Remnants of the First Earth Read online

  REMNANTS OF THE FIRST EARTH

  Also by Ray A Young Bear:

  Winter of the Salamander

  The Invisible Musician

  Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives

  REMNANTS OF THE FIRST EARTH

  Ray A. Young Bear

  Copyright © 1996 by Ray A. Young Bear

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Young Bear, Ray A.

  Remnants of the first earth / Ray A. Young Bear.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9588-3

  1. Indians of North America—Iowa—Fiction. 2. Boys—Iowa—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3575.0865R46 1996

  813′.54—dc20

  96-1444

  DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  For Todd Dana Young Bear, August 1960—January 1992

  Acknowledgments

  This novel would not have been possible without the unwavering encouragement offered by the following people in my “word-collecting” endeavor: my parents, Leonard and Chloe Young Bear; Stella Lasley Young Bear, my wife; and the many supportive family members of the Meskwaki, People of the Red Earth, Nation of Central Iowa.

  The same adulation goes to my editor, Anton Mueller, at Grove Press; Peter Basch, literary agent; and to the vast support I received from the beginning of my career to the present, via Bill Beyer, Wesley Abbott, Robert Bly, John Strong, Robert Gish, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Leslie Silko.

  I also give my deepest thanks to those cherished influences who have gone West to the Meskwaki Hereafter: Jack and Ada Old Bear; Todd Dana Young Bear; Irene Young Bear Bernadino; Kenneth Young Bear; and Curtis Young Bear. Their warm, smiling spirits have recently surfaced in my thoughts, making it seem like they never really left, helping me and everyone still.

  Lastly, and the Creator knows this, I respectfully acknowledge my great-great-grandfather, Ma mi nwa ni ke, the Sacred Chieftain who initiated the purchase of our tribal land in 1856. His monumental accomplishments remain unparalleled. Without him, the Meskwaki Settlement would not be in existence.

  —Ray A. Young Bear

  Contents

  Preface

  Part One

  The Year of the Weeping Willow Day School

  In the First Memory of My Life

  The Black Eagle Child Settlement

  Unearthly Manifestations

  Birthplace of the Republican Party

  The Great Flood of the Iowa River

  Remnants of the First Earth

  Prt Two

  Journals of the Six Grandfathers

  The Blinking Child Traditional Dancer

  Braided Strips of Medicine and Paper Bullets

  The Grandfather of All Dream

  The Stick-Shooting Escapade at Horned Serpent Lake

  A Softball Game That Was More than Epic

  The First Dimension of Skunk

  The Incorporeal Hand

  Part Three

  The Perils of Being a Black Hummingbird

  The Deformed Pearl Diver

  Mystery-Solving Sherlock Holmes That She Was

  Pipestar, Medicine Man Extraordinaire

  One Bucket of Twenty Moons

  The Meaning behind Hawaiian Punch

  The Ramada Inn

  What Held the Night’s Attention

  Part Four

  The Lonesomest Valley

  The Blackbird Swarms My Loneliness Summoned

  To See as Far as the Grandfather World

  The Night of Jim

  The Milieu of Forgetfulness

  The Mask of Seeing

  My Summer of 2004

  Preface

  The Wish That Bear King Had

  At daybreak, the Black Eagle Child Settlement—home for fifteen hundred tribal members—protrudes as a geographic anomaly against the flat, rural horizon of central Iowa. When seen from the west several miles out, especially along Runners Bluff, the Settlement resembles a tree-covered island encircled by monotonous vistas of cornfields, pastures, and grazing livestock. If it weren’t for the gray, rounded hills that rise slightly above the drifting layers of fog from the Swanroot and Iowa Rivers, we would be indistinguishable. Literally.

