This essay is written in response to Lakota artist Cannupa Hanska Luger’s exhibition earlier this fall at Portland’s C3:Initiative, “A Frayed Knot / AFRAID NOT.”
These are not ancient artifacts. — Cannunpa Hanska Lugar
I see myself in the twin photos of my grandmothers. One a traditional Navajo in her skirts and turquoise, hair in a bun. Her hands and face dark brown from the sun, a lifetime of sheep herding and weaving rugs filled with the designs that represented her dreams and her identity as an asdzaan diné of the western Dinétah. The storm patterns that speak to that identity based in space – and a spiritual connection to that place. I am my Dakhóta grandmother, my k’ unci, who calls me “my girl” who speaks only English to me and explains words in our dialect only when asked. Who wears polyester pantsuits and wears her hair in a short gray perm and is a lay reader in the Episcopal Church. The hymns in our language, the message a mixture of Christ brought to us by the colonists coached in our Dakota dialect. When I read a Dakota hymn, I see again and again Christ called Itancan , a leader of the people, a chief.
I remember in my Navajo grandparents’ house in the Painted Desert sitting in the dark of their front room lit only by a kerosene lamp, as they had no electricity. Even though the metal giants strode so close by, you could hear the cracking of power they carried in their steal arms from the coal-fired plant like a conversation brought from far away. A faraway land that takes and leaves nothing behind.
But that’s not true; they do leave things behind. Just a hundred yards away are the hills that glow at night. It glows, especially in the rain. It’s filled with uranium tailings, and years later, men would come and put a barbed wire fence around it and a sign with the symbol of radiation, an abandoned uranium mine. They left that behind for us.
The water runs from it and goes as gravity carries it. Through the red sand to the garden, my cheii, my grandfather, always kept in front of their house. Where he grew melons and corn and all sorts of good things, he hand-carried the water to it and tended to it like a bride. One time, he cut up a shirt I left behind to make little jackets to protect the melons during a cold spell. But that trickle from the old uranium mine found its way even into that humble dream. That relationship that always meant life and hozho to the Navajo people.
My Dakota grandmother grew gladiolas and rhubarb and climbing peas in her backyard garden in the green Dakota plains. Gladiolas that would grow tall and proud and touch the laundry dangling from the line that bordered the garden. Rhubarb, that sour delicacy beloved in such a place, both sweet and withholding at the same time. I suppose that’s the way Dakota Niobrara Episcopalians like it. I miss all those things.
Now, she lies in the churchyard of the humble white clapboard church her ancestors started back when the Americans first ordered them to join a church after the ink on the treaty was dry. It is the church where she was baptized, where my father was baptized, where I was baptized – each of us, offerings to some idea of survival. The church is itself a survivor, moved by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s when our village of White Swan was put underwater to build the dam that would power our white neighbors’ endeavors. Their farms, their dreams, while ours met a watery grave.
The Corps of Engineers claimed they had moved the bodies, and I suppose they did move many, but in 1999, when they lowered the water behind the dam, bodies came up. My grandmother and other White Swan descendants pitched their tents on the shore and refused to leave, refused to allow the Corps to raise the water and hide their sins. When a ranger tried to stop my Episcopalian grandmother, she looked at him cheerfully and laughed and held up her wrists and asked, “What are you going to do? Arrest me?” And the young man backed down, and she, with her elderly girlfriends, marched to the shore to protect their loved ones and demand proper reburial.
That was before Standing Rock. I suppose now, we know the answer is yes, they will arrest you, but then it worked. But then these things always worked for my grandmother. And by observing her, I learned something about how to navigate this world, frayed and afraid as it is.
Sitting in my grandparents’ home on the Navajo Nation, lit only by that kerosene lamp, the room is filled with their friends, lined against the walls. Elderly Navajos, women in their skirts and head scarfs, their heavy silver and turquoise jewelry on their wrists, their husbands and brothers next to them, some in black hats and western shirts and jewelry. They are talking in Navajo, diné bizaad, and I ask my uncle what they are saying.
