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/ 31 blanks When I was little my dad gave me a book on Indians, and I spent hours searching watercolor paintings of pueblo dwellings, mentally climbing carved hand and foot holes up high rock walls to hewn-out cliff houses, shallow caves in the rock. I studied the paintings of girls my age toting pottery jars of water on their heads all the way from the river. The Indian girls were dressed in skirts made of animal skins. They were strong and deliberate in their motions, and I tried to imagine myself walking all the way from the river balancing a crockery pot of water on my head as I climbed up sheer rock to my home without ever spilling a drop of precious water. I thought the Indian girls had to be perfect, because I knew I was not. I was a girl without something important. My mother had left us. For a long time, I didn’t know why. There were other tribes pictured in the book that lived in portable shelters. These were the nomads. I sat in the center of my teepee, rigged from sheets slung over kitchen chairs, wrapped in woolen blankets, my buffalo hides, 32 / cathryn hankla near the fire at night. I watched puffs of smoke from the cigarettes I sneaked disappear into the functional gap between teepee poles, to wisp beyond the kitchen ceiling up to the stars. It would follow that I’d sleep near the fire on a bedroll, not against a wall on a platform above the ground. I wouldn’t need a bed like mine. Maybe I wouldn’t need a mother the way I needed one in our brick ranch house with running water and a real kitchen with an electric stove not just some hot stones surrounding a charred pit. And in the morning I’d sweep the bare earth and rebuild the fire ring or maybe I’d go out riding bareback and practice with my bow. My hair held wood smoke day and night. There was always a wavy shape of purple in the far background of the watercolors, a mountain range almost out of sight. The low horizon flattened out the landscape on a scale I had never seen, a long plain of dry land, high desert expanding in all directions. I wanted to feel that spacious on the inside, but I felt a constriction in my chest. It was like I could never get a deep breath. As I stared at the communities of Indians I wondered why our house felt so separate from the other houses around us, why we had no village life. No fire ring, no communal cooking. No tribal dance. And of course no peace pipe or talking stick; no powwow, especially no conference on what mattered the most. No one told me any family stories; it had all turned off the day my mother left us. Family was a painful thing. My friends and I wandered up and down the streets on our bikes on long summer days. If we played anything it was cowboys, not Indians. We always had to have translucent plastic squirt guns soaking our pockets, water dripping down our legs to our red ball Jets. Sometimes we went in a house and ate a pimento cheese sandwich on white that someone else’s mother made for us. If we went into our house Dad was at work, so we peeled baloney slices straight from the package and rolled them up with yellow mustard centers. Rows of postwar houses surrounded us. Ours was one of the newer ones; the older ones were white and clad with wood. I wondered what it was about the neighbors’ grass that was so important that I couldn’t even step there without permission. Mostly we played in the street. In the watercolor, the braves were gathered on horseback for the hunt. It was later, after the Spanish came with horses. I led the women of my village out to hunt. Our arrows zinged through the air and hit true. I carved blanks / 33 some arrowheads on the tips of sturdy sticks and thought they looked scary enough. I would dip them in poison if I had to. If I saw a brave on horseback I became that brave, stripping off my shirt, not a girl anymore but a young man smeared with ocher and berry juice stain. My headdress was fierce with owl and eagle feathers. My long...

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