Road Warrior [Essay]
At Oxford I would lose touch with this. Other Indians had gone away before: to school, to the federal relocation program, where Indians were enticed to leave the reservation with promises of jobs and job training, so that the country might end its obligations to the tribes and the treaties. But everyone always came back. The story of going away and coming back developed from the very beginnings of the reservation era. The early American Indian novelist D’Arcy McNickle, a member of my mother’s tribe, wrote The Surrounded, about a young man who goes away to a boarding school after selling his land. He comes back—Indians always came back. Coming back was a common thread to stories of leaving: reconnecting, plugging in, finding ground, finding home. I had some idea of these things when I applied for the Rhodes, but not enough to be able articulate them. In my Rhodes application essay, I wrote about standing astride two worlds: the tribal and the global. What I didn’t realize is that if I lost my footing on one, I would fall.
Because of our great poverty and great need, my tribe pinned so much hope on me. After I got the Rhodes, local newspapers and radio and television trumpeted the story. I was a local celebrity and a hit in Indian Country. Tribal newspapers proclaimed my cultural achievement. I spoke at reservation grade schools and high schools and Native American Studies Departments throughout the West. I was the graduation speaker at my father’s former high school. On the stand, I was embraced by the tribal chairwoman and members of the tribal council who rarely got along well enough to appear anywhere together in public. I stood for the possibility of an Indian finding success in the larger world.
Many Indian people told me that they were proud of what I had done, seeing it as a cultural achievement, what Indians could do. I saw it that way too. When I was a kid I had wanted to be the first Indian on the moon, and with the Rhodes I had some idea of what it was like. At my university’s powwow on campus, an old woman dressed in the traditional style with high-top moccasins, calico dress, wide leather belt, and hair scarf, recognized me out of a crowd, put her arms around me and started crying. She said that she told her teenage grandson about me, so that he could be proud to be Indian.
At that same powwow, in a special ceremony I was given the traditional Indian name “Outstanding War Bonnet.” A war bonnet, or headdress, is worn by warriors who have amassed many great deeds, each signified by an eagle feather. My great deed was the Rhodes, and I was given a headdress covered in eagle feathers.
A local Indian health clinic made a poster; it shows a picture of me, alongside a very old picture of my great grandfather, the original Bear Don’t Walk, my family’s namesake. The poster lauds my scholarship, and says, “This is Today’s Warrior: Drug and Alcohol Free.” These posters were pasted on the doors and walls of local businesses. I would run into pictures of myself all over town.
A week before I left for England, I was on the reservation helping friends smoke giant Columbia River salmon. We did it on the grill of a junked 1964 Impala, suspended from a rusted swing set, placed over a large fire of larch wood. I went to find a bathroom inside a nearby trailer house and walked into the room of a teenage boy, but no one was there. On the wall, I saw a poster of Michael Jordan dunking a ball—alongside my poster. My tribe didn’t have many modern heroes. We had old ones: chiefs, warriors, rebels who fought the coming of the white man. Now, people thought I was one, which really put the spin on my head, not because they thought I was a hero, but because we were so bereft of them.
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