Vanishing, my ass
It’s hard to say whether what I’ve been thinking most about lately dates back to last month, last year, or 11 years ago. The reality is all three moments in time are probably significant.
Most recently, it really felt like I was most occupied with questions of belonging. Specifically, what belonging looks like when you’ve long-since given up the illusion that for everyone, there’s some place out there where they’ll feel totally at home if they just look and live long enough to find it. It was a little less than a year ago, in fact, that I came to the conclusion that if we’re being real with ourselves, these places are never ready-made. We all have an active role to play in creating them—these intellectual, cultural, social, and sometimes even physical places where we and like-minded folks can belong and contribute. Nonetheless, something somebody said last month made me wonder if that’s true of everyone’s experience.
In early July, a few of my coworkers and I met up with someone who lives full-time on the northeast Olympic Peninsula (like us), but still works with an art museum based in Seattle. This person’s been trying to help us get an arts engagement program for folks living with dementia off the ground. It’s intended to be modeled after a program her museum has been doing for north of a decade. We’re not flush enough to essentially launch a new program with a budget over $20,000 without funding already committed to support it, so we’re kind of at the mercy of what people reviewing grant proposals are into for this and we’ve already struck out once.
The basis of this conversation in July was to get on the same page about hitting the pause button on trying to find funding for this creative aging program until we’re in a better place with timing and resources. I was chatting with the person from the other museum while I was waiting for my own coworkers and we discovered we both have western Pennsylvania ties. She had just been back east for a visit and posted up at a cabin her family has held onto about an hour north of Pittsburgh. By the time the folks we were waiting up for finally came along she concluded by saying something to the effect of, “It’s good to go back and visit, but I could never live there. It’s good to be home.” She said something about feeling like an alien when she’s in western Pennsylvania and feeling comparatively at home in western Washington.
Following that, one of my coworkers who had just been out in central Idaho made a similar comment. She said that when she and her spouse, still under the spell of the Sawtooths in all their majesty, found themselves wondering why they had never considered setting up in Idaho, they remembered how politically regressive the state is and concluded that they could never live there.
Those comments felt curious to me. In the moment, I think I was just dubious of the insinuation that both of these households had found a sense of belonging in our particular corner of western Washington. At my most pretentious, I would be tempted to judge folks who’ve found some version of that as maybe not delusional, but just basic. Immediately after that July interaction, I think I felt both judgmental and a little resentful. When you catch yourself facing evidence that this notion of belonging is out there but it’s eluding you, it’s hard not to be resentful of the people who claim to have found it.
When I came to my senses in the days following and remembered that I don’t even buy that, a clarifying thought kind of dawned on me. That is, if you’re queer, neurodivergent, and Marxist enough (like yours truly), just by design, you’re never going to feel especially at home as long as the dominant culture is what it is. In an earlier stage in life, I might’ve found that realization pretty disheartening, but now I think it’s kind of liberating. In a way, if you can accept that you’ll never feel entirely at home anywhere—at least in society as it’s currently conceived—you can kind of live anywhere with minimal expectations as long as you feel basically safe.
If nothing else, thinking that way at least makes me feel like less of a failure. As far as the contiguous U.S. goes, it’s not like I haven’t given some different places a fair shake. In fact, I think I’m just starting to give myself more credit for the amount of psychological and spiritual labor I’ve had to do to just make sense of my life for myself because, almost without exception, every transition I’ve made since leaving Montana in 2011 has been pretty unnatural. The reasons I’ve lived where I have in my adult life don’t feel very compelling. And even when they’ve been practical—like living in DC for almost five years because it’s where I had access to the security of a job with benefits after undergrad—I question them in hindsight. I mean, were those reasons really so practical if I used them as the basis for self-sabotage and staying somewhere I never wanted to live for a chunk of my twenties? I don’t know.
