Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Ya-a ho John-ny Cash, Ya-a ho Johnny Cash.

  Ya ho Johnny Cash, Ya ho Johnny Cash . . .

  The second pipe dance song, he related, was the same except that it mocked a dancer’s oddly placed regalia pieces—the white Angora goat leggings.

  A sa mi-a kwi tti i-ke bi se ka-ke mi . . . tti-ka ta ka na ni.

  You are wearing your fu . . . ur-r-r leggings much too high.

  While Pat was chanting away on his improvised lyrics, Horatio Plain Brown Bear shot his arms and legs out, holding them rigid when the verse stopped. As another verse was winding up, in the dance part where the drum was rumbled, Horatio began to gyrate as if in a rigorous pipe dance. At the part where the “fur” mention was overemphasized and elongated, Horatio, taking a few good sniffs to clear his perpetually runny nose, scooped up some rocks and placed them inside an empty milk carton. On the next verse, near the “fur” part, he shook the milk carton like a rattle.

  Everyone had a good hearty laugh, but the song that alluded to “fur,” or hair, also made them nervous. All at once they realized there could be implications in acknowledging the songs message. They eyed one another quickly before looking away as if they were being blinded by the afternoon sun. It was an excuse to look stupid and act uninterested, the way they had taught one another to do in class: instant mutes, avoiding participation.

  Of course, the threat of being deprived of recess for not participating made the strongest among them quiver like a nauseated rabbit. They all knew how to read, Pat had said, because the white teachers had drilled holes into their skulls and with a funnel poured in the liquid sustenance known as the English language, the real “alphabet soup.” In dejection they had all read from the musty-smelling textbooks aloud, enunciating and uttering words that were essentially meaningless. Magellan. Magna Carta. Michelangelo. Before, Pat related, we were like wild reptile babies that refused to eat during captivity, forcing Euro-American owners to ram potent doses of civilization down their throats with sticks in order that they might live. And twice a week they were stripped of their grimy clothes, herded to the bathroom showers like war prisoners, and lathered with bulk Lysol-smelling soap before Mr. Mateechna, the Indian janitor, scrubbed them down with a hard bristle brush.

  They may well exhibit signs of knowing how to read vowels and syllables, the Weeping Willow staff commented at lunch, but words like skyscraper and museum are meainngless unless these places are introduced to them. Therefore, beginning in the 1950s, field trips were taken twice a year.

  Yet, even on short excursions to the Tama County courthouse to look at World War I memorabilia donated by the Potato cousins, the Black Eagle Child version of Audie Murphy twice over, Pat Red Hat, was closely monitored. Besides being a singer who was forced since infancy to drum with adults, Pat was unusually body-oriented. “Maybe I got this way from the old men,” he’d begin, before sharing wicked stories in Black Eagle Child with his diminutive classmates. This master held them spellbound with adult storytelling.

  As Pat amused Horatio with his improvised pipe dance lyrics, the other boys, not wanting to acknowledge the songs allusion to intimate body hair, joined Edgar Bearchild as he stared downward.

  * * *

  For Edgar, there was an incredible sense of relief, and he welcomed Pat for being a timely distraction. The question about his father’s occupation was unnerving. He couldn’t even begin to guess what his father looked like, much less where he worked or if he even did. There was a slight chance he might have actually seen him the summer previous, walking at a brisk pacie down a brick street in cowboy boots, but he wasn’t sure. Pondering a father who was virtually nonexistent was a strain, but no. one would press the issue.

  As Pat sang on, the boys sat like baby pheasants, frozen and listening. They could see Horatio’s shadow over the bluish gray pebbles. He was oblivious, and his antics were unabated. No one quite knew what to make of the silly dance business.

  Did Horatio even know, or was it part of a gag?

  The fact was, in 1960, rural midwestern Indian boys—or girls—were told absolutely nothing abput themselves, thanks to America’s mind-set back then. Therefore, the phrases that came forth from Pat Red Hat were strange things they didn’t recognize. Nevertheless, they acted as if they did for fear of embarrassment. The boys were wholly dependent upon Pat’s tremendous knowledge of human anatomy, knowing no one could possibly make up such bizarre but enlightening stuff. Pat was born and raised in a traditional family whose stories were infused with what most people might consider sexually explicit themes. Sexuality wasn’t anything novel and it wasn’t anything to be secretive about. At school, however, it was drastically different.

