Grave Decorators Daughter
Death, mourning, and Memorial Day in Indian Country
My uncle Thomas’ funeral was in the middle of a snow storm. I drove to the burial grounds, a hill in the country near where his wife was buried, with my parents and sister. The highway was covered by ground blizzards; the mountains normally constant on the horizon blurred with the white sky and prairies. We just followed the brake lights of the car in front of us, joking that if they went off the road, we would too. These white outs aren’t uncommon on the rez in the winter. We couldn’t see any headlights following us and wondered if it would just be us and the hearse who arrived.
Yet when we eventually pulled off the road, car after car pulled off after us. When we got out of our cars and into the storm, almost no one could stand. The snow was deep, the wind was blowing, and we had to walk uphill. An Indian agent once said that the wind blows nine days a week on the Blackfeet Reservation, and he was right. My relatives were holding hands, falling in the snow, supporting each other to make it up the hill. My uncle gave the shortest prayer I have ever witnessed (a Holy Roller, he has a tendency to talk about Jesus for hours on end). Despite the dangerous winter storm, everyone from the community center came to the burial.
Being Native sometimes feels like being in a never ending state of mourning. Indian Country is weighed down with unresolved grief.
Funerals are one of the major family gatherings present throughout my life. I have been to sixteen funerals that I can remember; I’ve known five other people who have died whose funerals I was unable to attend. When I was in college, it felt like every time I went home, someone died. Winter break freshman year, my uncle died. Summer break my sophomore year, my aunt died. Thanksgiving break my junior year, a close family friend died. I wondered if I should stop going home. The fall after graduation, my older cousin died. A few months later, another aunt was murdered by a white supremacist. The next year another uncle was murdered.
The many funerals I’ve been to blend together. My family’s funerals are frequently loud and long; there is hysterical laughter and hysterical crying. I’m often in the kitchen, helping my grandma manage the fried chicken, red hotdogs, fry bread, and Cool Whip-marshmallow-fruit salad. I walk around the church or community center to refill elders tea and coffee. I avoid direct eye contact with my aunts who are crying so I don’t burst into tears too.
I wonder who will leave us next. I am always surprised.
Today is Memorial Day. Though Memorial Day is technically a day to honor veterans who died in combat, most Americans seem to use it to celebrate the beginning of summer, with barbecues, camping trips, and 30% off sales at the mall.
Memorial Day on the Blackfeet Reservation is different. It’s a day we honor all of our loved ones who have passed away. Each Memorial Day of my childhood, my family would form a caravan filled with polyester flowers and ceramic dollar store angels and drive from cemetery to cemetery across the rez.
We start in Browning, where we visit two cemeteries. The old cemetery is hilly, almost large bumps more than hills, with a smattering of family members buried closer and closer together. My family has a little plot on the top of a hill. You slowly peel a handmade, metal gate to get in. When I was a child, this just had my great grandpa – my grandma's dad. Today, my great grandma, two great aunts, and several other family members have joined. Most recently, my great aunt, who was cremated, was partially laid to rest here. We clean their graves, pick weeds, and add plastic flowers. Other family members have adorned their graves with wind chimes, handmade wooden shields, teddy bears, angel statues, crosses, and eagle feathers.
Then we head up the road to the new cemetery. The new cemetery feels strikingly different from the old one. Crisp mowed grass, matching headstones, a man walking around with a map in case you lost a relative. My great uncle, a Vietnam vet, is buried there. So is my great uncle Phillip, my great grandma’s brother. I never met him, but he was a prisoner of war in World War II. My family did a sundance to ask for divine intervention for his safe return. It worked.
Next, we head to Heart Butte, a smaller town that’s a thirty minute drive south. The winding highway has no shoulders; I try to imagine what it was like when my mom was a kid. She said there were no railings back then, so you could just careen off a cliff into the twisting prairie ditches. The cemetery in Heart Butte looks much like the old cemetery in Browning. Well loved, uneven ground, not handicap accessible, wind worn American flags on tipi poles. My great grandma’s mom and my great grandpa’s parents are buried here; all passed away decades before I was born. My great grandma’s mom passed away when she was just a toddler: “Aged 26 Yrs” is written at the bottom of her clean white headstone below a cross.