Anyway, if you’re anything like me, it’s hard to get the story of your life straight for yourself. It’s hard to see all the different changes and migrations as part of an integrated whole. I’m also learning that it can be just as difficult to see your own preoccupations and interests as part of the same integrated reality that others are inhabiting. I have one particular moment of inflection in mind related to that, and it’s why one year ago is another point of origin for this whole line of thinking.
At the end of 2020, I did some pro bono work for Hedgebrook as a clever way to finish out some credits for an MFA I had started when I was back east. When I was wrapping up with them in December of that year, the folks there surprised me with the generous offer to do a 2021 retreat on their land on Whidbey Island, which is just across an inlet from where I live. For the stretch of the COVID Era (the C.E., if you will) when folks were finally able to get vaccinated, Hedgebrook was able to start having a few writers at a time back in residence. Even though I knew it would be a non-traditional year for retreats, there were still several reasons I hesitated to take them up on the offer.
The biggest and most practical one is that I didn’t have paid leave at the time and I knew that working while there would be frowned upon. To some extent, I respect that expectation that all writers in residence unplug from their ordinary responsibilities while they’re there. But at the same time, I think it’s a little inadvertently classist because it effectively precludes folks who don’t have paid leave and can’t afford to miss wages from participating in a retreat. I was, however, ultimately assured that setting up shop where I could access the internet (which their cottages intentionally do not have) to continue working on weekdays while I was there would be tolerated. With that resolved, I was left with my one, more existential inhibition around taking them up on this retreat offer. Keeping with the theme of this little reflection, I was mostly concerned with whether or not I even belonged there.
Under ordinary circumstances, there would be this whole ultra-selective application process you would go through to even be considered for a residency at this place. I had done nothing like that and would never be picked for something so exclusive if I did. They just invited me out of appreciation for the work I’d done for them. I often like to joke that I’m the person who only gets let into things through the service entrance and this felt pretty consistent with that.
For perspective, this is the place where members of staff will point out a blue desk still on the land that Alice Walker used while writing The Color Purple. Suffice to say I’m not going to be the reason a writing surface qualifies as a memorial desk anytime soon. Positing that I don’t belong at a place like Hedgebrook is not coming from a place of modesty or imposter syndrome. Outside of what I’m calling the “service entrance,” there’s just no way I’d otherwise be invited to stay in their cottages, burn their kindling and firewood, eat their food, and pick their flowers.
I struggled with that dissonance for a while, but ultimately concluded I’d probably regret not taking the opportunity, particularly since I live a ferry ride away—the logistics for something like this will probably never be as undemanding ever again. In the end, I went and maintained my working hours and made the most of the ample reading and journaling time in the cottage that gets treated to a nightly frog symphony because of its proximity to a man-made pond with a small waterfall. There were a few other writers in residence, including one whose much longer stay overlapped with the entirety of mine. She does a lot of teaching for Hedgebrook and, in exchange, was doing a long retreat that summer.
As a disclaimer ahead of what I’m about to recount, I have to say I like this person a lot. I feel a real sense of gratitude for the conversations I had with her. This is somebody who was mentored by Toni Morrison through her postdoc in the 80s. She was in the woman’s damn office the day she finished her final edits for Beloved. Outside of her teaching commitments, she has dedicated a lot of her literary life to the development and growth of writers of color. As far as I’m concerned, this is somebody who deserves legions of flowers while she’s here to smell them. Nonetheless, I remember her making a comment that set off a loud record needle-scratch in my head and I’ve thought about it a lot ever since.
I don’t even remember how it came up, but as an aside in some conversation, this person kind of implied that a certain well-known Native writer getting credibly accused by several women of sexual misconduct in 2018 marked some sort of waterloo for Native representation in literature. If I had been more confident in the moment, I would’ve paused the conversation and asked some clarifying questions to make sure I understood what she was insinuating—because it’s possible I misunderstood completely.
