Category:

CHAPTER TWO

Two years ago, I was a tribal attorney working the sad, windowless courtroom in the Government Center. Like all other titles around here, calling myself a "tribal attorney" was a bit lofty. I was just a recent JD willing to do the shovel work in family court, mostly child welfare cases and executing protective orders. At first, it felt worthy and important, but after a year of writing suspension of parental rights petitions and dutifully submitting them to the court, a morbid train of thought started taking hold of me: If I wrote about fifty of these in a year, just how many traumatized, neglected kids were we talking about? How many families separated? How many tragedies were written into these neat and formal petitions I was taking to the family court judge? And how many more were in the offing in the thirty or so years ahead of me if I stayed?

My mother had given her life over to this kind of work—she was a social worker who ran the tribe's family services department—but I suspected that I wasn't as altruistic as she was. I wasn't taking to being a tribal government bureaucrat, grinding away in a cinder block Government Center office while Buzz Carlisle and the council critters bought themselves new trucks and built additions to their houses and otherwise flaunted their corruption while the oxycontin and heroin flowed freely into the reservation. The whole system seemed designed to fill my caseload with a persistent onslaught of names that I couldn't bear to learn, and with that president and that council, it didn't seem likely that would change.

If that sounds like resentment bleeding from a wounded ego, I won't argue. I'd graduated from Cornell Law and had spent a year interning on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, where I drafted bills concerning Indian Country. One of them, concerning sovereignty and logging rights for a Ute band in Colorado, even became law. That led to a stint as a staffer in a senatorial office, but when that senator got beat in the midterms, I found I wasn't as in demand as I'd thought.

So when Joe Beck, the tribe's general counsel and one of my mother's oldest friends, offered to set me up with a job in the family court, I took it. Just for a little while, he'd said. Just until you figure out your next move, brother. I took the job because I couldn't say no to Joe and I figured I owed Passage Rouge for my education. And I owed Joe for so many other things.

But I was starting to feel trapped already, and went looking for ways to make my presence here in Passage Rouge matter. If I truly wanted to help my people, which is what I ostensibly came out here to do, I needed more power. The only problem was that I was a nonentity. I lived here when I was a kid, sure, but my mother moved us out long ago. I was enrolled, but people still use the term half- breed for people like me. I didn't have family here anymore, much less family on council, nor did I have any connections other than Joe Beck, nor had I paid any dues.

But I did have my childhood buddy Mack Beck, who was everything I wasn't. Mack was the director of the elder outreach program, a job in the government with none of the resentment or political baggage that came with my job as a prosecutor. He was married to Laurie, whom everybody on the reservation knew as Ms. Laurie, the second-grade teacher at Passage Rouge Elementary. Together they were raising a baby, CC. Mack was reservation-smart and armed with a degree in business and American Indian studies, he had a family, and all the elders loved him. And he looked the part: that long hair, that immovable mountain mass, the beadwork medallions and satin ribbon shirts. I was green, but even I could sense his potential. This was a candidate. All he needed was a little push.

He and I would hang out after work to bitch about our jobs, and one night, while we were having a beer in his living room, he told me the council was cutting the elder care program. He'd be out of a job at the end of the fiscal year. But he wasn't scared, he said. He fed his baby from a bottle and took a swig from his own and looked up at me with that friendly ursine smile. "Was thinking of running for a council seat."

To which I said, without thinking, "Why settle for a seat?" He laughed at that, but I was serious. "Yeah, you could get on the council. That's easy. But you'd still be working for Buzz Carlisle."

He looked away. The baby cried, and as Mack put a bottle of milk to CC's lips, I could see him dreaming past the limits of his imagination.

"You really think so, Cuz?"

I helped him file the paperwork the next day. The campaign signs went up around town. I booked his events, I wrote his talking points for when he debated Buzz in the Passage Rouge High School gym. I talked him out of quitting the race when he was feeling fatalistic about his chances, which happened often. I completely checked out of my job at family court, and Joe would send me concerned messages asking when I'd be done with "other pursuits," not hiding his disappointment.

I didn't expect Mack to win. Maybe we wouldn't have if the reservation hadn't had that blizzard a week before the election. Buzz hadn't secured the propane contracts that kept the tanks full and the heat on in tribal housing. People were freezing in their living rooms, blaming Buzz as they shivered.

We came in on the Hope and Change election. Mack was the local boy with a fancy college degree, singing the old honor songs with the drum, saying the right words about treasuring the wisdom of our elders and ancestors but rejecting corruption and the tacit surrender to the drug trade. Sure we squeaked out a victory on these promises two years ago, but then we learned that if you fail to fix the blight, you own it all: the drunk tank at full occupancy every weekend; shots fired in the HUD homes near the casino twice a month; and every day, the steady and persistent grumbling, barely audible from the safety of our offices but loud enough for us to know we're failing our own people and doing absolutely fuck all to fix any of it.

This excerpt ends on page 17 of the hardcover edition.