* * *
—
When they get to the entrance at the coliseum, Orvil looks back at Loother and asks if he has the lock.
“You always bring it,” Loother says.
“I asked you to get it before we left the house. I said, Loother, can you get the lock, I don’t want it messing up my regalia. You seriously didn’t bring it? Fuck. What are we gonna do? I asked you right before we left the house, you said, yeah I got it. Loother, you said, yeah I got it.”
“I must have been talking about something else,” Loother says.
Orvil breathes out the word okay and signals for them to follow him. They hide their bikes in some bushes on the other side of the coliseum.
“Grandma’ll kill us if we lose our bikes,” Lony says.
“Well, there’s no not going,” Orvil says. “So we’re going.”
Interlude
What strange phenomena we find in a great city,
all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.
Life swarms with innocent monsters.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Powwows
For powwows we come from all over the country. From reservations and cities, from rancherias, forts, pueblos, lagoons, and off-reservation trust lands. We come from towns on the sides of highways in northern Nevada with names like Winnemucca. Some of us come all the way out from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Minnesota; we come from Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, New York City, Pine Ridge, Fort Apache, Gila River, Pit River, the Osage Reservation, Rosebud, Flathead, Red Lake, San Carlos, Turtle Mountain, the Navajo Reservation. To get to powwows we drive alone and in pairs on road trips; we caravan as families, piled in station wagons, vans, and in the backs of Ford Broncos. Some of us smoke two packs a day if we’re driving, or drink beer continually to keep ourselves occupied. Some of us, who gave up that tired life, on that long red road of sobriety, we drink coffee, we sing, pray, and tell stories until we run out. We lie, cheat, and steal our stories, sweat and bleed them out along the highway, until that long white line makes us quiet, makes us pull over to sleep. When we get tired we stop at motels and hotels; we sleep in our cars on the side of the road, at rest stops and truck stops, in Walmart parking lots. We are young people and old, every kind of Indian in between.
We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other.
We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.
Big Oakland Powwow
In the Oakland Coliseum parking lot, for the Big Oakland Powwow, there is one thing that makes many of our cars the same. Our bumpers and rear windows are covered with Indian stickers like We’re Still Here and My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony and Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask an Indian!; Custer Had It Coming; We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors, We Borrow It from Our Children; Fighting Terrorism Since 1492; and My Child Didn’t Make the Honor List, but She Sure Can Sing an Honor Song. There are Schimmel Sister stickers, and Navajo Nation stickers, Cherokee Nation stickers, Idle No More, and AIM flags duct-taped to antennas. There are dream catchers and tiny moccasins, feathers and beaded miscellany hanging from rearview mirrors.
We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.
Blood
Blood is messy when it comes out. Inside it runs clean and looks blue in tubes that line our bodies, that split and branch like earth’s river systems. Blood is ninety percent water. And like water it must move. Blood must flow, never stray or split or clot or divide—lose any essential amount of itself while it distributes evenly through our bodies. But blood is messy when it comes out. It dries, divides, and cracks in the air.