Читать книгу My Body Is a Book of Rules - Elissa Washuta - Страница 14

PART 3

When I tell people I’m Native, they often ask, “How much?” It seems to be a reflex, the way, when I’m asked how I’m doing, I always fib that I’m “fine.” I don’t know why anyone cares to know my quantum, but I never want to be rude. I am three-thirty-seconds Indian: one-sixteenth Cascade and one-thirty-second Cowlitz. Since the Cascade tribe has been split into pieces, I am enrolled Cowlitz. When the Cascade leaders were hanged, all the other Cascade Indians were rounded up by Lieutenant Phil Sheridan, put on an island, and told that they would be shot if they tried to leave. You know Sheridan because you’ve heard, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” He was talking about me because he was talking about Indians like my great-great-great-grandpa Tumalth, whom he hanged on March 28, 1856.

Tumalth was survived by his wives and daughters. Mary Wil-wy-i-ty, or Indian Mary, is the daughter whose blood eventually became mine. If you’re asking me who the Indian was that made me Indian, I guess you’re asking about Mary, because she was the last fullblood in my family line. Her second husband Louis, Abbie’s dad, was Cowlitz. He was born to Lucy Skloutwout, a Lower Cowlitz woman whose descendants fill many chairs at council meetings. Mary was a very young girl when her dad died. Her sister Whylick Quiuck, or Virginia, was about nine at the time. When their dad was hanged, those little girls were enslaved, and the world was upended, never to be set right again.