Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

uneven circles, slung them one by one into the cast
iron frying pan to steam and brown and transform
from flour and water into a heavenly sacrament for
my father’s supper.
It occurs to me only now that my father—born
always and already a survivor, child of one of twenty
thousand out of one million who took the brunt of
colonization with their sturdy bodies and gentle
spirits; my father, born in 1927, Indian in a state
where shooting, buying, and selling Indians was
perfectly legal only thirty years earlier; my father,
three years out of a brutal eight-year stretch in San
Quentin, twice divorced, with the four daughters
from his first marriage lost to him and his only son
in the custody of an ex-girlfriend—my father was as
starved for love as I.
My father was an early riser; without an alarm
clock, he hit the linoleum floor running at five a.m.
with the energy to shave, make coffee, mop the
kitchen, get laundry started, scrub out the kitchen
sink, clean the bathroom. (He said he learned that
discipline in the Navy, but later I learned it was
actually the Seabees, and that he had been
dishonorably discharged.)