Reclaimers by Ana Maria Spagna

Author:Ana Maria Spagna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

What Now?

Death Valley, California—March 2012

Joe Kennedy’s mountain car, a boxy black Chevy Suburban sun-baked gray, looked to be the hardest-worked vehicle in Indian Village. I trailed it, and the sound of barking dogs, around a short dirt bend from Pauline’s trailer to where Joe Kennedy now sat beside Grace Goad at a round table under a porch awning, with an empty chair and a cell phone flipped open between them. Grace introduced herself, half-stood beside her walker—another elder, another walker—to shake my hand, and invited me to sit in the empty chair.

Grace Goad’s name was as familiar to me as Barbara’s or Pauline’s since, like them, she participated in the Homeland negotiations from beginning to end. She’d served on several tribal councils since that time, been voted on, been voted off. She should look world-weary, I thought, or cynical. Instead she looked steady and observant as we sat together in front of her adobe home.

A large tree shaded the yard, a deep-grooved red trunk with long thick limbs that dipped groundward and reached outward. Beneath it the dogs lolled in sand, finished with their barking like their work for the day.

“Nice tree,” I said.

A beat of silence followed before Joe Kennedy finally spoke. He explained that the tree was a salt cedar, non-native, that nothing could grow beneath it. Salt cedars suck up the water table and outcompete the native cottonwoods and willows, he said.

“But I can’t cut it down,” Grace said. “It’s the only shade I’ve got.”

Joe Kennedy did not argue. Tall and round-shouldered with a goatee, a long black ponytail, and a handsome chin-jutted smile, he seemed the kind of man women might call a teddy bear to soften his size, but while that description might fit his easy bearing—he leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands in his lap rather than crossing his arms across his chest—his manner belied diminution. There was urgency about him, not anger so much as an eagerness to speak the truth. About salt cedars. About Indian history. About everything. He did not suffer fools, and he did not hesitate to confront misinformation, but he also did not argue with his elders, so he held his tongue about Grace Goad’s tree.

A few teenagers loitered in the house, but did not come out; television noise roiled as background. A middle-aged woman, Grace’s daughter perhaps, emerged and unfolded a low aluminum beach chair near the dogs. She faced away from us, cradled a small notebook in her lap, and did not speak.

Joe Kennedy began a slow preface. No calling to order. No taking minutes. Unless that’s what the beach chair woman was up to. He’d heard about my project, and this meeting seemed mostly for my benefit.

“As far as reclaiming, we’d have to say ‘recognized’ because we don’t have all of our lands that the Timbisha occupied years ago.”

A third member of the renegade council, Erick Mason, chimed in on speaker phone. He couldn’t miss work—he works for Cal Trans, the state department of transportation—and as the conversation went on, he monitored a scanner in the background.

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