My Life on the Road: Part VII–Afterword

My guide explained that each member would have a Temple Recommend Card, like a credit card, and once it was inserted, a screen would display whether he or she had tithed, had attended weekly meetings, and was otherwise in good standing and allowed to enter.

Then in the center of a big open space was an enormous stone baptismal pool where, as my guide explained, even the dead, whether or not they had been Mormon in life, could be converted by proxy, thus becoming eligible to enter the first of three levels of Heaven.

His fledgling union is trying to raise wages for all farmworkers, but the growers have refused even to talk, and Cesar has enlisted public support by calling for a consumer boycott of grapes.

They are carrying a swaying image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on a palanquin, their banners shimmering in the heat waves like a mirage.

Under the cover of trees, I see a long, ramshackle shed with doors hanging open.

It all seems very distant from the tawdry glare of Las Vegas.

More than half of low-income defendants are convicted, but less than a third of high-income defendants are. Since the economic damage done by white-collar crime far exceeds that done by all burglaries, robberies, larcenies, and auto thefts combined, this punishes us all.

In the 1980s, privatization of prisons took off because it was presented as a good thing, a way to construct prisons faster and make them more efficient and modern, with more staff because salaries weren’t locked into government categories.

Good behavior or not, prisoners in privatized prisons served more of their sentences because corporations were paid per capita and wanted to keep the cells filled.

If today’s graduating university students indentured by debt want to find a cause, they can look at most state legislatures, where tax dollars that should go into state universities are put into building and running government-owned prisons for profit.

But a growing mystery was the number of letters I received from men in prison. Polite and enigmatic, they asked me for a note or an autograph or a photo for their daughters or because they didn’t have visitors.

The combination of fear and dependency they described sounded like the capture-bonding known as the Stockholm Syndrome, the enmeshing of hostage and hostage-taker that can happen when an all-powerful person controls but spares the life of a powerless person.

From Africa to the Americas, slavery and genocide were blessed by the church, and riches from the so-called New World shored up the papacy and European monarchs.

The next day Deborah drives us to Flint Ridge, an ancient quarry that once yielded flint for Native tools used in hunting, farming, and building.

There it is, a grass-covered, undulating serpent stretching out for a quarter of a mile on a plateau above a valley.

This is the largest of the effigy mounds surviving here, and also in the world.

In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a Native poet, mythologist, and scholar, explains that Serpent Woman was one of the names of the quintessential original spirit “that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind…she is both Mother and Father to all people and all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.”

Later when I’m sitting in my favorite place amid the tall outcroppings of igneous rock in Central Park, just a short walk from my apartment, I wonder, Who rested in this same place long ago, before the Dutch and then the English arrived?

In Minnesota, a young woman from Women of All Red Nations, a group born of the activism of the 1970s that forms local women’s circles and also speaks out on everything from land rights to health dangers, explained to me that Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate...

In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.

He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones.

For instance, when anyone asked about her name with honest curiosity, she would explain that Mankiller was a hereditary title for someone who protected the village. But you knew one too many people had asked her about it in a condescending way when she just deadpanned, “I earned it.”

Then in one of Washington’s many attempts to “mainstream” Native Americans through relocation and assimilation—and also to get them off valuable land—her parents were persuaded to move to San Francisco for “a better life.”

Only after seventeen surgeries—plus a bout with myasthenia gravis, a weakening neuromuscular disease—did she walk again.

But in the end, Wilma won because of her record of helping people to help themselves, as she had in Bell, and also because Cherokee traditionalists, who had rarely voted before, saw her leadership as a return to the balance and reciprocity of the past.

Gradually she brought the Cherokee Nation from being mostly dependent on government allotments to being mostly independent through communally run businesses.

In order to honor other Native women leaders, she interviewed many for her book, Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women.

Younger and more diffident than Rayna and Wilma, she seemed to defeat her shyness by sheer force of will.

She had a gift for being understandable—a sure sign of a good organizer—and wrote an essay on reservation life with the concise title “Land Rich, Dirt Poor.”

For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment.

We discover the bumps are milpa, small mounds of earth on which complementary crops were planted.

Each mound is planted with a cluster of the Three Sisters that were the staples of Indian agriculture: corn, beans, and squash.

Its brief and accidental owner is threatening to close it unless we come up with the purchase price pronto—a form of extortion, since he knows its staff cares too much to let it go.

Local newspapers compared its “finds” to the treasures of Egyptian tombs, a description that enticed souvenir hunters but made the burial mounds seem even more remote from local Native families whose ancestors had been interred there.

Too many Native people have themselves forgotten or forsaken The Way, with too few chances to relearn it.

In our weeks of talk, movies, and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition.

Family groups were eating or talking quietly—not hushed, as in a church, but not loud or boisterous either.

She is calm, honest, laconic, even funny, and as clear as any doctor about what is happening inside her body.

He has devised a system of spreading heated blankets over Wilma’s body, and it does seem to relieve the pain.

Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of Everybody has a home but me.