Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Before long I was truly convinced I possessed an innate talent to communicate. Grandmother reinforced this interest by taking my writing to a mimeographed community newsletter. In the summer of i960, my first work, after being edited and finalized in English, was published by the Black Eagle Child Quarterly.

  Grandmother

  If I were to see

  her shape from a mile away

  I’d know so quickly

  that it would he her.

  The purple scarf

  and the plastic

  shopping hag.

  If I felt

  hands on my head

  I’d know that those

  were her hands

  warm and damp

  with the smell

  of roots.

  If I heard

  a voice

  coming from

  a rock

  I’d know

  and her words

  would flow inside me

  like the light

  of someone

  stirring ashes

  from a sleeping fire

  at night.

  Part Two

  Journals of the Six Grandfathers

  In the fall of 1964, which was my first year at Doetingham Junior High and my first year away from Weeping Willow Elementary—a time I recorded as “The Autumn I Was Instructed alongside the Caucasians”—I rediscovered the process of writing poetry. This was in seventh grade, thirty years ago. Since then IVe often thought that if there’s external guidance to our destinies, I would have to say mine— the Well-Known Twin Brother’s cosmic hands—reached through the autumn air and twisted events so abruptly that all appeared natural.

  Of course, to have an illiterate Indian boy stumble over another language was perhaps part of the divine plan all along. Likewise, with Mrs. O’Toole, ex-Weeping Willow teacher. You see, this is what I visualize happened:

  At meteoric speed my Black Eagle Child and Christian name must have appeared on the Twin Brother’s secretary’s monitor:

  Ka ka to a.k.a Edgar Bearchild, formerly Edgar Principal Bear.

  This—He or they must have assessed—is an archaic Bear clan name whose meaning fell long ago from the unrelenting European encroachment—and the life-taking modernity that followed. These people, some of them, possess forgotten names with forgotten meanings.

  Take special note of this one, the ochre, seal-eyed word-collector, seeking absolution through his name. Ka ka to, he says, is a verb-based noun: a person with inordinate talent to instill in others a will, an influence that persists until an insurmountable task is completed. In being who he is, a word-arranger, this inflated explanation of his name is all he can offer the question-askers, those deprived of themselves, of identity, victims of progress. He is clearly attempting to make a meaning for himself—and for them, those who know more or less than he.

  Please forgive this lie, he whispers through his sniffles. He walks away, unfulfilled. Sooner or later, he will forget, ni wa ni ke wa, for that is the way he has been taught by those who value forgetfulness.

  The Newcomers. Five centuries of unparalleled genocide—seventy to ninety million dead Indians in North and South America—equals in supernatural time a mere breath expended by God, our Father.

  And just as quickly as a falling star falls—President John F. Kennedy was assassinated the year previous—a decision must have been circulated among the multitudes on that fateful autumn years ago.

  Bless Ka ka to with a meager life

  as a collector and arranger

  of words and let half or more

  belong to another language

  that which entangles

  confuses

  and let this existence surface

  in tenuous daylight

  only

  when prophecies of Earth’s End

  will only confirm what

  was known all along

  and complicate further

  this life

  with imagined grief and wild humor

  which shall be the essence of truth—

  in the end

  let ALL OF THIS occur

  in the midst of learning a god-given language.

  Divine intervention aside, it’s also possible that Mrs. OToole, a white, middle-aged female teacher, simply unleashed her bigotry and altered my life forever. That part doesn’t need visualization. What was, in my opinion, an average essay entitled “A Day in My Life” made Mrs. O’Toole whisper coarse-sounding words in my ear, stating I had not “fulfilled the assignment” but had instead written “a poem.”

  What the hell? I asked myself as my sensitive blowholes attempted to shut tight against her gruesome spit-spray. It was useless. As the youngest in the pod I lagged behind and ended up swimming alongside the very vessel that was hunting us. With her harpoon-laced breath, she came on like a vociferous sorceress. The only other person ever to douse me with her misty breath was Ada Principal Bear, my grandmother. But that had to do with traditional healing, annointed breath, and a wish to drive the green Spanish galleon’s mass back through the kerosene-darkened cardboard ceiling.