  In these few hours before the fiery orange sun ascends the wooded terrain, replacing the foggy shroud with clear daylight, it seems as if this place, my home, is momentarily surrounded by the wide, sweeping waters of an invisible ocean called eventuality. If you look down further into the drifting fog and think deeply about dreams that make you prepare to leave for an unknown destiny, an inner sense of fear never fails to conjure a serpentlike image of a Supernatural seeming to pause in its wondrous swim before flicking its massive tail. In the boil and wake created by the mythical sentinel, treacherous waves crash noisily along the shores of our borders. On occasion, the “shadows,” or souls, of certain individuals lose their footing here and tumble headfirst into the surf. You wouldn’t think it, but the consequences of a single loss upon our clan-based society is devastating. More so when we are few to begin with.

  Yet, this metaphorical earth-island is where three generations of my grandparents—wa wi ta wi, on either side—flourished in order that we would have a chance at some undesignated point to carry on where they left off, performing errorfree ceremonies to guide believers through the murkiness of the Cosmic Earthlodge. This, according to my limited knowledge, was the original wish of Bear King, the Settlement’s founder: to find a sanctuary where generation upon generation would flourish and maintain the customs that would forever identify them as Black Eagle Child.

  What makes our tribal homeland distinct is the fact that a small Algonquian dialect-speaking world has been in existence here, legally, for the past 140 years. As startling as it may seem to some, my great-great-grandfather, through his status as a living divinity, secured the initial purchase of property from the state of Iowa in 1856.

  That’s where the “legally” comes in.

  After centuries of warfare with the European newcomers in which our predecessors barely pieced themselves back together, my grandfather, who was a young O ki ma, or Sacred Chieftain, provided the answer by implementing his exclusive birthright to obtain acreage in our former dominion. Since a government-enforced order of exile had to be defied to facilitate a return to a region that was once the source of fierce territorial contention, solidifying the destiny of the Black Eagle Child people was not easy. But after persecution by different-colored flags that would have made others succumb, splinter, or simply vanish altogether, our acquisition of real estate was the only logical solution. And this could come about—and it did—only through the wish and actions of a single but blessed person by the name of Bear King, Ma kwi O ki ma. That was his exclusive role as a savior: to rescue us from suffering and ensure our survival.

  If it was provincial isolation that Bear King sought, he and his grandfather could not have picked a more desolate midwestern hinterland—the middle of Iowa—to conduct the ongoing affairs of a tribe. It is said my two grandfathers based the Settlement’s location on a story, a ji mo ni, told by an ancient hunter who was once approached by two underworld goddesses informing him that people would one day make their homes
on these hills. Declining the goddesses’ offer of immortality, the hunter returned to the winter Mississippi River encampment and conveyed with astonishment what the Supernaturals had said.

  Long before any name was bestowed to this fertile country, back when the soil was black, moist, and untainted, our grandparents many times previous were well acquainted with the trees and saplings that stood here in abundance. They were also aware of water transparent and sweet to the taste. As the strong summer wind rushed enchantingly over the adjoining prairies, making peaceful sounds, they remembered the ancient hunters story, which they then gave to their grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond until it reached the ears of Bear King’s grandfather.

  It was on the northwestern tip of Runner’s Bluff that Bear King’s emissaries, after a long arduous journey from Kansas, camped before setting out for the state capitol in Iowa City. They carried with them a written message asking the state legislature permission “for Bear King, the Boy Chieftain, and his followers to acquire land and reside peacefully in Tama County.” In a historic turnaround of the attitudes of the era, the Boy Chieftain’s request was granted in 1856.

  While it is generally a rarity—even today—for a tribe to become property owners in the United States, Bear King, whose name is remembered today only in the prayer-breath expelled by elders of the Earthlodge clans, was futuristic: He raised the necessary cash and made the authorized proposition to the government higher-ups; he was then given a deed to said property. On the surface, the transaction probably sounded acceptable, but it was also an outright capitulation of ancient customs and beliefs. Yet, for what was ultimately received, it was a momentary acquiescence of values. Without much intrusion from the Newcomers, the Black Eagle Child Nation was guaranteed at least a chance to thrive on its own.