  “Come on now, Pat Red Hat! Don’t fight us!” was a familiar teachers’ yell heard in the pale green sterile hallways of Weeping Willow Elementary. Everyone would know Pat was being physically restrained, and someone would actually attempt to stick a bar of lathered soap into Pat’s tightly clenched mouth. Washing his “dirty mouth” had little effect.

  Once in third grade Pat was unduly punished for using the word “but” in the wrong context. It began with Pat being asked by the teacher to spell “Mississippi” on the chalkboard. Properly trained to write in Black Eagle Child, Pat waddled up to the front of the classroom. There he turned around, looked at the shiny waxed floors, and said in broken English that he could spell it in “Indin.” Somewhere along the way the teacher thought she was being called a “big butt.” What Pat had meant to say was that he couldn’t spell what the teacher wanted but could instead spell “Me tti Ne hi si, or Big or Great River” in “Indin.” The teacher went into a fit, with all the other teachers joining in, squawking like chickens about to lay eggs and pecking away at the closest students available. Eavesdropping from their classrooms, the other students were frightened by the sounds of holocaust as Pat was dragged into the bathroom. He went down to the floor with his arms wrapped around two heads, but his effort was useless. The students understood perfectly what he had tried, to say. From that day forth, based on their observations of teachers’ examining each other’s rears, they learned “but” also meant a person’s rear. Add “big” before that, and there was trouble.

  “Okay, me no sure!” Pat cried from the bathroom. “Okay? Big, big way! Know my way! Ow! Know only . . . spell my way only! Ow!”

  It took five teachers to wrestle and tie him down with canvas straps. They stopped when Pat’s gums began to bleed and when one of them realized that Pat was right about the “big but,” that it was given as a preface to an apology for not knowing how to spell “Mississippi” as requested. Embarrassed, the teachers marched back to the classrooms smelling like cheap bulk soap. Such commotion would be a predictable highlight of a day at Weeping Willow.

  When Edgar Bearchild finally lifted his head from the gray merry-go-round bars, he looked directly at Horatio Plain Brown Bear. Light-complexioned and clownish, Horatio implored Hayward and Kensington Muscatine, who sat on either side of him, to engage in the same pipe dance mimicry. All attention to that point had been directed to Pat, who did the singing, and Horatio, who did the dancing. And now the Muscarines were desirous of the same attention. They joined in, shaking their imaginary pipes and gourd-rattles in a frenzy—only to become part of the joke. Pat had inserted their clan-given names in the song and they didn’t even know.

  “And look at these monkeys, looking like they’re scratching their privates instead of dancing,” said Horatio. With a sneering grin, he pointed to their stiff curled hands over their slouched bodies.

  Realizing how weird they must have looked, Hayward and Kensington stopped their frenetic gyrations. Although the Muscatines shared the same last name, they weren’t really related. Physically, they were exact opposites: Hayward was tall and lanky for his age and good at basketball; Kensington was short and oriental-looking and good-for-nothing. When Hayward laughed he brought the back of one hand to cover his mouth and leaned backward on one bent leg like a girl; when Kensington laughe
d his oriental-looking eyes bulged out of his wide, well-developed forehead, and his gaping pink mouth could be seen with stunning clarity. Especially around younger female classmates.

  Somewhere two to three generations back, they sometimes said, they must have been related. For whatever reason, the Muscatines hung around Horatio like servants, taking abuse. Horatio constantly persuaded them to do stupid things, like planning a group depantsing of a female student or humping one another for kicks. Today they were duped into performing a dance that alluded to the dreaded arrival of pubescence.

  Humiliated by what they had just done, the Muscatines hunched their shoulders, dropped their jaws, and pretended to laugh at themselves. Along with Horatio Plain Brown Bear they sat on the octagon-shaped ride, facing the south, toward the midafternoon sun and the school; the other three boys—with Edgar sitting between Ted Facepaint and Pat Red Hat—were facing the northern hills of the Black Eagle Child Settlement.

