Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Tehachapi Mountains; she spent the summer playing
with lizards and horned toads, sleeping between cool
cotton sheets, watching the glimmer of
hummingbirds come to her grandmother’s feeder
very early in the morning. Her dark eyes feasted on
the sagebrush dotting the brown hills, and she spoke
regularly with a black bird perched in the manzanita
behind the house. She ran barefoot all day, her feet
finding joy in the dust. Once, she sat down on some
ants who were busy with their own matters, and was
badly bitten. Later, after apologizing to the ants, the
little girl watched them work for hours, at a distance.
Every evening the grandmother bathed the girl in
a deep shiny white tub, but no matter how the
woman scrubbed, the colors wrought by soil and sun
would not be cleansed from the girl’s knees and
cheeks.
“More like that man every day,” the grandfather
muttered to himself, shaking his head. “The sooner
they have room for her at Mrs. Samm’s, the better.”
But the grandmother saw her own lost daughter in
this little girl’s movements and wished for a chance
to correct her mistakes as a mother. The
grandmother let the girl without a mother sow corn
in the small fenced flower garden, where the green