But maybe warmth isn’t the point here. Maybe the point is simply to honor something vaster than the self, to express humility through devotion, to acknowledge there is something more than this, and it potentially could be that, so let us try and see what that brings. Following the pilgrims’ procession toward an altar of burning candles, I bow my head and pray.
AT SOME POINT IN THE BLUR of junior high, my mother enrolled me in a preparatory course to receive one of Catholicism’s seven sacraments: confirmation. She wasn’t religious but she was Tejana and therefore saw catechism as a parental duty on par with orthodontia. Every week for two years, I sat amidst a passel of teenagers and listened as the monsignor harangued us about the vileness of sin as we whispered, napped, passed notes, and sneaked outside to smoke. Then I would slip into Mom’s Buick, where Sade crooned from the tape deck, and try to make sense of what I’d heard. Mom would listen to my confusion about one doctrine or another, then suggest I stop overthinking things. “Just let it go,” she’d advise.
How can you overthink something whose implications are so huge? I continued worrying until the course ended and a Mass was arranged to confirm us. Before the bishop could anoint us with chrism—the blessed oil that would forever seal our bonds to the church—the monsignor said we must first go to confession to absolve ourselves of sin. Mom waited in the Buick one afternoon while I ran inside to do so. Sinking to my knees before the darkened screen, I rattled off every sin since my last confession, then paused.
“Anything else?” the priest asked.
Stopoverthinking, stopoverthinking, stopoverthinking. Too late: I was already launching into my litany of doubt. Before I’d even finished, the priest delved into one of his own. These thoughts of mine were dangerous, he said. Wasn’t I concerned about the state of my soul? Had I not contemplated the pains of hell?
I ran out of the confessional crying and dove inside a pew. After calming myself down—surely hell was a long way off?—I stared up at the stained glass windows, the fourteen Stations of the Cross, the candles flickering yellow and blue. Then I heard a noise behind me. Four rows back knelt a girl from my class. Pressing her hands into her forehead in prayer, she looked so holy, so pure, so not overthinking. Rising from the pew, I genuflected before the altar and made the first adult decision of my life.
Back in the Buick, I told Mom I couldn’t be confirmed. “That would be,” I somberly said, “unethical.”
It was the first time I had ever questioned Mom’s judgment about anything. She was our family’s breadwinner, the one who marched off to IBM each morning wearing a power suit with shoulder pads and who interrogated every suitor my sister or I brought home. I never protested when she signed me up for ballet or gymnastics or modeling or piano lessons despite my disinterest because I trusted she knew best—even when it meant enduring a humiliating season of catching fly balls with my face in Southside Little Miss Kickball.
But when I told Mom my decision, her voice grew uncharacteristically soft. She felt obligated, she said, to baptize her daughters and guide them through their first communion and confirmation. She didn’t explain why then, but it occurs to me now that Catholicism might have been one of the few cultural attributes she could actually pass on. After a lifetime of linguistic discrimination, she had refrained from teaching me Spanish. She hated to cook, so I hadn’t inherited any recipes for rice or beans. My jazz drummer dad controlled our household’s soundtrack, so I grew up hearing Frank Sinatra instead of Pedro Infante. We carved pumpkins for Halloween rather than decorated sugar skulls for Dia de los Muertos. I had never even been spanked with a chancla.
Do this for me, Mom pleaded.
Sitting there in that Buick, I made the second adult decision of my life. I agreed to be confirmed—for the same reason Bernice Lazore has juggled two conflicting spiritual practices for over half a century; that Darren Bonaparte locked himself into his office for a year, reading a mountain of manuscripts before composing one of his own; that Mary-Louise drove to the Mission of Saint Francis Xavier this morning despite a childhood of trauma at a Catholic Indian Residential School. It might even be for the same reason Kateri Tekakwitha beat herself with an ardor that finally killed her. Maybe she wasn’t searching for Jesus at all but for the memory of her Catholic mother’s caress—that reassuring stroke across her shoulder, that tickling kiss on her forehead.
Which is why, however much I empathize with their wrath for the church that Christianized them by force, I can’t help but wince whenever Mohawks bash Kateri. She reminds me too much of Mother Julia, who has also united a marginalized people eager to see one of their own deemed holy and who grants them miracles in their time of need. Kateri reminds me of La Virgen de Guadalupe, whose skin is as brown as many of her followers and who has been making public appearances for five centuries and counting.
Above all, Kateri reminds me of La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as translator and mistress to Hernán Cortés during the conquest of Mexico. She too suffered throughout her life, sold into concubinage at fourteen and handed over to the Spanish a few years later. Though essentially a slave, she grew so vital to the mission of Cortés, he was sometimes called “Lord Malinche.” She bore him a son, one of Mexico’s first mestizos, but Cortés eventually took him away. To this day in Jaltipan, where she is supposedly buried in an unmarked grave, locals hear her crying as she wanders around the river, searching for the lost son who gave rise to an entirely new identity.