  When the singing, drumming, rattling, and laughing settled down, the sounds of a whipping flag and clinking chains returned. With his little face still bent backward toward the sun, Pat, with nostrils flaring in his hooked nose, asked what everyone was doing after school. The Muscatines were thus spared further humiliation.

  “In case you’re not doing anything, would you like to go see those hills above Liquid Lake? People say some kind of spaceships are landing there.”

  “Oh yeah, I heard my grandfather talk about it,” said Horatio, after he chucked the milk carton to the weeds. “Didn’t they have a feast for them last year?”

  “That’s right!” answered Edgar, surprising the group. They all looked at him as he turned around and pointed his left arm to the southwest. “I think they took food and offerings to the last ridge over there. You can barely see it, though. My grandmother went. She said tiny people were seen walking through the underbrush, coming from . . . over there. Look. That way.”

  The boys all looked toward the precipice of pine trees on O’Ryan’s Hill. Edgar asked if anyone thought they could find the spaceships. The Muscatines looked around, hoping someone would carry the discussion further.

  “Of course we can,” replied Pat assuredly, as he gently rocked the playground ride with his bulky weight. “We just have to wait until nightfall. I guess that’s when the lights in the sky begin moving. Some spaceships are supposed to be the size of quarters, with black smoke trailing behind and sounding like ten trains.”

  “What I hear,” interjected Horatio, after wiping his nose on the cuff of his shirt, “was that these spaceships are the Supernaturals who have come to check on us, to see how we are doing.”

  “But-ta . . . but-ta . . . what-ta if-f-f they’re not?” asked Theodore through an intermittent breath of inhaled and exhaled words. “What-ta .. . if-f . . . they’re fr-from ou-outer space? Or-or fr-from the stars? My-my aunt Louise . . . Stabs Back . . . sa-says th-they’re . . . th-the . . . they br-brought us Star Me-Medicine.”

  “What are you talking about, Ted?” inquired Pat. “Star-Medicine? On whose back? What-ta what-ta do you mean?”

  Quick to imitate, Horatio followed with another question. “And-da and-da who-who a-are you staying with since your fa-fa-father is working in Iowa City?” On the side the Muscatines covered their mouths, and their beady eyes gleamed as they giggled.

  Theodore’s eyes began to shift at the mockery, and then he suddenly clammed up. When the recess bell was manually rung, Horatio got up and proposed a camp-out at Liquid Lake over the weekend, to which Hayward and Kensington quickly agreed. They looked at each other and smiled. As everyone started to get up, stretching arms and legs, the Muscatine duo volunteered in an excited tone to bring “the weenies.” The rest of the group, led by Pat, took that as innuendo, saying “Wee-h!” with a basslike emphasis. The short but pronounced verbal utterance was a turnaround, the reference to “weenies” being taken as a literal delivery of their privates.

  At further expense of the Muscatines, the group’s giggling accelerated as they entered the school building. Once inside, Pat and Horatio said to the teachers aloud, “Hey! The Muscatines are bringing weenies to the camp-out!”

  “That’s good,” said the teachers who stood in front of their classroom doors. “I’m sure they’ll taste scrumptious over the fire,” they said. “Mmmm—mm-mmm, yum-yum,” said one of them, rubbing her belly and rolling her wet tongue over the top lipstick-covered lip.

  “Wee-h!” cried the group in an exaggerated manly intonation before breaking into a more pronounced laugh. Upon hearing this and without knowing what the joke was about, other tribal students began squealing uncontrollably as they stood in the water line. “The Muscatines, they’re bringing weenies!”

  When the teachers indicated the Muscatines might have to “bring lots of them, in boxes,” the entire school erupted into throes of maniacal giggling. When Mr. Mateechna, the janitor, was summoned by the teachers to figure out what was so funny, he simply told the students in question to stop talking.

  “Quit talking! Quit talking nasty! Bo na na ke to ne mo kol Bo ni-wa ne ska-a to to ne mo kol” the janitor warned. “You are going to get these others blamed. They will wash everyone’s mouth with soap. Ki me tti ta wi a ba ke i-ma a ki-ko ta ka ki. Ke ki me si ke i-ki ko ka be to ne o ko ki-si bya i ka ni.”

