In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

135 7 The End and the Afterlife On a beautiful summer day in July 1972, Mitch and Mary Michael’s world came crashing down around them. They had just returned from White Swan on the Yakama reservation, where they were celebrating the Fourth of July with family and friends. Their grandson, Jackson Alexander, told Mitch Michael he was going to the courts with some friends to play basketball. Instead of shooting hoops, the boys went to Rocky Point on Lake Coeur d’Alene. While swimming Jackson became fatigued and began to panic. As he struggled, his brother grabbed hold of him but was forced to let go for fear that he might drown along with him. Upon hearing the news of Jackson’s drowning, members of the family began assembling at the home of Lavinia (Jackson’s mother), a place from which to weather the disaster, collect whatever emotional remnants remained, and begin building again. After everyone arrived, Mitch called his children to the back room. He had something to say: Now I tell you, my children, do what is right. We no longer have any elders to talk to us, or tell us what to do at this wake. I looked around and didn’t see no speaker around to ask what this word means. All the speakers use this word: Qw’nqw’ntsutn. I’m going to tell you children what this word means: “we’re pitiful, it can’t be helped.” But it can be helped. It is us, the old people that have children, that can stop it by correcting their children. We are the parents. We are to blame. We should talk to our children; tell them what is right and what is wrong. Now all of you, my children, take care of your children. Never leave your children. Take them wherever you go. This all comes back to me and I no longer can take it. This is the last time you will hear me.1 SONGS OF POWER AND PRAYER IN THE COLUMBIA PLATEAU 136 Upon finishing his talk, Mitch collapsed. Moments later, his heart surrendered to sorrow that had become too much to bear, freeing his spirit from this earth and the persistent pain that came with being Indian. It was standing room only at the joint wake for Michael and his grandson, held at the mission church in De Smet. Family members representing the hundreds of people Michael had sung into the afterlife came to honor him—there to support his family in the same way they had been supported. The community had lost one of its great prayer leaders, among the last of a generation able to bring a precontact indigenous identity into an imported faith—able to weave disparate worlds into one. Connolly was one of his beneficiaries, fortunate to have stood by Michael’s side for years as a fellow arbiter of the afterlife. Connolly had been to innumerable wakes, had conducted countless funerals in Native communities where transcendence and tragedy walked hand in hand. No amount of experience could have prepared him to bury his mentor, however, a “grandfather” with whom he shared a bond more intimate than that of father and son, stretching from the familial into the sacred. Standing over Mitch’s coffin, Connolly gently placed in his hands a crucifix he had received during his first vows as a Jesuit in 1951. With tears in his eyes, he asked Mitch to keep praying for him, hoping the crucifix might act as a bridge to bring them together again one day. For the next eight years, Connolly continued to accompany Gibson Eli to healings throughout the Columbia Plateau and Canada, a period in which Eli was at the height of his powers. Calls came from far and wide, and Eli rarely said no. During this period his health began to wane, seeming to decrease in direct proportion to his growing spiritual power, as if his spirit were being coaxed from his body. Before Eli’s initial heart attack word had gotten out that his health was failing, and those who loved him while living sought to ease him through death. Eli recalls their first effort to bring him home: I went to sleep and at once I dreamed, and here was my wife, just like if I was awake, standing right before my bed. She said, “You’re pitiful, I’m going to take you home.” So I looked at [18.226.222.12] Project...

Share