  Beginning with the revelation given by the goddesses to the living divinity status of my grandfather, spiritually interwoven factors brought us out from the nightmarish exile of the Kansas prairies. Through our stories we were brought back to an area familiar to our predecessors. For the Boy Chieftain, Bear King, figuring out the intricacies of a farming enterprise replete with barns, silos, machinery, and knowledge of grain and hog prices was the furthest thing from his thoughts and intentions.

  My maternal grandmother used to say it was crucial we have a place of our own. Listening intently, I learned that our lives were dependent upon a plethora of animistic factors immersed in ethereal realities.

  Basically, she instructed that the very ground on which we all stood, Grandmother Earth, was the embodiment of a former Supernatural being. She was all of nature, this Grandmother: She was the foundation for rivers, lakes, fields and forests; she provided homes and sustenance for insects, birds, reptiles, fish, animals, and human beings. She held everything together, including the clouds, stars, sun, and moon.

  Our sole obligation, my grandmother instructed, in having been created in the first place by the Holy Grandfather, is to maintain the Principal Religion of the Earthlodge clans. It was agreed eons and eons ago that if these ceremonies were not performed, the world would no longer be held together, the elements of wind and ice would whirl together and splinter us apart. Our forgetfulness, in other words, would become part of a chain of natural and man-made catastrophes—flag wars and ecological suffocation—leading to the end of the earth. And the people who so connivingly and viciously sought to make us forget ourselves by subjugating us, the Euro-Americans, would be the root cause.

  It is therefore prophesied that by making us forget who we are, they inevitably kill themselves. . . .

  Edgar Bearchild

  Part One

  The Year of the Weeping Willow Day School

  On the playgrounds of the Weeping Willow Elementary School, six Black Eagle Child Indian boys sat on a creaky motionless merry-go-round with their legs dangling over the bluish gray pebbles. Within the octagon-shaped ride, two empty places separated the two sets of third- and fourth-grade boys. Calmly and deliberately they addressed one another in a mixture of English and their tribal language.

  The topic, it was somehow decided, was their father s occupations. It somehow seemed important to talk about employment, the vehicle of their clothes, food, and shelter. Included in the first responses were the names of distant Iowa cities, like Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Des Moines, and Iowa City. Even though they had all gone on a school field trip to Minneapolis a month previous on a train, none of them had been to these cities. Incomprehensibly, each father seemed to be a welder, a factory employee, or a construction worker in the cities. Money amounts were discussed.

  Everything about the conversation was going well until the group asked Edgar Principal Bear what his father did for a living. Sensing five sets of eyes on him, the light-brown, round-faced boy lifted his glasses to his flat, chubby nose with his finger and looked downward at his scuzzy brown shoes. He was reacting as if he hadn’t heard a word said.

  “Edgar, ki na we na-ke i sha wi ya-ko se ma? Edgar, what does your father do?” the group asked again pointedly. “A kwi me ko-ke ko-i no we ya ni ni. You haven’t said anything.” Edgar s head involuntarily jerked upward and a tuft of black hair broke free from the oiled-down Elvis Presley hairdo, dangling upright in the breeze of an intense afternoon sun and curling.

  The group, consisting of Pat Red Hat, Kensington Muscatine, Horatio Plain Brown Bear, Theodore Facepaint, and Hayward Muscatine, couldn’t understand why Edgar was unusually quiet. Typically he was talkative and jovial. Now he only made them curious.

  The question startled Edgar, rendering him dry-mouthed.

  Finally, after shrugging his shoulders and straightening his hair, Edgar offered that he didn’t know. It was obvious he was not comfortable. He fidgeted and kicked some pebbles to the center of the merry-go-round before continuing. “But my uncle works at Whit-more’s Sawmill in town. My mother works at the chicken factory, and my grandmother at the Why Cheer Laundry and Dry Cleaners. Tte na-ne tti se e ma-mi ke je wi wa—Whitmore’s Sawmill— o te we ne ki, Ne ki ya-wi na—chicken factory—mi ke je wi ya ka o ni-no ko me se ma-a i me ki—Why Cheer Laundry and Dry Cleaners.”

