnt seem interested in stocking much else other than whiskey) and stepped outside to the curb. I sat down, opened the bottle, and as clich as it may read, a handful of those motherfuckers walked right over and sat down next to me. We passed the bottle around and swapped anecdotal stories about pussy, what we (they, but for the moment I was accepted and as close to the bosom of whatever nature gods watched over us) would do when we leave the reservation and then the topic of the Army came up. They asked what happens when you ship off for Basic Training.
I told them, as honest as I could, about the yelling and screaming, and stumbling through a series of inprocessing stations where they shave your head and drill you with as many shots and vaccinations as there are buffalos on the prairie, but made the egregious mistake of adding one in particular. Before they send you overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan they give you the smallpox vaccine, because somewhere in the world are samples of weaponized smallpox that went unaccounted for after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thats the story they feed us as the injection site turns into an open oozing sore, and your axillary lymph node swells to the size of an apple. I added, too bad you guys didnt have that one about five hundred years ago, huh? Wink wink, nudge nudge.
No one laughed. We finished the whiskey in relative silence, and they disappeared. Completely white again, I left. RIP Sylvia Dodge.
I got to the reservation and milled around for a bit, underwhelmed at how white, and insignificant everything seemed to be. I mean to say, I wasnt expecting war parties riding bareback into the hills to scalp the French, or masses of red-skinned bucks dancing around a fire, beating on drums. Well, maybe the dancing and the drums, but all I saw were native Americans in jeans and flannels doing as I was doing: milling around waiting for something significant.
I walked into a little convenience-type store selling cheap handmade arts and crafts to dumb whites like me, here reaching for some kid of cultural identity beyond fast food chains, MTV, and base consumerism. I bought a bottle of whiskey (they didnt seem interested in stocking much else other than whiskey) and stepped outside to the curb. I sat down, opened the bottle, and as clich as it may read, a handful of those motherfuckers walked right over and sat down next to me. We passed the bottle around and swapped anecdotal stories about pussy, what we (they, but for the moment I was accepted and as close to the bosom of whatever nature gods watched over us) would do when we leave the reservation and then the topic of the Army came up. They asked what happens when you ship off for Basic Training.
I told them, as honest as I could, about the yelling and screaming, and stumbling through a series of inprocessing stations where they shave your head and drill you with as many shots and vaccinations as there are buffalos on the prairie, but made the egregious mistake of adding one in particular. Before they send you overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan they give you the smallpox vaccine, because somewhere in the world are samples of weaponized smallpox that went unaccounted for after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thats the story they feed us as the injection site turns into an open oozing sore, and your axillary lymph node swells to the size of an apple. I added, too bad you guys didnt have that one about five hundred years ago, huh? Wink wink, nudge nudge.
No one laughed. We finished the whiskey in relative silence, and they disappeared. Completely white again, I left. RIP Sylvia Dodge.
ackack:
Now THAT is some funny shit. I have found myself trying to get a drink around the foot I jammed firmly in my mouth many, many times.
kay:
Good blogging love. 