The Vanished Indian
Chapter Five
Chapters Four and Five are both about vanishing. Really the entire first part of the book is about all the ways that we vanished. We vanished from the creation story. We vanished from the land. We vanished from public imagination while the newcomers became American. Did you know that originally it was the Native people who were called Americans? That was what the colonists who still thought of themselves as French or Spanish or Dutch or English called us. Over time they began to call themselves Americans, we became Native Americans, and then we became invisible.
Chapter Four was originally going to be about all of these ways that we vanished from each other but it was just too much. Valerie thought that #MMIWG2S needed more than a couple of paragraphs (When nobody cares about missing native people that is bad. The end) and elsewhere she commented “I thought you were going to say something about forced sterilization here …” and Chapter Four became Chapters Four and Five. Not that it couldn’t have all stayed together, but having one chapter almost twice as long as the others is a little lopsided and chapter breaks are often just that. …
A break. We all need breaks, especially if the material is intense.
The chapter begins with policing and how we disappear into prisons, then it talks about how sometimes we just disappear.
I attended a vigil for the missing and murdered in Toronto several years ago. One of the speakers was a woman who recounted her experience with the Toronto Police Services, which not only refused to acknowledge her account of being sexually assaulted but placed her in custody for being disorderly. They also refused to acknowledge her gender identity and placed her in a unit with men—where she was sexually assaulted again.
Standing there with others, I remembered a time I came close to being a name on a sign instead of being a person who holds a sign.
You know I haven’t even told my mother this story? She might remember the time I came home late, I know that she had waited up for me and was angry when I walked through the door. She didn’t always wait up for me. I blamed my friends even though they had actually rescued me. Heard something about a hotel room and what the guys staying in it were going to do to the girl. Realized I was the girl and came and got me. But I didn’t want to get into trouble so I threw them under the proverbial bus and blamed them for not leaving early enough to get me home before curfew. It was a bitch move but I was 16 or 17 and they weren’t friends who hung out at my house so my mother wouldn’t ever have a chance to confront them. I don’t even remember if it worked, if my blaming of them meant I didn’t get grounded or whatever consequences my mother still attempted in my late teens.
But I remember that I was almost a victim. That I was almost one of the missing or assaulted. And I don’t know if it was because I’m native. I have no idea. Maybe? Maybe they didn’t even know. Native people are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. I don’t know that it necessarily has to do with people knowing that they are Native and targetting them although that certainly happens. It also has to do with all the social factors that put Native people in social settings where they are more likely to be victimized. If something disproportionately happens to poor people, and Native people are more likely to live in poverty guess what.
The Canadian Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found that police do not take concerns about assaults and sexual assaults of Native women seriously. Testimony after testimony was presented to the commission, stories about how the police disregarded their concerns or refused to investigate. The report documents a history of this disregard going back to the early years of Canada’s colonial history.[i] Willie James Jennings writes about this in The Christian Imagination, noting how early missionaries saw and described the Native women as sexually promiscuous and blamed them for the sexual sins of the men. Scholars Sarah Deer and Rebecca Anne Goetz remark on it in their histories. It’s inescapable because it is right in their own journals and diaries: the way that they saw us, thought about us, blamed us.
Sexual assault is often framed in terms of what the victim was wearing or doing or drinking. But sexual assault is the imposition of power; it is about who the victim is. And that is something that Black and Native women and girls and queer or two-spirit people can’t do anything about.
So the chapter ends with policing as well, because they promise to keep us safe and they don’t. They put us into their rape factories when we transgress their boundaries, and they abandon us to rape when we tell them that we are in danger. Police will tell families that there’s nothing they can do because she is in a “high risk” profession or “making high risk choices” or any number of variations on that theme and why would that make them less likely to act? Shouldn’t our presence in places of high risk make their response MORE urgent rather than less so?
But that’s the point isn’t it.
We’re supposed to disappear.
Next month we turn a corner. It’s been a long difficult slog through these first five chapters so I will leave you with an interlude from the book. A pause that I took in the midst of all this grief. A moment to breathe before we push forward into becoming kin.
Grief is the persistence of love. It sees my ancestors in stalks of corn and hears them whisper when I pour wild rice through my hands. It fills my bag with nettles and reminds me to be gentle when I strip bark from larch or dogwood.
Grief is the sound of thunder you feel deep in your chest, the lingering smell of sage hours after it is burnt.
Grief is the forgetting of names. It does not know which place the ancestors’ feet last touched before leaving home forever. It looks back over shoulders and sees only darkness. Stolen lives means stolen history means no thread to pick up and follow home.
Grief holds the accumulation of centuries in its hands and watches it turn to ash and then reaches out for more. Grief is consuming and consumed, an endless cycle of loss.
We take a moment and pause. So much loss, so many missed opportunities for relationship and community. How can we not be overwhelmed by it? These histories, these memories: they come in like the tide. Each wave pushes the ocean further inland until we are submerged.
In the harbor of a nearby town, there is a hurricane protection barrier. It is a wall with a gate that protects the town from hurricanes. But as the seas continue to rise and the hurricanes become more intense, the townspeople behind this wall of rock and steel know that it won’t protect them forever.
We are like this. We hold grief at bay with walls of rock and steel, fearing the time when they fail to protect us. We fear the ocean, the weight of this history we cannot change. We fear the rip tides of systems we feel helpless to change. Imagining possibility seems so far away. What if we can’t swim?
But.
What if we can?
What if we can?