RavenShadow by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page A

We see them, of course, but we do not make eye contact with them. Old-time Lakota men could never, ever, ever look their mothers-in-law in the eye, or women their fathers-in-law.
    Among white people, though, if your boss speaks to you, or your sergeant, or your teacher, you better look him in the eye. Otherwise it’s, “Look at me when I talk to you, boy.” And if you don’t, they think you’re evasive or shifty. When you’re only trying to be respectful.
    Learning to speak white body language has been harder for me than learning English, by far. Sometimes even today I get confused and act inappropriate. Sometimes I have to make a choice, with both red and white folks in front of me. It’s hard.
    I don’t claim, though, that all four of these voices aren’t me. For better and for worse, they are. The traditional voice is the one I was raised to. The rez voice is the first one I picked up, the everyday way of my people. The educated white talk is one I wanted badly to master. It was my key to college, a career, anda good-paying job. The radio voice was my last acquisition. Got it and my show-biz name from the radio station, out there in Seattle. My first real job—I’ll tell you about it later. My PERSONALITY , on the AIR . Cause I was GOOD , baby. Do it to it, Blue!
    Natcherly, this hipster voice isn’t me. This white-man life isn’t….
    Until they began to be me. Until Crow’s voice sounded like me, even to me. I forgot the old voice. Hey, pretend long enough and you become what you’re pretending to be.
    So that’s where I was the night Emile rescued me. A traditional Lakota who’d become a hipster, big-city boy, divorcee, and drunk.
    And Emile spoke to me of going on the mountain? On the mountain? Back to the old ways? What am I, a museum?
    So what was my new life? Jive and booze. Can jive and booze be your whole life? Yep, booze alone can be your whole life, and your death, too.
    The way out? To go back to my beginnings and rediscover the good red road—that’s what Emile was telling me.
    Here’s what my beginnings were.

Crow’s Raising
    G randpa, Unchee (my grandmother), and I lived near the mouth of Medicine Root Creek, in a back corner of the Badlands. The Badlands are beautiful, but they are a hoodoo place. The ancient peoples were strong here, Stone People, Rooted People, and Animal People, before human beings, and their bones are here yet. The paleontologists have found thousands of fossils of the original peoples. Sometimes even a kid can find a dinosaur bone imbedded in the Earth. In a way the Badlands were even badder a hundred years ago when the Ghost Dancers retreated there to dance their visionary dance, away from white people and from Indian unbelievers. And they were bad when I was a kid—only scattered, remote homes, two-tracks for roads, wagons and horses more common than cars.
    My grandparents had a cabin, you could call it, except the word cabin calls up the wrong picture. Basically it was a freight car. Where Senior (that’s my dad) got it, or how he hauled it to my grandparents’ little piece of land, I’ll never know. The rest of the house was (and still is) catch-as-catch-can. Tree trunks support the roof. Tarpaper, newspaper, scraps of two-by-four, odd remnants of plywood, pieces of two-by-twelves. We even had our version of the great housing fashion of the 1950s, a picturewindow. It was a two-piece windshield filched from a wreck and carefully framed by Senior into the kitchen wall. In the summer we could have another picture window, a giant one, plus air-conditioning—we just slid the big freight-car door open.
    Grandpa and Senior built a privy and a squaw cooler too. This was a brush shelter, pine boughs on poles. In the summer Unchee cooked on a wood-burner in its shade, we ate there, and it was our hangout place away from the heat of the house. I remember her squaw bread fondly, and the black coffee with molasses, and the dried corn with berries. That was a good