  From the movements of the shadows cast in stark detail over the gravel, Edgar ascertained the boys had all looked at one another. He had dodged the subject of fathers. Again. There was a brief but strained pause in the conversation. They sat still and listened to the chain fasteners of the whipping flag and looked toward the empty swings. As they did this, Edgar tpok out a comb and fixed the curl. When they returned to him, he looked down at his brown scuzzy shoes. Again.

  No one had noticed before but the warm breeze that pressed their shirts against their upper torsos outlined either their ribs or the tiny ridges of their backbones. Above them, at the end of a tall clinking metal pole, the American flag whipped loudly. In precise moments it undulated and ended up with a sharp snap. The chain fasteners tapped steadily against the pole. There was something about colored cloth that hung in the air, responding vigorously to the warm spring breeze. Nearby, lonely swings swung without riders. In the air, the smell of fresh dandelions and apple tree blossoms.

  Today, for no apparent reason, a subtle change was taking place in their six young bodies. As a group they had decided to skip a game of softball. Was it maturity? They couldn’t even begin to know. Whatever the source or cause, they found certain comfort in taking a break from the norm to converse like adults.

  After all, they had been together as students hopelessly immersed in school, yet they hardly knew anything about one another’s families. They had listened to each other read and do arithmetic badly. No one had the edge on grades. Not even the girls. They were all equally illiterate. Yet they were Black Eagle Child, held together and separated.

  All at once, like the warm sensory breeze rippling over their tight shirts, a sense of maturing generated thoughts on the purpose of life itself through this discussion of their fathers’ employment in the daylight air.

  Wanting to continue the conversation, the
group turned to another classmate, the one who sat to Edgar’s right, Theodore Facepaint. “Ted, what does yours do? Ki na wa na-ka tti-i tti te wa?” But Ted was just as dumbstruck. He could barely lift his head from the metal handlebar, and he blinked repeatedly as if intending to speak. His parched thin lips were curled inward, and quick audible gulps of air were taken. Under his thick black glasses was a slightly pale and pockmarked face with a wide, flat nose that looked broken. Under his long brown-tipped hair was a set of puffy, trembling eyes.

  Ted, in a halting voice, explained that his father was a construction worker. He worked on buildings in Iowa City. There was a reference to “u . . . ni . . . ver . . . siti . . . ha . . . spi . . . toes.”

  It was a warm, sunny 1960 spring afternoon, a recess period in which everyone else had gone to the other side of Weeping Willow, frolicking over the large grassy lawn in a much-needed game of softball. Teaching and learning was hard for both the Bureau of Tribal Affairs staff and students; hostilities had somehow ceased temporarily. There was a semblance of amicability.

  No one would be chased after, scolded, roughed up, and sent inside. On this occasion, the yellow-jacket wasps were doing the chasing—with each other. They seemed to shoot through the blue sky openings in the high fluffy clouds that were unevenly smeared across the green wooded horizon. Upon seeing the boys, the wasps hovered for a moment between the gray tubular merry-go-round bars before buzzing toward the concrete haze around the school building.

  Pat Red Hat, who was a portly, big-boned boy, sat with his sleeves rolled up past his forearms. His tattooed knuckles gripped the bar tightly as he stretched backward, basking his little face and hooked nose in the sun’s rays. Never one to be afraid to look directly at the sun, his eyes were halfway open. It had something to do with an ancient story about how mischievous children had once tied up the sun with cordage on its daily crossing. “Are you really afraid of children?” he would shout upward at the fiery sphere before throwing rocks at it. With his large exposed rump hanging over the wooden seat, Pat started singing songs from the annual tribal celebration, breaking the awkward stillness. The first was a pipe dance song that was made with a country and western singers name.