Follow the Blackbirds

Going Back

59 Going Back “Back home” implies a return, a cycle of returning, as if it is expected, natural, a fact of life. Families gathered around kitchen tables, connections to generations before us, journeys we make to or away from home. It is there, back home, where we laugh, and cry, about relatives, meals, loss, fulfillment. It is there, back home, where we are trying to return, where we belong, where the landscape is as familiar as our childhood bed and our mother’s hands, where our roots are the deepest. It is there, back home, where I meet strangers with my eyes and my father’s smile. Connection to place is powerful, innate. The word for “mother” and for the earth are the same in Dakota: ina. Place names around us— Maŋkato, Owotaŋna, Winuna, Shakpe, Mnisota—repeat the story that this land, this land is where our grandmothers’ grandmothers played as children. Sixteen different verbs describe returning home, coming home, or bringing something home. That is how important the homeland is in Dakota. No matter how far we go, we journey back home through language and songs, and in stories our grandparents told us to share with our children. “Back home” for my grandmother is where she was born, where she left in search of work, where she went with her “Indian suitcase,” a brown paper grocery bag, to visit her sisters every chance she got. When I was big enough to go with her, each time we passed it, she pointed out the “old home place” marked only by tall pines in the rolling hills along Highway 100. When she retired and moved back home, each time we passed it, I pointed out the “old home place” to my children. The last time we travelled that way together, much to my surprise, my son said, “Look, Mom! There’s the old home place!” “Back home” is where my grandmother and my mother are now buried. 60 When my son returned from his second tour in Iraq, I traveled to the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, California. During his deployment, I sent Sunday comics and wrote of changing seasons and landscape, a small gesture, but a hopeful one to keep him connected to home. Military homecomings are greatly anticipated and highly emotional. Anxious families waiting, waiting, counting the months, then days, then hours and minutes until we see with our own eyes our sons spill out of nondescript white buses in a stream of desert camouflage so wide even a mother can hardly distinguish one Marine from another. When I saw his smiling face emerge through the crowd, then I knew my son was, at last, “back home.” Now, back home is along the Maple River among tall oaks where blackbirds sing. It is where our nearest neighbor brought freshly baked cookies a few days after we moved in. It is where I can stop along the roadside to buy fresh sweet corn and tomatoes and leave payment in a yellow box. It is where the names of towns echo our presence on this land—Blue Earth, Sleepy Eye, Good Thunder. It is a long ways from the “old home place” and the California desert, but there is a kitchen table and a familiar landscape. How do we reconcile that famous quote “You can never go home again” with the end of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy learns she always “had the power to go back” home? Whether it is a place we seek, a sense of belonging, a welcome from those who knew us first, we go back home again and again, traveling, always traveling in search of stories about who we are and where we came from—back home. ...