Memory & Consequences

7/7/2022

To remember hard stories truthfully requires bravery.

I’m reading The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. We bought the novel at the Heritage Center of the Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge reservation. Pine Ridge is about two hours south of the Badlands and as I read this book I see the stark, beautiful landscape out the car window. I see the little gravel turn off at Wounded Knee, where 500 American soldiers massacred 300 Lakota Indians in 1890. Where, in 1973, Native people held this place for 71 days until the US government moved in and destroyed the tiny town that was there then. We met, at that turnoff, a woman who remembers the day her house was plowed over.

The Seed Keeper is a strong story told through the voices of four native women. Each woman, in her own time and way, is trying to integrate her story into her time and it is fraught work.

Reading these compelling stories is making me wonder about our fraught time. How much of the deceitfulness of the Trump administration was welcomed and supported by people who wanted to win, not remember?

The dad of the Seed Keeper main character says:

Personally, I remember stories of my family that are harsh and must have been difficult to endure. I can say my dad lived a hard childhood as the oldest kid of a new widow during the Depression. Saying those words is not the experience of a decade being often hungry, exhausted, worried about his mom and little brother. His experience deeply affected how he raised my siblings and me, affected what he expected of us and the fears he must have wrestled in the night when we were sleeping in our cozy beds in our nice bedrooms in our lovely home.

Our nation was won by dozens of battles fought by men who then came home and didn’t talk about it. It’s intense and weird work to live one’s life on top of repressed memories. It’s easier to put on made-up macho rituals than to deal with the demons of wars fought well and fought badly.

Carrying and sometimes firing an AR-15 is easier than, well, a whole lot of things that apparently a lot of men don’t have the bravery to say or admit. Cruelty is the power of the weak and pathetic.

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Are women often more enduring and strong because we fail so early? There is a story out there of who we should be – and so many of us failed at that so early. It’s almost a rite of passage for teenage girls to realize they are never going to attract the coolest boyfriend, wear the best clothes, or weigh the right weight. Our hair, acne, scars, shyness, mouthiness, and other so-called imperfections teach us to move inward, figure out who we are, then live that life. Women who don’t do this work live lives trying to fulfill the story written for them, instead of their own.

In my 20’s I was friends with a remarkably homely woman. Frizzy hair, complexion like mashed potatoes, terrible clothes, she even had a wart on her nose. Everyone liked her. She was an underpaid social worker who enjoyed people, laughed a lot, and loved to eat in diners. I was having breakfast with her as she described a mutual friend who was absolutely beautiful and who  was going through another bad breakup with a toxic guy. Bev leaned back and said, “I always feel sorry for women who are beautiful right away. They don’t get the time one needs to know who one is.”  

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In the novel a very old woman talks about the horrors she experienced as a young woman. She thinks about telling her memories to her daughter and grandkids as they harvest their garden  on a beautiful early fall day. She decides to not tell those stories because what she experienced and witnessed was too horrendous. She doesn’t want those stories to be in her grandkids' heads. 

At the end of the day, she and one of her granddaughters walk back to their little home where they discover people in shock. The two youngest boys of the family have been kidnapped by state authorities to be delivered to Indian boarding school.

Trauma trips through generations.

Our nation was founded with energy, vision, and hope. Our nation was founded on sanctimony, greed, and slavery.

Here we are.

Half of us say our history isn’t our history.

The other half says,” Listen up.”

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The rez dog Len refers to and yes, that pup got part of Len's salami sandwich. Len shares.