One big downside to feeling so out of place in general for so much of my adult life is that I’ve repressed my intuition a lot and missed opportunities like this. There have been so many conversations where my gut has raised an alarm—that internal needle-scratch that is always so obvious in retrospect—but I haven’t felt the clarity or confidence to stop the conversation with a question or to push back. This was absolutely one of those moments and it kind of haunts me because it probably would’ve been more edifying for everyone present if I had just asked if I was understanding correctly. Instead, I’m left with the impression that a known abuser was the only Native writer this person was aware of and/or had read and that they genuinely didn’t know how many great Native writers there are and were even before that guy came around.
There’s a reason I connect this moment so strongly with the struggle of my adult life to square my own lived experience with that of other folks. And this is why I wonder if the real roots of this whole reflection date back to at least 11 years ago. Particularly when it comes to Native representation in literature, thanks to the English teacher who made every junior class at Gardiner read Fools Crow, I think I naively assumed that James Welch was, like, canon for even us white European settlerfolk, and that most kids my age were also reading him.
Where I came from, Welch was mixed right in with the likes of Orwell, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare. It wasn’t until I was in Virginia for undergrad that I would learn that wasn’t normal. In those years, I started to get a sense of how different my experiences and references were from those of…I hesitate to say most peoples’, but it certainly felt like a lot. The absence of Welch in my peers’ reading fare, and really just the absence of Native people in their lives on the East Coast in general, was an aspect of that.
I guess I’m kind of describing a symptom of culture shock here, but something I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody talk about with regard to culture shock is how it can subtly trigger the same dissociation that we see with a post-traumatic response. I don’t know if there’s any expert out there that has already broken this down. If there is, I regret being ignorant of them all these years because I’m just now beginning to understand how irreconcilable so many of my life experiences have felt and recognize that my MO has been to cast them as disparate or question if they were even real.
In rare instances, I think there has to be some part of my brain that processes stuff people say that feels totally out of step with my perspective and, rather than challenge or question it, proactively decides that my reality and somebody else’s must be fundamentally different as a way of heading off further disorientation. I don’t love that that’s the case, but I really believe that’s why I didn’t speak up in that moment at Hedgebrook in 2021 when it sounded like somebody was genuinely not aware of all the work by Native writers that is going to be canon in my lifetime if it isn’t already.
The reason I’m relatively certain that my dissociative reflex was at play during that interaction is because one of the books I had taken with me to Hedgebrook (and was probably finishing right around that time) was Red Nation Rising. Among other things, the folks who wrote it did an excellent job of explaining the systems and stereotypes devised by the settler state to make it seem as though Native folks are rapidly vanishing, if not completely extinct. Describing this rhetoric, they write:
The very presence of Native people marks a disorder in the settler state, and this requires violence. Violence, in particular state violence, is part of the everyday life for Native people in settler society, but, despite this, police and settlers are never “responsible” for taking Native lives, because the Native is the impossible subject in the settler state. And the settler story of the “vanishing Indian” provides a ready-made alibi.
It’s the kind of manufactured racist idea that gets used to justify settler behaviors like overt violence, theft, genocide, and looting of cultural items.1 But these ideas always carry over into much more insidious acts of violence like erasure. The internal needle-scratch over that comment I heard back in 2021 owes, I think, to a budding sensitivity to that erasure. And I think all that is just magnified in my memory because the person who made it spoke so much about erasure in the context of her own life story as the child of immigrants.
The engine of erasure2 looms large if you’re not in that exclusive club that finds that elusive (arguably imaginary) form of belonging. And I think it fuels our own tendencies to dissociate the pieces of our lives—especially our past—that don’t seem to fit with our current situation or the company we find ourselves in. I think it also fuels self-loathing, particularly around those same pieces of the past. I’ve recently been contending with one of the more unfortunate symptoms of that, which is the main reason for my thinking about and writing this right now.
