05 February 2009
Writing to Bridge the Mixed-Blood Divide
An American Indian Perspective
By Susan Power
Descended from American Indians and Scots-Irish/ English who colonized the United States, Susan Power, a Harvard-trained lawyer, turned to writing about her Dakota Sioux heritage. Her first novel, The Grass Dancer, won the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction. Her books include Strong Heart Society (1998) and Roofwalker (2002), and her work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Story. Power teaches creative writing at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
My mother was born in 1925 in Fort Yates, North Dakota, a dusty town on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. Her Dakota name is Mahpeyabogawin, which in our tribal language means Gathering-of-Stormclouds Woman, and so she came into this world like a premonition of all the black storms that were soon to follow, as overworked soil on the Great Plains became a dry, loose, killing powder. She grew up in a small log cabin just across the road from the original grave of our famous Chief Sitting Bull.
“He was our protection. If we were in trouble, or scared about something, we’d run over to his marker of piled stones and call, ‘La La, La La, help us.”’ My mother has a long Sioux memory, “like an elephant,” she says. I’ve heard this story many times.
“Of course. It’s short for ‘Tunkashila.’ Grandfather.”
“That’s right.”
I wasn’t raised speaking Dakota but learned enough words, enough phrases, to appreciate what a visual language it is -- each word a picture nestled in a tangle of stories that I have carried into my life and my art. I wasn’t born on a reservation but in the sprawling city of Chicago, and my mother’s memories are only half of me since my father was born in New York state, descended from Englishmen, Scots-Irishmen, who left Europe in the 1600s for the adventure of America. He was 10 years older than my mother, college-educated, raised in privilege, and when I was little I liked to imagine how strange and shocking it would have been for them if they’d met when my mother was 10 years old and my father 20. Would he have pitied her then? Seeing her dust-covered, barefoot, hair cut simply in a boy’s bob, and wearing a worn pair of bib overalls? Would she think he’d landed from another world, to see his dapper clothes and elegant pipe, clean-shaven face that always smelled of Old Spice? Somehow, in their separate journeys, my parents did come together, fellow book lovers who had jobs in the publishing business. And this is where we always converge, no matter how different we were, and are, from one another – in this love of words.
My mother was one of the original founding members of the American Indian Center in Chicago, and I grew up embraced by the intertribal community, learning to dance washboard style like the older Winnebago ladies, hearing true ghost stories and cautionary tales of misused magic. I learned how different tribes worshiped, many interweaving their traditional beliefs with Christianity. This was my life on weekends, evenings, summers, but it wasn’t my only life. My parents also exposed me to mainstream American culture, took me to ballets and theater, libraries and museums. I “discovered” Shakespeare when I was 12 years old, browsing through the extensive record collection at the main public library downtown, heavy sets I lugged home and listened to for hours. I memorized long dramatic passages, favoring the death scenes, and would gasp around the house, “I’m dying, Egypt, dying,” in a speech that never seemed to end. I thought Shakespeare would have felt at home with Indians, master storyteller that he was, and it seemed quite natural to me to take him as a relative, a familiar, and draw inspiration from him as easily as I did Stella Johnson, who told me Winnebago stories of the Snow Shoe brothers.
In school I was always the only Indian student, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, and I saw society change from year to year, so that my difference evolved from a stumbling block that challenged teachers to something they cherished and nourished. In my early years, a teacher might give me a perfect grade for a well-written and carefully researched paper but wasn’t entirely sure she wanted me to read the text aloud (as everyone else was invited to do) because my vision of history was not the commonly accepted model. But by high school, my teachers would purposely call on me in class when they wanted another viewpoint expressed, a challenge to prevailing opinion. Friends who had earlier been wary of a classmate who didn’t seem to fit in, eventually claimed I had a secret life they envied, weekends in New York attending a traditional Mohawk wedding in a longhouse, the Thanksgiving break where I came back with a beaded crown and the title of Miss Indian Chicago. I am heartened to see that increasingly readers, like teachers, are interested in all the stories of America, all the voices, and so as a writer I have opened the doors to may secret life and invite anyone to enter.
After my father died and I moved with my mother into an apartment building, she wanted me to feel connected to his side of the family as well as hers. She set up our long entrance hall as a kind of ancestral gallery, a place where East and West, Indian and white, could come together as a visual reminder of different stories and hopes, all merging in me. On the eastern wall she hung land grants and tintypes of my father’s people, in the center of their number an older man with a lush white beard and mischievous eyes: my great-great-grandfather Joseph Henry Gilmore, Baptist minister, university professor, poet who penned the lyrics to the hymn “He Leadeth Me” and whose father had been governor of New Hampshire during the Civil War (1861-1865). On the western wall she affixed two beaded drumsticks, oil paintings of Sioux chiefs, aromatic braids of sweet grass, and, dead center in this collection, a photograph of my great-great-grandfather Mahto Nuhpa (Two Bear), hereditary chief of the Yanktonnai Dakota, respected orator, defender of his band during the Battle of White Stone Hill in 1863. The two men stared across the chasm of our dark tile floor, their cultural divide, contemporaries who never met in life meeting now in this unlikely place. My mother’s imagination must have found the tableau irresistible, and she began telling me stories of how they argued sometimes at night.
“They’re all good people but they just don’t understand each other, so they fight. Even Two Bear, who was such a revered council chief, can’t keep the peace. War has broken out between them so you should be careful at night not to walk through the hall. Both sides love you, of course, but they’re angry, firing bullets and arrows, and they don’t always see what they’re doing. You might get caught in the crossfire!”
When I was little I believed everything my mother told me. I avoided the hall late at night, after we went to bed, but in the morning I would check to see if I could find evidence of the battle – bullet holes in the plaster walls, splashes of blood on the floor. It didn’t matter that the hall was always tidy; I just figured my ancestors cleaned up after their wars because they worried they would scare me with their violence, their mistakes.
Years after I moved from this apartment and hallway, my mother reminded me of her tales regarding ancestral division by telling me how it all came out in the end.
“That’s right!” I scolded her. “You had me completely afraid to go through that hall at night, thinking all kinds of mayhem were breaking out.”
“I know, I know. That was terrible,” she chuckled. “But there is a happy ending.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Ever since your book came out, The Grass Dancer, I’ve noticed that at night there’s peace and quiet in the hallway. No more arguments or misunderstandings, no more anger. Both sides are so proud of you, of what you’ve written, and both sides feel as if they’re playing an important part in your success. Nobody’s left out. That gives them a lot to talk about, a lot they can agree on. They’re probably realizing they have more in common than they thought.”
When I began writing fiction, I never would have imagined that my stories and words, my love of literature reproduced on paper and magical narratives passed on by a chain of voices, would unite my blood – the fascinated ghosts of those who came before me. This is the best result, in my opinion: My work is a bridge between divides, where everyone feels honored and included, consulted, everyone has a voice at the table, everyone has a stake in what comes next.
