The Big Dam
and the salmon of my heart
“Here,” I told my therapist, as though I was handing her a picture of a hairstyle, “this is what I want to look like when I am finished with therapy.”
This special salmon fishing spot, treasured by natives for 10,000 years, now lies deep under artificial “Lake Roosevelt.” Thanks to the “new deal,” all the salmon are locked up behind the Grand Coulee Dam, probably the world’s largest ever chunk of concrete. The Grand Coulee Dam builders made no provision at all for salmon. Or for Indians.
“And here is a picture of me as I am now,” I told my therapist, handing her a printed copy of the photo from yesterday’s post, How to live in a constant funeral.
Do you understand how the builders of that dam must have had a big chunk of concrete first in their own hearts? How else could they have thought this was ok? My parents did not intend to dam me up. As parents go, mine were very encouraging of free choice. I am a white person; the damming goes back a long long way.
As I begin to wake up from the hungry drive of the Europeans to conquer and subjugate, I see that I am not free. My rivers have been dammed. My electricity has been used to power agendas not my own. Because, under all the whiteness, I am still electric, still alive. I want to dismantle the dams and let my native people fish again. They know how to live. I only know how to kill them, how to enslave, how to make dirty deals, and how to die. So I invite the people to the table, the parts of me I have subjugated to the outer agenda, the white agenda. I beg them to teach me. I need to relearn what I, too, once knew.
I am not talking politics, I want to be very clear, I am talking metaphor. What’s outside, as a metaphor for what’s inside. What I see is my internal situation playing out on the big screen. I am dammed up. I am a big artificial lake. I have lost my flow. I have been used, but for what purpose I do not even know. “Recreation?” Not my own. Like the Indians, I take to drink. Like the Indians I have found little reason not to die.
“You asking me what did we do after the flood? We, starved. We drank. We were river people. My daughter-in-law’s son committed suicide. He blowed his brains out about three or four years ago with a rifle. I know two or three who committed suicide,” Louie said.
“I attend death scenes on the reservation,” said the local coroner. “You can take a graduating class at Inchelium High and in ten years they are all dead. It is absolutely staggering.”
I am a white woman, and I have had many outward advantages, no doubt about that. But where is the river I loved to sit beside in the days before I was born into this guilty culture? I first opened these blue eyes in suburbia, where millions of artificial lights were powered by millions of dammed up souls, where the river that ran though my town stank, robbed of her beauty, bereft of fish. My dear father was a dammed up soul if ever there was one. Sherman Alexie made an interesting comment in his recent interview for Buzzfeed:
Alexie’s readership is primarily composed of college-educated white women. Unlike some male authors (see: Jonathan Franzen) who worry that a female audience will feminize their art, and thereby delegitimize it, Alexie embraces his readers. “They pay my mortgage!” he said. “But they’re also just more open to actually crossing boundaries. They have that perfect combination of privilege — because of their whiteness — and oppression, because they’re women. They’re at the forefront of every battle, and they come into it with both strength and weakness, with both power and pain.”
It’s not that white men do not have the same infernal dams built across their own internal rivers — they do. My father knew it. He saw that dam, he walked out on it, he chipped away at it, but in the end he was too afraid to dismantle it. Different cultures have different kinds of dams, maybe. I don’t really know. I can speak only from my own perspective. I hope I am not offending anyone, and if I am, feel free to tell me. To be born white is to be born blind and deaf, in many ways. We are passive as the dams are installed in our hearts, the not caring, the hardness. Many of us in my culture have realized that the dams are not a good thing, and we are taking down the dams in our hearts chunk by chunk.
The political scene will change as we each do our part. Some prefer to work in the outer world. As an introvert, my calling is to work mostly inside myself. The environment will restore itself as we do our internal work. I come from a long line of engineers. Who, with an open heart, could build a dam like the Grand Coulee?
Free the salmon. Watch them jump. Restore your own wild river. Let your own natives fish again. Let the people eat. Let them relax and play. Free all the slaves. Raise up and restore the despised parts of your own self. There are natives within each of us who still remember how to live free. These ancient ones will sing to us if we are quiet, if we even begin the deconstruction, if we show good faith, if we recognize them at long last and listen to their drums and their voices. Because they are waiting to free us.
Psalm 137
By the floods of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?
I’m not talking religion. I’m talking metaphor, internal landscape. How can I sing the song of myself while I feel enslaved in a foreign land?
for a continuation of this dammed up theme, see All the Tears