  At home, Grandmother reduced my fevers; at school, Mrs. O’Toole ignited a literary spark in the dimly lit hollowness of my immature being. Granted, with the family’s help, I had already published poemlike work in the tribal newsletter called the Black Eagle Child Quarterly. But for years I didn’t have the vaguest idea what I was doing.

  Had it not been for the Quarterly’s editor, Billy “Cracker” Jack, who was renowned for making disparaging comments to children, I might have kept going. Nineteen sixty was not only my debut year as a child-poet but also the year of my first literary-related downfall. Before he left the Settlement in search of “relocation” adventure, “Cracker” Jack went on this extreme W. C. Field’s kick, which corroborated his greatest disrespect for young people. All children, except his own, were subjected mercilessly to his petty admonitions. With some children he began by making fun of their physical characteristics. If there wasn’t any flaw, he would create one and persist until the child became self-conscious and convinced something was terribly wrong. With me, he attacked my words. On the one hand I am indebted to him for encouraging Grandmother and Uncle Severt to submit my work to the Quarterly. But as it turned out, “Cracker” Jack started belittling my “proud indin” themes in public. He was quoted as saying “my voice wasn’t real” that my “ideas were implanted by Liquid Lake Martians.”

  There was more to this than a child-poet worth picking on.

  If memory doesn’t fail me, there was a vicious tug-of-war in court over the custody of an abandoned child, the one who brought a monstrous television set for one glorious summer to Grandmother’s house. I can still see in my imagination the kid being tied between the two opposing team-families over the green lawn. The father, “Cracker” Jack’s brother, was dead, and the mother couldn’t claim the orphan due to another marriage. Before the tug-of-war countdown ended, both of his limbs in a false start were ripped off by sympathetic family members—and everyone fell. Like a beheaded chicken, the orphan’s torso lost its equilibrium and flopped aimlessly on the ground, spilling his suffering.

  Or at least that’s how the disorder caused by the social services seemed to end up. Incidentally, both families lost the fight, and when the orphan left for the adoption agency, my brother Alan and I were deprived of television for three long years. Its presence in my life was significant because the Saturday morning cartoons verified what I had seen with my own pre-TV mind through Grandmother’s stories. My thoughts had been set aglow with pictures of talking animals and supernatural deities who transformed themselves into whatever they desired. We had seen movies, obviously, but tribal mythology animated by amusing creatures completed our perception that another realm, the Supernatural, existed all around us.

  Anyway, because of “Cracker” Jack’s animosity engendered indirectly by my work, I lost four valuable years. Yet, it was at this juncture that Gra
ndmother, after seeing my work translated into English, began to hint there was probably an invisible force at work. “Maybe there’s a sentinel spirit, guiding you and your words,” she’d say. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you learning a little bit of English. But your work with your Six Grandfathers’ Journals has to continue.”

  I would not see the orphan with the large television set for fourteen years or “Cracker” Jack for twenty-four years. The former became a Navy Seabee, while the latter went west and came back with “a deck of cards.” Meaning the shady gambling trade.

  * * *

  Somewhere within the trillion Milky Way stars the Well-Known Twin Brother s secretary must have typed out a crucial question: Is the life of Ka ka to a.k.a. Edgar Bearchild-to-be one to be led or misled? With regard to who I presently am, I have a feeling the cosmic computer had a major malfunction when Mrs. OToole’s acidic food particles drew a Goyalike etching throughout my anatomy, verifying suspicions white people could not shake their murderous mode of operation.

  We were herded into an alley with our arms raised, trembling from the ultimate act of submission. The well-dressed militia cocked their rifles, took aim at our peasant hearts, and braced themselves forward against the impending recoil. On a cobblestone street that was illuminated like a theater stage—with fluorescent lights under our feet—we were painted with our own blood and done away with. Our arms fell limp, and whoever didn’t die right away ate glistening bayonets for dessert. ...