Despite Malinche’s hardship, despite all of the sacrifices she made as she tried to survive, she is often derided as a traitor by her progeny—not unlike Kateri. Yet to hate these women is to hate our grandmothers, to hate our mothers, to hate ourselves. Haven’t we done enough of that already?
This is ultimately why I have traveled to Kahnawake today. Now that I have lost much of our language and tradition, now that I have abandoned our homeland, now that I have bypassed the chance to pass on our seed, Catholicism is one of my last remaining ties to my heritage. This is why I will keep my tomb-blessed Kateri card, despite no perceivable warmth, and why I will add it to the shrine of devotional items atop my writing desk. This is why I will remain Catholic, no matter how it morally or intellectually devastates me: because I am ancestrally so.
NOTES
1. According to a 2015 New York Times special report, one of MIT’s sites—Bovada—received 190 million visits from computers during a twelve-month period; 97 percent of that traffic purportedly came from the United States.
2. These traditional wooden dwellings tended to be a couple hundred feet long and about twenty feet wide and housed dozens of families in small compartments. A dearth of doorways made the structure efficient for heating and defending. Around the mid-eighteenth century, families began building smaller log cabins of their own but retained longhouses as gathering places to uphold their traditional ceremonial practices (aptly known as the Longhouse).
3. Father Isaac Jogues, the so-called Apostle of the Mohawks, met an especially gruesome fate. His first captors chewed off his fingers and kept him as a slave, while his last hacked off his head and tossed him into the Mohawk River. He was canonized as a North American martyr along with seven other Jesuits in 1930.
4. According to the Reverend John Downs, only one Mohawk has led this congregation in its 260-year history: Father Jacobs, sometime between the 1940s and the 1970s. The rest of the priests have been white, he said, and some quite disapproving of incorporating Mohawk culture into the church. In recent years, however, the parish has been led by a Filipino named Jerome Pastores who encourages the melding of traditions, including singing hymns in Mohawk, praying to the four winds, hanging up wreaths of sweetgrass, and installing altars to Kateri.
5. Saint Pedro Calungsod braved typhoons and jungles in his mission to catechize the Chamorros of Guam during the mid-seventeenth century. Suspected of poisoning babies with his vial of holy water, he got martyred at age seventeen with a spear to the chest and a machete to the head.
&nbs
p; 6. Sir Hector Langevin, Secretary of State for the Provinces, told Canada’s Parliament in 1883, “In order to educate the children properly we must separate them from their families. Some people may say this is hard, but if we want to civilize them we must do that.” Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the flagship Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the United States, explained his own pedagogy as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” According to one source, of the 10,000 indigenous children who attended Carlisle from 1879 to 1918, only 158 graduated.
7. Post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, addiction, and domestic abuse are among the legacies of these residential schools, along with the near-destruction of indigenous culture. Some alumni do, however, credit the schools for teaching them discipline. Scholar Marie-Pierre Bousquet suggests this is why a number who graduated through the system later became key First Nations leaders.
8. After a flurry of residential school survivor lawsuits in the 1990s, Canada appointed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address their grievances. In December 2015, just-elected prime minister Justin Trudeau vowed to implement all ninety-four recommendations of a scathing 3,231-page report about the treatment of Aboriginal people throughout Canada’s history. Trudeau also inducted two indigenous leaders into his cabinet of prime ministers (half of whom are women).
15
The Activist and the Obelisk
I’M BACK IN THE SLICE OF AKWESASNE THAT MOHAWKS CALL SNYE,1 Canadians consider Quebec, and New Yorkers assume is still the Empire State, this time with a passport, a colleague, and three young Chinese women in tow. They are students from St. Lawrence University, but when we step off a dock and into a speedboat and start zipping across the St. Lawrence River, it occurs to us that—if we are stopped by the U.S. or Canadian customs agents who patrol these waters—they will likely be perceived as something else: human cargo. This stretch of river is, after all, the region’s most notorious smuggling corridor, and Chinese are among the most heavily trafficked citizens. Scenes from Frozen River flicker in my mind until my colleague—the unflappable Celia Nyamweru—makes an executive decision to stop thinking about it.
Piloting the boat is a Cree elder named Bob. We met a few weeks ago at Akwesasne’s annual powwow, where he stood out even among the dancers in full regalia. Imposing with his wrestler’s build and long silver hair, he also wears a bear-claw necklace. Each claw extends a full four inches before curling in toward his chest. Something about it commands the awe of a bandolier—maybe even more, as claws imply a power that can never be spent. A medicine man gave him the necklace forty-eight years ago, he says, and he has worn it every day since. Also hanging from his neck is a beaded pouch made of moose hide. It holds his cell phone.
Clouds darken the river as the Adirondacks climb blue in the distance. We pass another island every few minutes and a boat every five. Either duck hunters or smugglers, Bob guesses. Whoever they are, they rough up the waters so that it feels like we’re getting spanked. Eventually Thompson Island comes into view, and we pull up to its dock. Bob steps out and extends a hand to each of us. A retired fur trapper, his grip is herculean.