  Mr. Mateechna tried unsuccessfully to stop the addictive giggling. It only increased. More so when Horatio shared a story of a previous camp-out in which Hayward Muscatine threw an uncooked weenie in the fire because he wanted to go home. As the weenie was being described in broken English, picking up “bits of dirt” and ash on its roll to the fire, the janitor’s stoicism broke. His yellow, chewing tobacco-stained teeth were bared as he emitted a hearty chuckle.

  “Oh? The weenie got grubby?” asked one of the teachers.

  The boys, pumped up to a frenzy, all pointed at the red-faced Hayward and screamed, out his new name, “Grubby!”

  If not for the spectacular weather, Pat would have gone home with bruised gums. The janitor covered up for the boys by saying the word “weenie” just sounded funny. To the teachers he explained, “You’d have to be Indian to understand. The word, if it ended with ‘na,’ would mean him or her: wi na.” Satisfied with Mr. Mateechna’s explanation, the teachers stood in front of their blackboards and proclaimed their adoration for “weenies” by saying, “Wi na and all of us like weenies! Right?”

  And that really did it: the foundations of the aged school shook from the stomping feet of its students. Which wasn’t good because the building had been condemned for years. But Pat, who was an expert at making sexual innuendo all-inclusive, made everyone near him aware of such stuff. In particular, Horatio. Any word spoken was an invitation for lewd associations or imaginary predicaments. Horatio made a spark into a roaring flame. If you were conveying a story of how big an object was or how delicious lunch dessert was, it became something else in an instant with a low vocal exhalation. “Wee-h!” In spite of its unoriginal obviousness, the Bureau of Tribal Affairs teaching staff never caught on. In their suspicions, they simply became frustrated, and a federal psychiatrist was summoned to Weeping Willow when mouth-washing failed.

  After the doctor offered his evaluation to the staff, a perpetually embittered teacher, Mrs. O’Toole, came into the classroom, shaking her red-painted fingernail angrily and saying, “Dirty. Dirty. Dirty Red Hat!” From that day forward, like Hayward with his new name “Grubby,” Pat was known as Pat “Dirty” Red Hat. Credited with defaming an Indian student’s family name, Mrs. O’Toole was eventually forced to resign from Weeping Willow.

  The federal psychiatrist had been one of a kind. After researching the myths of the Black Eagle Child tribe, he had simply determined that sexual-related themes were introduced early on to tribal youth, and nothing out of the ordinary had taken place.

  In the First Memory of My Life

  On November 12, 1951, I was born in my maternal grandparent’s two-room house on the Black Eagle Child Settlement. To
day, this house stands a quarter of a mile from where Selene Buffalo Husband, my wife, and I presently live. Back then it was an unpainted house where my mother, Clotelde, and her two younger brothers, Winston and Severt, and their mother and father, Ada and Jack Principal Bear, shared the small rooms. My father, Tony Bearchild, would by choice remain aloof from our lives for another decade. When I was a child, this small, unpainted house and the people within, as well as the surrounding hills, comprised my total worldly realm.

  The house was equipped with two woodstoves, one of which was used for cooking and the other for heating; the smoky brown interior was illuminated by either daylight or the wicks of two kerosene lamps. The floor consisted of well-worn, shiny, smooth slabs of wood. Above, the cardboard panels on the smoke-darkened ceiling provided a perfect artistic medium: My two y6ung uncles, using safety pins, carved and scribbled what must have been the first pictographs and names I saw in elaborate longhand.

  Today from afar I can only look at the house and ponder in amazement: This is where memories and a personal and family history were developed. What the house gave me, you could say, was the basic knowledge I would need on this largely enigmatic “Journey of Words.” For that I am grateful, but it isn’t quite enough. There are many things I don’t yet understand, and it’s highly unlikely that I ever will.

  That much I already know. . . .

  In 1954, before my younger brother Alan was born in the same unpainted house, my grandfather Jack Principal Bear passed away from complications of failing health. Of the four earliest childhood memories I have, three deal with events that involve my grandfather and what occurred within and outside the four walls: The first was his encouraging me to walk to him; the second was three young men supporting him as he stepped off the porch; and the third involved the solemn ceremonies surrounding his inexplicable disappearance.