  A metaphorical death by firing squad is exactly what my grandmother, Ada Principal Bear, had feared about Weeping Willow Elementary. Whether in a classroom or a bloody floor-lit alley, education coincided with colonial subjugation.

  “These white people will destroy everything and they will cause the demise of humankind and Grandmother Earth,” she warned at the onset as we awaited the orange school bus beside the frosty gravel road.

  (I would later indict Mrs. OToole of Doetingham—Doo-tin-hem—Junior High School as a conspirator. An agent of the Red Pedagogical Army. From her coffee- and nicotine-stained dentures a message was spewed out. Propaganda.)

  I am blessed with a mission, I recited aboard the orange school bus, to be the harbinger of prophecy, the angel of Earth’s End . . . ally of the Northern Lights . . . me, an ochre, seal-eyed poet in a tight flannel shirt, hole-ridden jeans, and Presbyterian Church-donated shoes.

  That autumn at Doetingham Junior High, through classroom assignments, I rediscovered poetry. If I listened to Grandmother and wrote what she said, I adduced, certainly I could do the same with my own thoughts, employing the English language. I had done it before. After “Cracker” Jack’s infamous attack on my first poemlike work, Grandmother opined that if the tribe was oblivious to the Sacred Chieftains, then it was not inappropriate to use every opportunity that presented itself to apprise the greater American public of a disrupted Black Eagle Child dynasty.

  With a radio in the household, the Why Cheer Theater, Weeping Willow Elementary, and Grandmother working at the Laundry and Dry Cleaners, the English language proved omnipresent. In the kitchen, even as Grandmother narrated for the Journals, the radio or the phonograph would be playing in the background. Every day and most of the night we gorged ourselves on the airwaves.

  Listening to “oldies but goldies” radio stations today, I can still recall songs from 1956 like Guy Mitchell’s “Singing the Blues” and Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill.” From 1957 I really liked “Young Love,” but whether the artist was Tab Hunter or Sonny James, I’m not positive. By 1958 I was swept up by “Twenty-Six Miles” by the Four Preps and “Twilight Time” by the Platters. The same with “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson and “It’s All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. For 1959 and i960, there isn’t a single song that stands out as being influential. Which is understandable, considering what disc jockeys were playing: “Charlie Brown” by the Coasters; “Alvin’s Harmonica” by David Seville and the Chipmunks; “Running Bear” by Johnny Preston; “Alley-Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles and “Mr. Custer” by Larry Verne. Oh, Elvis was around, as were Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, Chubby Checker, and, last but not least, Dion. These were high-caliber music makers! Jesus, where was I? In 1964 my ears finally perked up to the tunes of the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Animals. Music and movies—like 1955’s Oscar winner, Marty, with Ernest Borgnine, or 1957’s winner, The Bridge over the River Kwai, with Alec Guinness and William Holden— I now theorize, were instrumental in subconsciously reinforcing the English taught at Weeping Willow Elementary.

  But nothing could have prepared me for junior high. Having Mrs. O’Toole for a teacher again and Sitting beside cream-colored classmates proved a riveting experience. Sensing that my brother Alan and I were metabolically deficient, Mother made us familiar with vitamin supplements long before they became popular. I may not have been a plump, healthy child, but whatever horrid-tasting chemistry I ingested made my sight less transfixed.

  Being a child-poet and “word-collector” wasn’t novel, but a boat tips over if the rider is unfamiliar with its balance and means of propulsion —right? Especially when the boat was shaky to begin with. Simply put, I was like the baby Moses in The Ten Commandments movie, cast off and set adrift down the Nile River in a small waterproof basket.

