Terminal C at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is pleasantly quiet. I scored a table near an outlet and near to the Dolores Park Café counter, where their cappuccino is an actual cappuccino, not a weak café latte like you’ll get half the time in the United States. In fact, that’s how they make their “cappuccinos” in the other coffee kiosk over in Terminal D. They charged me a few months ago $7.00 for some steamed milk with a dash of espresso in it. This is my coffee tip for SFO domestic terminal visitors, Dolores Park Café. Despite a palm tree logo that might make you think they specialize in a coconut Frappuccino or something, their espresso is really smooth.
I’m on my way to Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP) tonight to visit my aunt for a few weeks and also to give a talk next week at a national Native higher education conference at one of the big glitzy tribal casinos south of the Twin Cities. I don’t gamble so my main entertainment will be walking through the facility wondering if I’ll see some other NDNs I know from childhood. We might not recognize each other anymore though. I never know whether to be insulted or flattered that people recognize me thirty or forty years later. The Native higher ed organization asked me to talk on self-indigenization or “pretendianism.” So I’ll be imparting some whiteness theory drawn from critical race studies. If you know, you’ll know I am also drawing on Foucault in relation to making live; for audience members who don’t know, it won’t matter. They’ll still get the gist of my meaning. Finally, I’ll combine in that talk UN definitions of genocide and references to a comedy horror movie from the 1980s. I equate the settler-colonial imperative to make the always dying Indian live in the settler body politic to reanimation of the dead. It’s a fun talk; at least for me and perhaps anyone else with a macabre sense of humour. If you’re more sensitive about such things, you might not be a fellow jaded Gen-Xer.
It's always good to go home to Minnesota. I look forward to the summer lushness. The leaves dancing on the trees, the view driving over the thick, dark Mississippi on the way home from the airport, the steep foliage-lined banks going down to the water. I love flying in, descending down to that incredible green flatness extending out as far as the eye can see in every direction. I feel the deep familiarity of the land and waters below as we descend down from tall blue skies with majestic cloud bodies towering above Earth. I always say that the skies are the most arresting beauty on the prairies. I play Ashley McBryde in my earbuds.
Home sweet highway, oh won't you roll
And I'll ride with you like a rollin' stone
If I have it my way, Lord, when I go
I'll go on this home sweet highwayA cup of truck stop coffee and a cigarette
Add it to the list of things I ain't quit yet
Oh I've tried and I've tried leavin' you alone
But I keep on comin' back, 'cause there's no place like home
(Songwriters: Blue Foley/Ashley Dyan McBryde/CJ Field)
I am not as authentic apparently as Ashley McBryde. I don’t smoke. And I don’t drink truck stop coffee. When traveling by car, the cooler on the passenger side floor of my Toyota isolation capsule carries cold packs and Mason jars of cold brew made in a stainless French press in my fridge at home. But I do love the road. And I keep coming home. I am torn for years now between the benefits of being home and the drawbacks of it. I have yet to accept an opportunity to relocate there, but I think of it often. I feel the history harder in Minnesota than I feel it in Alberta or California, the other settler-state boundaries within which I spend considerable time. I know the history both personally and from book learning in Minnesota. My family plays a role in that history. Feeling history harder in a particular place is both good and bad. With genealogical, land, and deep historical belonging come more painful, albeit smaller moments of feeling like one does not belong as much as---as what? I don’t dwell too much on feelings of not belonging; we all have moments of alienation. Best not to make more of it than necessary.
