One Little Indian Boy

I only knew that Montana Indian boy for a few months. In 1983, he was a student at the Eastern Washington farm town high school where I was one of the only four Spokane Indians. Two of them were my sisters. One was my best friend. I’d known the fourth for my entire life. All of us Spokanes commuted to that farm town from our reservation.

That Montana Indian had been fostered from his tribe’s reservation to a white family in Eastern Washington. I don’t remember how that came to be.

I’ll call him Eddie.

He was handsome and mean, brilliantly so.

He once borrowed a pencil, snapped it in half, and gave the lead end back to me.

“There,” he said. “Now you can’t erase everything that’s wrong with you.”

Sitting in a car with my white friends, he said, “Yeah, I got a kid—ugly big head Indian like that one,” and then pointed at me.

My white friends laughed but then apologized to me later.

I knew Eddie was jealous of me. I was an academic and basketball star. I had a pretty white girlfriend who was good at basketball and volleyball.

Eddie played a few games on the junior varsity hoops team. Scored a few points. Then he quit. He struggled in school and was constantly being reprimanded for missing homework.

I lived with my parents. As dysfunctional as they could be, my Mom and Dad didn’t lose me to a white family 700 miles away.

I didn’t argue with Eddie. I didn’t return his insults. I’d like to flatter myself and say that my verbal pacifism was because of kindness. But I just knew that his stay in my life was going to be temporary.

And it was brief.

He was there and then he was gone.

Maybe fostered to another family, white or Indian. Or maybe he was sent back to his family.

Over the decades, I often thought about Eddie. He was a lost Indian boy, like so many of the boys from my tribe, like I could’ve been if I’d made even one of the self-destructive choices that are readily available to reservation Indian kids.

I sometimes wondered if Eddie has read my books or seen Smoke Signals, the movie I wrote and co-produced. And, yes, of course, he’d seen the movie. Every Indian has seen that movie.

But did he realize that the Indian who wrote the books and movies was the same Indian that he knew for a few months in high school?

Did he tell his friends, “Yeah, I snapped that nerd’s pencil”?

Did he say, “Yeah, he’s still an ugly big head Indian”?

I don’t know.

Then, one night, I searched the Internet for his whereabouts. He has a very distinctive name—one of those awesome Indian names that contains an animal and adjective—so he was easy to find.

And I learned that he’d died of cancer at age 48.

Too young.

But he had died on his tribe’s reservation. He died at home. I watched a tribute video to him on YouTube. He had that one son. He had a grandchild.

There was a photo of Eddie as a young man hugging his mother.

He had returned to her.

But I did further research and saw that she’d died when she was only 58.

Eddie’s father had died when he was only 35.

Eddie’s sister and brother had both died in their 30s.

And, then, I saw that Eddie’s son had died only a year after he did.

Car wrecks, alcoholism, cancer, suicide.

Another reservation life beset by tragedy.

What is there to do?

Dear Eddie, I forgive you for your mean words. I hope you forgive me for my distance.

Dear Eddie, let me pick up this broken pencil.

Let me turn it into a drumstick.

Let me turn the world into a drum.

Let me drum.

Let me sing with these words.

Let me play this honor song for you.