Something this whole erasure-fueled dissociation and self-loathing has possessed me to do quite successfully is believe that I’m somehow dead to people in my past, and that they’d find me insufferable if I forced my company on them now. I recognize this same mindset in my hesitation to introduce myself in real life to people that I’m somewhat acquainted with through informal online spaces like Montana Twitter. Since I grew up in Montana, these two pockets of my reality—my oldest acquaintances as well as the newer virtual ones—converge there with special intensity. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this whole idea kind of took center stage when I was out that way for three weeks between July and August.
One 48-hour span from those three weeks really stands out. I think it went a long way to make me begin integrating a pretty broad cross-section of these dissociated fragments I’ve become aware of. It started with a meal at the home of some old friends—the parents of one of my best friends growing up. I think the world of these folks, but have been shy about reaching out whenever I make a trip back to my hometown. It’s definitely a form of self-loathing masquerading as shyness. This duo, who I will identify for the benefit of any Gardinerites reading as Eleanor and Tom Stone, fall into that category of people from my past that I think are beyond cool even as I fear they would find me insufferable if they spent much time with me these days.
Nonetheless, I went out on a limb and reached out on the last Wednesday of July and they kindly had me over on that Friday. Toward the end of the evening with them, I mentioned that I was going to try to get on the road the next morning by 5am for Missoula to attend as much of the last day of the first James Welch Native Lit Festival as I could. Somewhere in there, I said that Lois Welch would be reading in the afternoon and that she herself has said she’s not sure how involved she’ll be able to be for the next festival in 2024 (when she’ll be 88 years old). The mention of Lois prompted Tom to share a story I had never heard from his and Eleanor’s Missoula years in the 80s.
Though the two met while working in Yellowstone, they migrated up north where Eleanor took a job at St. Patrick’s and Tom started working as a plumber. I guess there was a serendipitous day where Tom responded to a service call out in the Rattlesnake for somebody with the name Lois. He was inside the house and at work when he was startled by the first person to check in with him. It wasn’t anybody named Lois, but it was somebody he was pretty sure he recognized.
He asked the guy who emerged if he remembered giving a reading in the 70s at Cornell, where Tom had been an English major (Tom had the specific year that I’m failing to remember—it was either 1971 or 1974). If you haven’t already guessed it, the person at the house was its other occupant James Welch (who I’m going to keep calling James just because I don’t know if I’ve earned any right to call him Jim as those close to him did/do).
Once James got over the initial surprise of somebody remembering his appearance at Cornell 10+ years prior when his work was still pretty unknown, he and Tom chatted for a bit. Eventually, the Lois whose name had been on the service call made it home and by the end of that visit to the Rattlesnake, the Welches had persuaded Tom to apply to the writing program at the university. Tom ended up attending and interacting with Lois many more times in her capacity as director of the university’s creative writing program.
After sharing that anecdote with me, Tom said to relay a hello from him to Lois if I ended up running into her during the festival. I told him I doubted I would have the honor, but that what he shared seemed to have all the hallmarks of so many people’s interactions with the Welches. Most people’s face-to-face introductions to them have been everyday scenarios like that—like a plumbing service call. Without exception, people always describe them as welcoming, kind, and encouraging. James Welch in particular seems to have managed to leave a profound impression on everyone who had a chance to interact with him, and it sounds like he often remembered even the most mundane encounters and conversations.
With Tom’s story in mind, it was hard not to see James Welch as a sort of fulcrum that brought so many fragmented elements of my reality into focus during those last days of July. Where I grew up, James Welch is canon. Most people I grew up with have read at least one of James Welch’s books. Others, like the Stones, knew the guy personally. And if we want to talk about the number of great Native writers in our midst these days, the lineup for the first JDub Fest is evidence that I haven’t been delusional all this time. Sterling HolyWhiteMountain and the team who put the festival together have proven that you can feature exclusively Native writers in a three-day program that could’ve run a full week. And, at least to me, it’s not like these are unknown writers3; most of the Saturday lineup alone is represented somewhere on my own bookshelves at home.
