City Indian

I’m what they call a “City Indian." I don’t have stories about life on the rez, but as a kid I was told we had native relatives somewhere down in California. They were my mother's family, people we were never very connected to.  Until my parent's relationship reached a breaking point. Then she decided to reconnect with these wild half siblings I had heard so little about. 

I remember visiting one of these siblings for the first time, an aunt who lived in Eureka, and feeling the damp, dark, and lonely emotions of an outsider. I was nine, and my mom had piled my three sisters and I in the car for the 7 hour drive. As a treat, we stopped at a little shop in downtown Eureka. I was allowed to purchase this big stick of roll-on glitter that tasted like candy sweet chemicals. I rolled it indiscriminately on my chubby cheeks. 

We arrived at Aunt Sarah's small house after dark. I was sleepy yet restless from the longest car trip I had ever taken.

[Later, in Sam's bedroom]

I sat on a dirty brown carpet and felt the glitter sticky on my cheek. I leaned against the bed, where my cousin taught my older sister a thing or two about life. We stayed up past midnight with no word from our mom about bed time. I watched MTV and saw Missy Elliott's "No Rain" video for the first time. The bright lights, lewd gestures and bizarre imagery of a woman dancing in a trash bag frightened me. I kept watching until I fell asleep, sad and scared, wrapped up in somebody’s jacket. 

When I as in college looking back on this awful night I learned that my aunt and her friends were doing bumps of coke between pulling swigs of cheep beer. That was the first time I heard Gwar. I was a devout little Christian girl until I was thirteen, and that was the first time I knew there was darkness in this world. I wouldn't have understood then that my rural relatives were reacting to that darkness, not creating it. I had it easy growing up in the city.

I wanted my mom to grab me and my three sisters and drive us all the way back to our little home on 82nd avenue, where the fighting of my parents was much more quiet, and no one drank.