Many nights over the recent years that we’ve lived together, my father and I have pulled out the bong — phallic, glass, about two feet tall. Some people, including many in our own Native community, would look askance at two recovering alcoholics with two decades of estrangement and a packed bowl between them. Indians like us are often told to “sober up!”
It’s true: Alcoholism and addiction are killing our people. Over the last four years, I’ve attended 10 funerals in my Secwépemc and St’at’imc homelands: six for people under the age of 45, five of whom were family members. I was a pallbearer twice, tasked with carrying the departed until they were lowered into the frozen ground. I delivered a eulogy once. And I don’t even live on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve, in British Columbia, like most of my family. Imagine how many funerals my relatives there have attended in the same time.
Native people have suffered like this for centuries. Beginning in 1894, every Indigenous child in Canada was required to attend one of the country’s 139 Indian residential schools — segregated assimilationist institutions designed, in the words of one of their architects, to “get rid of the Indian problem.” My father, a proud problem, was born at one of those schools, St. Joseph’s Mission, in Western Canada; he was found just minutes after entering the world in the school’s trash incinerator by the night watchman.
Dad made it out of that incinerator, made it off the Canim Lake Indian Reserve and turned himself into a noted artist whose work is in the Smithsonian’s collection. He also became a father to two kids, my sister and me, with two different moms from two places that seemed as far away from Canim Lake as he could get: New York and New Mexico. After giving it his best shot for a few years (a half-dozen if we count the time he was drunk but still there), Dad left us for good. The experts call it intergenerational trauma.
There’s a reason my dad drank so much for so many decades before he found the bong — why Indian people succumb to addiction, overdose and suicide at the highest rates of any racial group in Canada or the United States. When you insist, with every arm of society — the military, the education system, the entertainment industry — that a people are already dead, or that they should be, eventually they take that to heart. And when you deny an entire race the right to parent their kids, for generations, eventually they unlearn how to do it. My dad never knew how to be a dad.
But it wasn’t always this way. Not so long ago, our people lived in healthy communities organized around our lands, relatives and traditions. Elders tell us we must get back to these ways to survive, to heal and to live. That’s why kinship, ceremony and sobriety take on such profound spiritual significance to so many Native people. In Indian Country, there’s an image that captures this concept of healing: the Red Road, the idea that we are walking a path between worlds back to our ancestors. After I quit drinking, and after having reconnected with my dad later in life, I moved into his old place with him in a little Navy town in Washington State to try to heal our relationship. Father and son, together on the Red Road for the first time in 22 years.
Late at night, Dad and I like to amble down that Red Road, high as kites. Weed takes the edge off. Keeps us from drinking. Gives us a way to dull and address our pains, without barking up the trees of deadlier addictions. Relieves us of the strict codes of sobriety we can’t keep, because we’re rule-breakers, not followers. Loosens up the hard stories we tell so that we might come to know each other. (Something they don’t always show you in those stoner movies.) And brings out those rolling coughs that morph, in so many throats, into laughs. (Something they do.)
And on nights when we’re feeling extra traditional, Dad and I crack open the most sacred of our family’s games: Scrabble. Scrabble is serious business back in Canim Lake. Sometime after our family’s kids were taken away to St. Joseph’s Mission, we decided we might as well get good at the white man’s words by stringing together letters on tiny wooden tiles. Some, like my auntie Denise, play the Scrabble Deluxe Edition, with all the extra points and multipliers that can extend a game for hours.
Unlike Denise, Dad and I opt for “bong-hit Scrabble,” the standard version of the game modified by one essential house rule: All players must take a rip from the bong between turns. The result is an incredibly slow but entertaining game, during which Dad has been known to invent new words, like “sloppify.” (As in: “When you get a bunch of Indians in the house, they really sloppify the place.”)
Tsk-tsk. Don’t tell the traditionalists, whose teachings we respect and usually follow — or the drug and alcohol counselors, either. But the truth is, these late-night smoke-sessions-turned-word-battles, this intermediate form of addiction and stoner therapy, is healing for us. I know because, after years of living together as a real-life father-son Cheech and Chong, I gave my dad the memoir I had spent the same period writing. After he put it down, he told me, for the first time, that he understood what he had put me through and that he was sorry. I know those disciplinarians at the Mission would be horrified by all of it — the weed, the traditionalism, the healing! — but most of all, that he and I rebuilt exactly what they had tried to tear down: an Indian family. At least I like to think they’d be.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is the author of “We Survived the Night,” out now from Alfred A. Knopf, and the director of “Sugarcane,” which was nominated for best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards.
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