Our final stop on the reservation is Holy Family Mission, another thirty minutes away down a dirt road. Holy Family Mission was a residential school my great grandma Annie attended. Three generations of my family were forced to attend residential schools: assimilationist schools run by churches or the federal government meant to strip Native children of their culture, language, religion, and community and assimilate them as working class, Christian citizens. Children were often forced hundreds or thousands of miles from home; Holy Family Mission is a rare school close to home. My great grandma’s grandma is buried here.
The cemetery is on a hill overlooking where the residential school buildings were. The buildings no longer stand; they were burned down in the 1980s. First we leave flowers on my great great great grandma’s grave in the cemetery, then head to the bottom of the hill for a picnic. We walk to the dorms. The boys dorm, the girls dorm, a building that looks like there was a kitchen. Today, they’re just a pile of rocks and rubble. We set up camp chairs or sit in the trunk of my mom’s hatchback or my grandma’s truck and eat boiled potatoes, eggs, and corn and bannock bread made by my grandma. Boiled potatoes still remind me of Memorial Day.
Last year, my mom, sister and I found a cottonwood tree by the old school buildings and left orange flowers to honor all the children who attended. Cottonwoods were historically sacred trees for the Blackfeet. Orange is a color used to honor residential school survivors.
Our final stop on the Memorial Day caravan is in Augusta, Montana. Today, it’s a majority white town, but it was once home to a large Métis community. Much of my grandpa’s family is buried there. My mom says she wants to be too. The cemetery is on a hill overlooking town with a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains. Generations of my family are buried here; I recognize them by their last names, not because I knew them while they were alive.
I hope I remember where people are buried when my mom dies.
This Memorial Day, I am in Minneapolis. One thousand and ninety six miles from the Blackfeet Reservation. The Friday before Memorial Day, I began to think about how I would honor my ancestors and relatives this year. Should I offer tobacco at the river? Cook bison, cactus, and hominy stew and make a spirit plate? Read the poems and prayers from their funeral leaflets out loud? What would be meaningful for them?
I decide I’ll go to Mni Owe Sni (Coldwater Spring), near Bdote, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. It’s an important sacred site for the Dakota, and today, is part of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. It was an overcast day. Near the entrance, a deer just starting to grow his antlers greets me. I’m not sure what to do when I get to the spring. I don’t really pray, so instead I think about my relatives who have passed away and offer some kátoyiss (sweet pine). I couldn’t find pisstááhkaan (tobacco)
I also think of my future in the context of my past. How will my relationship to my ancestors and the land change if I stay in Minnesota? Will I travel to the Blackfeet Reservation every Memorial Day with my future partner and kids to decorate graves? What if my kids are the first ones in thousands of years to not grow up in Montana? Will we create new traditions? Am I okay creating new traditions instead of following my relatives and ancestors? When do new forms of mourning and remembrance become traditions? Is it possible to have an authentic relationship to the land as a Native person if I’m a thousand miles away from my land, my ancestors land? If I stay in Minnesota, will a part of me always long for Montana? Am I okay always being a little homesick?
After I do my attempt at a prayer-turned-guilt-ridden-existential-crisis, I walk around the prairie and cry. Mni Owe Sni is one of my favorite places in Minneapolis because it reminds me of Montana. Today, wildflowers dot the lush green prairie with pops of purple, yellow, and white. It smells sweet, and birds are chirping. I run into a white lady with a muddy golden retriever. He sniffs my hand and keeps walking. The woman smiles at me and says nothing. I smile back with a red nose.
All humans experience death and loss. Yet colonial death and loss is a different scale. I don’t just mourn my own relatives and elders, I mourn those who died so soon they never became elders. I mourn the compounded grief my family members face when police and courts disregard their pain. I mourn that in the same breath, my great-grandma would say that she had fond memories of residential school and that her friend died of lye poisoning from having soap in her mouth too frequently.
I think a lot about death and how it relates to unresolved grief in Indian Country. On November 17, 2015, I created a Google doc and titled it “All I want is for Indians to die of old age.” It was for a poem that I never wrote beyond the title. So many deaths in my family are tragic because they were preventable. They were murder or suicide or alcoholism or untreated diabetes or IHS negligence. They came far too soon.
To honor my relatives, today I think not only of our grief, but of our joy. I rub some kátoyiss (sweet pine) in my hands to stimulate their sweet scent and think of all of the laughter and bannock and medicine and stories and teasing and burnt coffee and boiled potatoes and love we shared. I think of them in the way that I hope my descendants one day think of me.