And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: D. Miranda [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 1999
Subject: Indian Teeth
Indian Teeth
by D. Miranda
After drilling and shaping and prepping the tooth,
he gives me a temporary, tells me to come back in two weeks
but when I do
guess what
someone wrote down the wrong shade of tooth color
and the crown is too white
so he sends me home to wait some more
and in another two weeks I come back
get into the chair, open my mouth
and while my lips are distended with rolls of cotton
and my poor little tooth is bare to the world
Dr. Doug asks in a cheerful tone So!
are you a whale-lover too?
I tell him that was a loaded question
thinking you don't know how loaded, buddy
thinking-- he doesn't *know* I'm Indian?!--
Having a moment of abrupt identity dysfunction
do I *look* *that* white?!
surreptitiouslly examining my skin, thinking of my hair, my eyes,
the silver and turquoise turtle at my throat--
and my teeth, my grandmother's beautiful teeth--
guess I forgot my headdress today left the papoose
outside with the pony hitched up at the door
and my Indian I.D. is home in a drawer--
and he asks after a puzzled pause
So what do you think of what those Makah are doing up there?
and I say I thought my own tribe had done much the same in the
past and that the Makah had made me proud to be related even
distantly to their fierceness, devotion and those sleek cedar canoes
and he is speechless until he thinks to ask which tribe I come from
and I tell him
Chumash, Esselen, Ohlone, Costanoan
the Chumash being the only ocean-going California tribe
who occasionally took a whale out there in the swells
but more often travelled hundreds or thousands of miles
to trade with artisans of other tribes
for jewelry, furs, feathered baskets, inlaid bowls, and all the fine
arts
of living in beauty
of working in beauty
of worshipping beauty in all the details of existance
oh yes they *used to* do that he says then bites his own tongue
so it won't say "but they shouldn't be so primitive NOW"
and I lie there thinking of all the photos of trophy salmon
on his walls here
and the boat he sails to Gig Harbor to get home
when the Narrows Bridge is closed
and his children at a private Academy
and I see that his money can't buy him
the same fishing rights of the lowliest Indian in Washington State
I see how many times he's caught his limit
and had to quit the fun before he wanted to go home
and how angry it made him
that a bunch of sloppy uncouth Indians have more rights than he did
I see how a whale had become all the fish he can never take
all the waters his yacht will never sail as intimately as the Hummingbird
all the lands he can't be at home in as I am when walking the Salinas
valley or the dry Tehachapi mountains of my childhood
and I don't answer when he jokes to his assistant
that a really good Jerry Springer Show would be the Makah Tribal
Chairman up against some guy from Greenpeace
that would really be a sight!
Just fix the &@%%&@& tooth, I say
but the rolls of cotton steal my thunder
On my way home, I laugh
surprised
that my anger gives up so easy
that I'm not viciously swearing up a storm
but the fury won't come
I'm tired of worrying about white men who offend me:
I keep seeing *her*, that whale, turning toward the canoe,
paddle strokes and arms flying in unison
arc of a harpoon
a moment when living is not separate from the bloody moments of death
when people dance in the fine rain
on the wet beach
hunters bringing home the whale who has answered their songs
proving that work is not separate from prayers
beauty is not separate from function
I keep seeing
a tribe tasting the tissue of a being who presented herself to the
harpoon with a grace she still remembered after generations of absence
I believe they could taste that grace in her flesh,
in creamy layers of fat
a taste like power--sudden, pungent, strange--
an old flavor strong on the tongue--
and I realize what he knows, this dentist:
that no matter how much money he makes off my poor Indian teeth
he can't buy
what he saw happen at Neah Bay:
colonization is a disease
that prevents the victim from understand
anything that's not for sale
and can't be stolen
like ancestors
who are magic,
like whales
who are grace incarnate
and give up that gift
for a song.
Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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