The festival also ended up being an occasion to introduce myself to some of my acquaintances from the interwebs that have more or less urged me to find them and say hello if I’m ever in their neck of the woods. One of those folks whose storytelling and writings I particularly cherish and admire said he would’ve been bummed if I was at the festival and hadn’t made a point to introduce myself. I’m glad I did and I hope I don’t forget what I learned from that: If someone says they hope you’ll seek them out and say hello, they mean it. They might even be disappointed if you don’t.
I suppose the way my long-simmering thoughts about erasure-fueled belonging and dissociation clicked into focus at the end of July was kind of a coincidence of timing. However, for a few reasons, it strikes me as no wonder that somebody like James Welch and something like a festival celebrating his artistic legacy would bring these ideas to the surface for me. As cheesy as it sounds, it’s clear that Welch is kind of this north star that connects and grounds so many people with different lived experiences for different reasons. In a Q&A ahead of the festival, I think festival director Sterling HolyWhiteMountain keyed in astutely on why and how that is in stressing the outsiderness that marks Welch’s life and writing. When it comes to questions of belonging and how it can inform and transform your art, Welch is kind of an OG.
It also hasn’t escaped me that the festival is kind of a prime example of what it looks like to actively create an intellectual, cultural, social, and physical space that doesn’t already exist. It’s right there in all the messaging about why the festival was created: “There is no place for Native writers to talk publicly about our work, with each other. We wanted to create that space.” This is obviously quite specific to the context of Native writers, but I think everyone who’s ever felt like an outsider can take inspiration from the conception of spaces like this. And for writers in particular, it’s a victory for all of us every time other writers are given the space and autonomy to write the way they want to write and talk the way they want to talk.
The poison of the dominant culture thrives and proliferates in outsiders not having these spaces. I think it similarly thrives and proliferates in outsiders not being able to integrate their experiences because being able to do that—being able to traverse different worlds without separating them—makes us all more powerful and more of a threat to the forces that are in place to exclude, control, and homogenize. I have to believe this is how we create belonging and help the outsiders find each other. This is how we expose what is said to be vanishing or elusive as very much alive and here.
If there’s anything I’d identify from this whole meditation as The Big Fucking Lesson™ that’s been fermenting for 11 years or so, it’s that it’s an adversarial position and an act of resistance to see those disparate worlds we’ve inhabited as integrated, and to insist on making space to accommodate all of them.
1 Most recently, I saw this “vanishing Indian” concept referenced on a text panel for an Apsáalooke Women and Warriors exhibition to explain how the fuck the Field Museum in Chicago ended up with a shit-ton of Apsáalooke cultural items. The curator who wrote and okayed that interpretive panel is presumably Apsáalooke, but I still found that explanation without further examination a bit dissatisfying.
2 I’m borrowing this term from KEXP writer and DJ Larry Mizzell, Jr., who uses it a few times in his conversation with artist Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes for an excellent episode of Fresh off the Spaceship.
3 As Lois Welch pointed out, between her first published book and now, Louise Erdrich on her own averages a book about every 15 month and has a haul of prizes to show for it at this point. If you, like me, missed the July 28 programming at JDub Fest when Louise spoke about James Welch’s work and the (“hottest ever!”) butter sex scene in Love Medicine, you can watch this polished recording from Missoula Community Media Resource (though I also recommend watching the longer, raw recording from the Friday livestream because Sterling has some good jokes).
This month’s featured image: I was bummed when I thought I didn’t have any photos that would be appropriate for this latest discharge of my heartfelt nonsense, but then I remembered this photo. There’s gotta be a better way to represent James Welch and this overarching “vanishing, my ass” sentiment, but this very Blackfeet-presenting 4Runner in a Missoula parking lot during the first James Welch Native Lit Fest will have to suffice.