Thompson Island is lushly forested with just enough land cleared for a bungalow, a volleyball net, a ring of canvas tents, some Adirondack chairs, an outhouse, and a teepee. We enter the bungalow, which smells of wood and soup. Bob’s wife and brother-in-law are preparing lunch in the kitchen. A hunk of cured salt pork tops the counter along with turnips, carrots, onions, and cans of kidney beans. They greet us as they knead circles of dough that will soon be fried into bread.
We shuffle into the main room, where a wood-burning stove crackles and pops. Dried corn decks the walls, tobacco leaves line a basket, feathers fill a jar. “Before I came to get you, I saw an eagle steal a duck from a hunter,” Bob says. “Maybe we can find her, eh?” Grabbing a tall, gnarled stick, he heads out the back door and we follow close behind. Soon we are immersed in a forest that my urban mind registers as a scenic workout venue. Bob sees something else entirely.
“Stinging nettles,” he says, pausing at a plant whose leaves are cut as delicately as snowflakes. “If you grab it, you get stung. But if you pick it right and cook it, it’s very strong, like spinach. Warm it up with butter and it tastes real good.”
A few steps more and he stops again, this time before ruby berries growing in clusters. Sumac, he says. Boil the berries, let them sit, then strain off the floaters. Medicine people give the juice to women when they are menstruating. Those dark purple berries? Those are elderberries, good for the blood. You can boil them into jam or bake them in a pie. Medicine people use the stems to treat rheumatism.
“And this we call Indian Band-Aid,” he says, plucking a bright green leaf with a long skinny stem and wrapping it around his wrist. “Boil it, cook it, and add a little olive oil and beeswax to make a salve.”
For every ailment, there is a plant that offers a remedy. You just have to know where to look, he says.
We continue on, past mushrooms the size of dinner plates and grapes a tangy blue. Bob points out black ash trees, white oak trees, walnut trees, cottonwood trees, wild garlic plants, and wild onion. You can find anything out here, he says, even marijuana. Ten years ago, while hiking about, he came upon a stash of seven-foot cannabis plants growing in pots. He reported it to the Mohawk police, who in turn contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which estimated a $130,000 street value before hauling the pots away. They never caught the growers, but Bob thinks they were Quebecois.
The forest thickens. We are hiking single-file now, holding back limbs so no one gets whacked in the face. I gradually notice an ethereal noise emanating from above, like a fairy humming.
“It’s the trees,” Bob says. “See how they rub together?”
Another thing the southern and northern borderlands have in common: vocal trees. Their song amplifies the farther we hike into the forest, each cluster contributing a different octave as their trunks nuzzle in the wind. Some groan the feral melody. Others shriek it. The sound is haunting but beautiful.
The trail, meanwhile, has turned as springy as a tumbling mat. I look down to find it carpeted in moss an electric shade of green.
“There she goes!” Bob calls out, and I glimpse the expansive wing of a bald eagle as she alights high up in a cottonwood tree. The students and I applaud, but she deigns to reveal only the white of her crown. Our trail, meanwhile, has vanished beneath a jumble of vines. Gripping his stick, Bob bushwhacks a new trail to the riverbank. White-crested waves lap against the shore as golden leaves swirl in the tide.
“You must catch some serious fish out here,” I say to Bob.
“Oh no,” he says. “No, no. The Natives stopped fishing here twenty, thirty years ago. There is a warning not to eat fish more than once a week, and pregnant women are not supposed to eat them at all. With a warning like that, I don’t either.”
He explains how, just two generations ago, this river ran thick with sturgeon, bass, walleye, eel, and pike—plenty to feed your family and sell extras on the side. Wild game roamed the region too: deer, elk, rabbit. Beavers kept the fur trappers busy, while black ash trees offered up splints to basket weavers. Well into the twentieth century, Mohawks could subsist off the land as they had since Sky Woman fell onto the back of a turtle.
Then in the 1950s, Canada and the United States started building the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of canals, locks, and channels that enabled ships to launch in the Great Lakes and sail clear to the Atlantic Ocean. One of its many regional side projects entailed a massive hydroelectric dam that straddled the international borderline. Its construction drowned six villages and virtually all of the area’s beaver hutches, displacing some 6,500 people2—many of whom were Mohawk—and decimating the trapping industry.
The dam also brought new businesses into the area, including General Motors, Reynolds Metals, and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), all three of which opened factories on the outskirts of Akwesasne, near the town of M
assena. Mohawks initially welcomed the job prospects but got hired only for manual labor (if that). And they soon started noticing rank smells emanating from their neighbors. Yellow-gray smoke slithered from the smelter stacks and drifted toward their homes and farms. One by one, their cattle went lame, the swelling in their legs so severe they had to lie down to graze and crawl to forage. Then the bees vanished. Many of the partridges from which Akwesasne derives its name did, too. Mohawks contracted bronchitis, then asthma. Midwives reported an increase in babies born with abnormalities. School nurses documented children’s teeth turning gray. Medicine people tried to cure the rashes, but no plant could heal them.
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