Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

steady carpentry jobs right from the start and
supplemented my mother’s low wages with cash.
And perhaps what I felt—sated, cherished, replete
—might have reflected the shy, tentative unfolding
and filling of three wary hearts.
Of course, as in any romance, we were all trying to
impress each other. My father fixed and constructed
and made us feel that we were the center of his
universe. He told stories about his mother
scavenging for acorns and cactus apples to feed her
four boys. He shared memories of his mother’s
grandmother, an ancient Indian woman who spoke
no English, but who taught him the word for “water”
when she was thirsty. (He couldn’t say the word;
when I asked, he touched his throat and said, “It was
down here, like this,” and the sound he made was
like swallowing the sound “o” in, as I discovered
years later, Santa Ynez (Ineseño) Chumash, now
reclaimed with the Indigenous name of Samala.) He
talked about his father sneaking out to secret Indian
dances at a certain rancheria in the hills, about his
grandfather’s bootlegging.
And he told stories about my mother when they
were first married (“Ay, she had a mouth on her in
those days—she would cuss me out when I came