I am also aware that Alberta is a sweet spot for me in that I am recognizable to many Natives as a Native person, but I don’t carry deep local and regional social and political history in my body, family name, and relations. My Dakota family and tribal politics don’t follow me around Alberta, or even around Canada for that matter. As an introvert who finds intergenerational tribal and familial pain and politics excruciatingly chaotic, not having these things follow me consistently across that surprisingly hard settler border into Canada is a bonus. Most of the time. In Alberta, to be recognized as Native is not always a benefit with the non-Natives. But even non-Native explicitly anti-Indian racism can be perversely pleasurable. Many of us who grew up in white vs. red racial hierarchy, whether in South Dakota or Alberta, Montana or Saskatchewan, and then moved to more “liberal” or “progressive” locales, say we eventually prefer explicit anti-Native racism versus the smarmy, clueless, starry-eyed Native cultural appropriation of fetishizers—a harder to recognize form of racism. The fetishizers take more work. And in their denial of the harm they cause, they get to pretend they do good on our behalf, that they are well-intended, that they are kind, inclusive, honouring, and tolerant—all the while engaging in theft and slow, insidious violence with a smile. Have you seen that 2022 horror film Smile?
At first, the fetishizers are a relief when one leaves, for example, a reservation border town with the overt violence of white society. But over the course of years, the smiling ones can enrage you too. Sometimes they are also creepy. I don’t downplay that the violence of fetishizers is slower than the potentially quick and harsh violence of an explicit Indian hater. But you also know quickly where you stand with the hater. It doesn’t take years and a thousand small cuts to figure it out.
Back to this capsule in the sky, and to more pleasant thoughts of the road (or sky) and the music that goes with it. My back-of-seat monitor shows that we are at 35,000 feet and just over Elko, Nevada. I’ve stayed and searched in Elko for a decent cup of coffee. As a person from lush river lands, the Nevada lands look like Mars to me with the occasional trailer house and dusty truck tucked among the roadside rocks and dirt. I feel the dust in my nostrils; I feel it tightening the skin on my face. And then there are the unglamorous highway-side casinos with interesting characters in them. I only know from checking into the casino hotels. I once had a Navajo person tell me that lands like where I’m from look messy and overgrown to her. The desert where the earth is so visible is her formative landscape.
I just looked on my phone for the photos of when I and my daughter fled California during the August 2020 fires. We were there to drop her off for an internship on a hilltop farm in Sonoma County. But the fires meant she couldn’t get to the farm for a couple of weeks. We decided to get out for a while and sped back to Minnesota. I thought we stayed in Elko; the photos show us in Winnemucca.
Elko and Winnemucca get confused in my memory; I’ve regularly traveled through both over the years from Minnesota to California, and back again. So has my traveler kid. I hear in my head (and now in my earbuds) Johnny Cash sing “I’ve been everywhere, man.” Luckily, Babygirl likes country music, including Johnny. She is a great travel companion.
I was toting my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road
When along came a semi with a high and canvas covered load
If your goin’ to Winnemucca, Mack with me you can ride
And so I climbed into the cab and then I settled down inside
He asked me if I’d seen a road with so much dust and sand
And I said, “Listen! I’ve traveled every road in this here land!”
I’ve been everywhere, man
I’ve been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I’ve breathed the mountain air, man
Travel, I’ve had my share, man
I’ve been everywhere
(Songwriters: Geoff Mack / Michael J. Faubion. I’ve Been Everywhere lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.)
We’ve just flown over Spearfish in the Black Hills or He Sapa of “South Dakota.” 500 miles to MSP. I wish my kid was with me, but she has her life to attend to in California, where she was also born. The mistake I made was not raising her in my formative landscape. Now I’m caught in California for much of my life. That was never the plan.
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June 8th Postscript - Mystic Lake Conference Center
I did see another NDN I know from childhood! She was at the conference. She came up to me after my keynote and said we knew each from Red School House, a St. Paul survival school with an Anishinaabe-centered curriculum we went to as kids. We non-Ojibway were welcomed too. She told me her name. I stood up to hug her; I totally remembered her, and her brother. I probably hadn’t seen her since I was 11 years-old.
Right before my keynote, I was sitting in a quiet hallway going over my talk. I looked up and noticed I had taken a bench across from two meeting rooms named after my four greats grandfather, Chief Little Crow. It is nice to be home and to be surrounded by one’s history. Well, some history we’d rather forget. But sometimes it feels good to feel the history harder.
That’s it, readers and listeners. Until soon, and as always, thanks for coming along on this leg of the journey.
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