blood memory

The sound hits me as I walk down the hallway, the thump thump thump of the drum, eight drumsticks smacking over the taught leather, wrapped around a cedar body. I feel the drumbeats in my chest, keeping time with my heartbeat, calling me into the large ballroom, past the low-slung couches and the carpeted lounge.
Curious students turn toward the large double doors, trying to determine what the sound means, but it calls to me, and my steps quicken on the polished faux-marble floor. Looking into the room, I see a group of people huddled around the drum, others mingling around the rows of maroon covered chairs facing the podium. The sound pulls me through the doors, toward the drum, voices now sing in unison, as one lone falsetto breaks through and rises above the rest. Unintelligible vocables fill the air, heyas and other phrases, so full of meaning despite the fact that I can’t translate any of it.
Blood memory rushes forward, the sound envelopes and surrounds me, welcomes me home. One lone singer hits the animal skin with hard even honor beats, thud thud thud, like exclamation points, stressing the importance of the moment while the others keep time lightly.
I find my friend sitting in the front row, microphone and recorder in hand, but I have no words for her, just a look, face flushed and happily anxious for what comes next. I see some familiar faces from years past, go and reintroduce myself, get some of the background info for my article as the crowd, all of whom were standing, begins to fill up the chairs.
The students make a few announcements, take care of some housekeeping issues, welcome their esteemed speakers, etc . . . then ‘she’ walks up to the podium. Jet-black hair pulled back, easy confidence all over her face, black t-shirt and jeans, smitten from the very first. “Who is that?” Familiar refrain whenever caught off guard, intrigued, curious, frightened.
When everything has been said, the story of the first Thanksgiving, what it means to American Indian peoples, all things I had read or heard before, but never so vibrantly, I tell my friend to interview the mystery girl, but she freezes, says she can’t. I take her recorder and microphone, corner mystery girl, and ask to interview her, afraid that my article is quickly slipping away.
I throw the usual questions—who, what, why, when—visualizing my inverted pyramid in my mind, piecing together the article in my mind. The easy laughter, the confidence again, can’t take my eyes off of her, I nod when I think it appropriate, but I’m not listening to the words so much as listen to her body.
Smitten, flushed, love or longing, whatever it is, on first sight. Not that I’m a believer, but there it is, and was, but something stronger than sense pulled to me. Maybe the future was calling to me, my children, the binojiinhs, but I stammered my thanks and ran the other way. The article wrestled with me throughout the night, but I finally spit it out, wrote it all down on my old electric typewriter, quoting from the tape and listening to the drum songs repeatedly.
We’d meet again the next fall, and that time I was unable to escape, a cold September night when I surrendered to fate. Not that I regret any of it, but I was busy trying to become something else, trying to chase the middle class dream, when she awakened something else within me.
The blood memory, the call of past and the future simultaneously, learning more about my own culture and my self than I had ever hoped to before. My father’s family embraced assimilation and left their past firmly in the past, but my wife’s family lived their lives differently. They were on the front lines fighting for sovereignty and rights—religious, cultural, spiritual, political and otherwise. Things that some Indians now take for granted, things that they take as something that is owed to them.
The circle felt complete, felt as if I finally found where I belonged, but this kind of growth never comes easily. The outside person was never the point, the surface reality nothing but a front, the inner work much harder but far more long lasting. My beliefs have to be based on the experiential; just taking something that I had read or heard isn’t good enough.
That evening program in November of 1990 seems a lifetime away, in some ways it was several lifetimes ago for me, but it was the start of my real life. The things that I have done and the places that I have gone since then all started with the drumbeat and the sight of my wife. There are still many things that still need to be done, still other experiences to be had, and sometimes I forget why I started this journey to begin with, but moments of absolute clarity are precious.
The song that the drum was singing that night was the American Indian Movement song—composed by members during their standoff with the U.S. Army at the Wounded Knee compound in South Dakota in the early seventies. It’s a call for pan-Indian solidarity in the face of outside political and cultural pressure from the government and other outside forces.
My focus isn’t that universal these days, more time and energy is devoted to familial issues, but that is as it should be. My two teenagers are almost ready to go out into the world and I need to teach them who and what they are. Rooted in the past, but living in the present, planning for the future. My little one still has years of hanging out with mom and dad before he faces the same thing.
My children come from a long line of strong people—Webkamigad, who fled northern Michigan and canoed to Manitoulin Island (the dwelling place of the Spirit)—Pamptopee, who escaped the U.S. Army and forced relocation to Nebraska, then walked back to Michigan—Tyendinaga, colonel in the British Army and leader of the Mohawks during the Revolutionary War and their forced relocation to Ontario afterward.
We survived despite the government’s attempts to annihilate and later, assimilate us. This isn’t about bitterness—this is about strength of character, strength of belief, strength of culture. These are their ancestors and they should be proud of where they came from, have faith in where they are going. Their hard-fought sacrifices and victories should not be forgotten, it makes us who we are as a people.
I spent most of my youth knowing next to nothing about my own culture or history. I only saw Indians on old fifties movies or shows and we were either the enemy or a superfluous sidekick. My image of who I was provided to me by the ancestors of those who usurped and displaced us.
The blood memory does not forget—Americans measure things in centuries, but we measure time in millennia. The first European is believed to have reached the Great Lakes some four hundred years ago, but the bones and artifacts of our people litter this area and have done so for over ten thousand years.