When I come to visit in the summers, English is an effort for my mom’s family. They stop translating for me after three days. He leans over to tell me they are discussing who the Hebrews are. They are asking, “Who are these people, and why do we have to care about them so much?” And I sat there in the dark mutely shocked. It had never occurred to me to ask that question. I thought about how my Dakota grandmother had also probably never asked that question. Her family had gone from being Sioux medicine men to Episcopal priests in a single generation. They had gone to seminary, so certainly knew the Bible.
Here I was in a room of people to whom it was all an abstraction. After I got over my initial shock, their perspective informed my own. I dared to ask questions that only an outsider could ask. They were outside of Judeo-Christian culture, but they were firmly grounded in their own world. And the confidence in which they occupied that space was a huge lesson for me. A lesson I still only begin to understand.
On Sunday, I visited my Dakota grandmother’s grave. I had traveled there to write an article about the flooding. A hundred yards away lay a new lake. The old lake, a wild prairie lake that our ancestors had visited and loved for generations, had overflowed its banks and taken up residence in the field adjacent to the churchyard.
Community members from White Swan told me that the previous Saturday, a family peered into the grave dug for their loved one to see 10 inches of water. The same water that was seeping into their homes across the road, flooding them in March and mid-September. The rain had returned to deluge White Swan again, and now my grandmother’s grave was at risk. I looked at the newly dug grave on the hill and realized that my grandmother here at the level of the new lake was probably underwater. Mni Wiconi now took on an ironic meaning. Water is Life? Water is Death.
I once wrote a novel I called “Chalk Rock.” It was about an abandoned village that my grandmother had taken me to when I did my senior thesis at Dartmouth about Yankton womanhood. After visiting Greenwood, the former agency town on the reservation, she asked if we could take a detour. And took me to a place along the river, a collection of crumbling homes made of soft, white rock quarried from the limestone cliffs that face the Missouri, the chalk rock that gave the place its name “Chalk Rock Colony.”
When we stopped, I followed her out of the car, and she told me, gesturing all around, standing in the jimsonweed and gumboed road, “This is the place where my girlfriends started their families, had their babies and spent the happiest years of their lives.” It turned out this was a place the young Yanktons of her generation had built for themselves in the throes of the Great Depression. They built these houses, and a canning factory, put in the waterline, and made their lives on their own terms and were happy.
Then came the war and the dam washed it away. But in that moment on that sunny day, my grandmother remembered that dream for me. So, I wrote a novel about it. Because who knew young Native people, much less young Ihanktonwan Dakota, as we call ourselves, had done such a thing? Young people always talk about it, but they did it, and it worked, for a time.
My Navajo grandparents, shi ma saani do shi cheii, are also gone now. They are buried beneath the desert they made bloom and made beauty from in rugs and tooled leather, worked silver and turquoise, and in songs, songs that heal. My cheii was not a medicine man, which in Navajo we call Hatathli , singer, but he was a diagnostician, a hand trembler. He could tell you what was wrong with you and what medicine man to go to for healing. But he had a fine voice and was in demand to help with “sings” as Navajos call healing ceremonies. These ceremonies can involve singing for up to nine days straight over a patient. And include the making of intricate sand paintings whose images contain the power to heal, to bring the person back into harmony, to hozho with everything that is around them.
I wonder what the ceremony and symbols would be to heal us from the uranium mining and the power atomic fission brought into the world, and the terror nuclear winter still holds over us. What would that be?
I wish my grandparents and their friends were here to speculate. I wish I knew Navajo well enough to ask those questions. I wish they understood Western culture enough to understand what I was talking about. I wish, I wish. I wish I was not a frayed knot because I am afraid.
Jacqueline Keeler is a Diné/Ihanktonwan writer and the executive editor of Pollen Nation, a Native-led and edited magazine dedicated to issues affecting Indigenous people.
ALSO BY JACQUELINE KEELER: Trump and Native American Heritage Month: A tale of two proclamations
This article was originally published in Pollen Nation Magazine . Pollen Nation is a Native-led and edited magazine dedicated to providing North American readers with an in-depth understanding of issues affecting Indigenous people.
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
