I was born under a tin roof, in an ugly bathroom adorned with long outdated seventies décor. If full size toilet covers were manufactured, like those squeaky plastic furniture covers one would see in any old lady’s house, the toilet I was brought into this world on would have had one. I wish I could say I was born on a dark and stormy night, but in reality, I was born in the middle of a typical summer Tuesday, to a half-drunk mother and a essentially non-existent fully-drunk father. The sky was blue, the sun was hot, and the reservation in Oklahoma was my new home, as I had been recently evicted from my cozy warm place inside my mother.
The mobile home I was born in, festooned with fake wood panelling, lacquered veneers, and ugly formica countertops had the thickest, nastiest orange shag carpeting the world had ever seen. Honestly the whole thing should have been burned down.
But that could be said about a lot of the homes sitting on the Rez. Each had its own problems, both structurally and socially. Some were falling apart on the outside, some were falling apart on the inside, and most of them had occupants falling apart themselves for different reasons. Divorce, Alcohol abuse, substance abuse, unemployment, and a general malaise infected everything around the Rez… it was inescapable. It stuck to you. The flypaper of the Rez always hung on.
I was infected myself. All those obligations of culture hung like a necklace that nobody wanted to wear. Heavy, awkward, and only earned you odd stares in the streets offrez. It is a stigma. We are a strong people. Deep down, we truly are. But we were broken, and rebroken, for two hundred years, faced extinction and genocide, and something like that sticks with you. It binds us together and makes us slaves to our past. People look at the black slaves out of Africa that were forced onto American shores, forced to work, forced to eat, forced to sleep, raped, beaten, and killed in order to maintain an order of life and civilization in the rural south. But they rarely talk about the entire race of people that lived in those lands before the Europeans ever landed.
I see the country we live in celebrate black history month and I laugh bitterly. …Not to discount their struggles. But their ‘race’ was never threatened with extinction. Horrible transgressions against their humanity, yes, but not ethnic cleansing levels of transgression. You live here, you get it. You understand it. Conform, forget your past, adhere to the American way of life, and be damn happy about it.
I am really getting off track. This is not a soapbox. This is a story. But you need to understand where I was born, and where I was raised, in order to understand what happened on the Butte. I can’t go to the mesa and ignore the path up its side.
My name is Jonathon Tumbling Raven Smith, a Chocktaw by my father’s line, and Cherokee by my mother’s. I probably have a slew of other tribes in my bloodline, that’s how things work out these days. I am probably Chickasaw, Osage, Ponca, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, Kaw, Seminole, and every other tribe that was corralled into the borders of the Oklahoma Territory. I don’t think anyone could really keep track, given the circumstances, and the life on the Rez. Some really value their family trees.
Whatever, man. My family tree is a burnt out stump at this point. My family is me, my dog, and his fleas. I left home when I turned 16. Maybe I should start there. That is a good place. And every story needs a good place to start.