  No one with the exception of the Well-Known Twin Brother could have possibly conceived what was in the offing. For each succeeding generation that my Six Grandfathers lived in, there were different priorities. Unfailingly, each grandfather faced the same obstacle, but unbeknownst to them, each was a faded duplicate of the First Grandfather. Grandmother taught that the world was a wicked amalgamation of modernity, eventuality, and social change. In listening to her observations as the Principal Bear matriarch, I began to construct a scene over which we had little or no control, our self-destruction.

  Guided by these vast influences, I began to formulate a life plan of sorts. Part of my time would consist of updating my grandfather’s journals; the other part would be spent on my own writings. Being a “word-collector,” being able to write and think in both languages, was a rarity. I resolved to ignore the “Cracker” Jacks and Mrs. O’Tooles of this convoluted society.

  Almost effortlessly I started to feel the strength and weaknesses of words. In both languages, thoughts and opinions could divide, anger, or injure people but could also become a vehicle for empathy.

  In an earthly realm where the forces of nature are infinitely more powerful than human beings, personal and collective insignificance is a given. In our relatively compact tribal society, there was equal standing among everyone other than the chieftain hierarchy. In the ancien régime our people hunted, fished, gathered food, planted seeds, and harvested crops together, making everyone interdependent.

  This philosophical stance of insignificance was reflected in the journals. Preceding each passage my grandfathers wrote were such disclaimers: “Now, at this very moment, I will be forthright and say that I do not know much, that I am not exceedingly knowledgeable, but this is what I have been told: whatever you see, you will document that fact, for it will serve as a point from which present and future Black Eagle Childs will have an unobstructed view of our life. This I have done in the same way my other grandfathers did. . . .”

  With that as a catapult, and with zero apologies to Shakespeare and Popeye, I write what I see and therefore and therein I am. Not unlike the aspirations of many a would-be writer.

  Where the rivers of existence

  do not come together

  is the only

  geography cherished

  by my Six Grandfathers

  Where the rivers do not come together

  is a geography known only

  to the Six Grandfathers

  Among the trillion stars traveling through the earthlodge cosmos I was destined to have a collision with a supernova. And this is what I saw: Other than the brown-tinted skin that encompassed our bodies and minds, nothing impacted our lives more than the
food we ingested, as well as the breath we inhaled and expelled within a particular existential moment and place. This earthly existence made for our exclusive use came with socioeconomic and physio-biological divisions.

  It began with the organic spaces each of us occupied. The air, for instance, where Jane Ribbon—that fabled “Dam Monster”— snipped pages from CM. Marshall’s catalogs emitted a faint but pervasive scent of riverwater and boiled roots. Admittedly, the shadowy space inside her small two-room house, where the arts of pearl diving and medicinal healing were venerated, was markedly different from the air held inside a distant farmhouse inhabited by whites. Further, the air inside the black limousine, the one I saw parked on Uncle Clifford Water Runner’s road in the summer of 1967, was extremely different. Behind the tinted windows breathed Jean Seberg, the Iowa-born Hollywood actress. (Up until her unfortunate passing in 1974, she had wanted to meet me, but “Cracker” Jack at a West Coast screening for Paint Your Wagon advised her my family had “perpetrated a cruel nonexistent child-poet hoax” to people like her who were interested in “saving us from our plight.” Jean Seberg, on that long-ago summer day, bought Crawdad, our beagle puppy. Uncle Clifford, ever the schemer, made the unauthorized twenty-dollar sale and didn’t even split it. Years later when I told Grandmother about Jean Seberg’s suicide in Paris, she commented that my brother and I were fortunate in that she took nothing else with her. Maybe the puppy took both of your places in death, she would say instead.)

  These experiences of the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the spaces in which we are contained are interrelated in the sense that they involve human beings, yet there are pervasive divisions that make us inimitable. The space we occupied in rural or wooded earth-light was experienced firsthand, organically.

  From our pain we have gained energy; from our losses we have barely recovered. Do-nothing academic types tout us as “the tribe that miraculously reemerged from several remnant groups.” They are swift to compile reams of new and old information about our religion, mythology, and current political beliefs. Books about us with hyped-up phraseology and absurd anthropological theories are published.