* * *
—
Orvil manages to get the regalia on and steps in front of the full-length mirror on Opal’s closet door. Mirrors have always been a problem for him. The word stupid often sounds in his head when he looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t know why, but it seems important. And true. The regalia is itchy and faded in color. It’s way too small. He doesn’t look the way he hoped he would. He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Being Indian didn’t fit either. And virtually everything Orvil learned about being Indian he’d learned virtually. From watching hours and hours of powwow footage, documentaries on YouTube, by reading all that there was to read on sites like Wikipedia, PowWows.com, and Indian Country Today. Googling stuff like “What does it mean to be a real Indian,” which led him several clicks through some pretty fucked-up, judgmental forums, and finally to an Urbandictionary.com word he’d never heard before: Pretendian.
Orvil knew he wanted to dance the first time he saw a dancer on TV. He was twelve. It was November, so it was easy to find Indians on TV. Everyone else had gone to bed. He was flipping through channels when he found him. There on the screen, in full regalia, the dancer moved like gravity meant something different for him. It was like break dancing in a way, Orvil thought, but both new—even cool—and ancient-seeming. There was so much he’d missed, hadn’t been given. Hadn’t been told. In that moment, in front of the TV, he knew. He was a part of something. Something you could dance to.
And so what Orvil is, according to himself, standing in front of the mirror with his too-small-for-him stolen regalia, is dressed up like an Indian. In hides and ties, ribbons and feathers, boned breastplate, and hunched shoulders, he stands, weak in the knees, a fake, a copy, a boy playing dress-up. And yet there’s something there, behind that stupid, glazed-over stare, the one he so often gives his brothers, that critical, cruel look, behind that, he can almost see it, which is why he keeps looking, keeps standing in front of the mirror. He’s waiting for something true to appear before him—about him. It’s important that he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.
* * *
—
Today the Red Feather brothers are going to get Lony a new bike. On the way they stop at the Indian Center. Orvil’s supposed to be getting two hundred dollars to tell a story for a storytelling project he read about on Facebook.
Loother and Lony sit outside in the hall while Orvil is led into a room by a guy who introduced himself as Dene Oxendene. Dene sits Orvil down in front of a camera. He sits behind the camera, crosses his legs, leans in toward Orvil.
“Can you tell me your name, your age, and where you’re from?” Dene says.
“Okay. Orvil Red Feather. Fourteen. Oakland.”
“What about your tribe, do you know what tribe you are?”
“Cheyenne. From our mom’s side.”
“And how’d you find out about this project?”
“Facebook. Said it paid two hundred dollars?”
“That’s right. I’m here to collect stories in order to have them available online for people from our community and communities like ours to hear and see. When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life. Does that make sense?”
“Sure.”
“What does it mean to you when I say ‘story’？”
“I don’t know,” Orvil says. Without thinking about it, he crosses his legs like Dene.
“Try.”
“It’s just telling other people something that happened to you.”
“Good. That’s basically it. Now tell me something that happened to you.”
“Like what?”
“That’s up to you. It’s just like you said. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Tell me something that’s happened to you that stands out, that you thought of right away.”
“Me and my brothers. How we ended up with our grandma, who we live with now. It was after the first time we thought our mom overdosed.”
“Would you mind talking about that day?”
“I barely remember anything from when I was younger, but I remember that day perfectly. It was a Saturday, so me and my brothers had been watching cartoons all morning. I went to the kitchen to make us sandwiches, and I found her facedown on the kitchen floor. Her nose was all smashed into the floor and bleeding, and I knew it was bad because her arms were curled up at her stomach like she’d fallen down on top of them, which meant she nodded out walking. First thing I did was send my brothers to the front yard. We were living off of Thirty-Eighth then, in a little blue house with this tiny gated patch of grass that we were still small and young enough to like playing on. I got out Mom’s makeup mirror and put it under her nose. I’d seen that on a show, and when I saw that it barely fogged up, I called 9-1-1. When they came, because I told the operator about how it was just me and my brothers besides our mom, they came with two cop cars and a CPS worker. He was this old Indian guy I never saw again except for that one time. It was the first time I heard that we were Indian. He recognized that we were Indian just by looking at us. They carried our mom out on a stretcher while the social worker showed my little brothers a magic trick with a book of matches, or he was just lighting matches and it felt like magic, I don’t know. He’s the reason they called our grandma and why we ended up getting adopted by her. He took us to his office and asked who else there was besides our mom. After talking to our grandma Opal, we left and met her at the hospital.”