“Adahy! Hi-ga! Hi-ga!” I heard the Cherokee words crack out of my grandmother’s throat, and I knew my six-year-old brother Waya must be home. “Ad-a-hy!” I felt my eyes roll almost viscerally. Even the syllables of my name sounded flowy-er or something, in an annoyingly non-English and obsolete kind of way, as my grandmother slipped into speaking her native tongue when my little brother was home. “Hi-ga!” I slid down my headphones, currently blasting Eminem’s “White America” from his 2002 album, and heaved back, “Coming, Elisi!” E-li-si was what I had always called my grandmother and was the only word in Cherokee that I conformed to using. I put an active effort into resisting to acquire any of the words Elisi had begun to regularly use at home with Waya, ever since six months ago when she put him in the Cherokee immersion school that was started on the Reservation where we lived in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
“Hi-gaaaaaaaa!” I let out a private groan and summoned the energy to roll my head to the side just enough to see the clock on my nightstand. 6:08pm. I had heard that word she was calling almost every night around dinner time for the past several months, but never asked her exactly what it meant. I figured it was the word for “dinner” or “mealtime” or “eat,” but never consulted her to clarify, in order to prove a point. Truth was, I wanted nothing to do with the Cherokee language. And especially when it was interrupting my particularly involved Eminem listening session. The juxtaposition of listening to my favorite rap artist spitting the words, “White America/I could be one of your kids,” while simultaneously hearing my leather-skinned grandmother call me down for a ten-cent Cherokee meal was a little too cruel for the amount of irony I could handle in a single day. All sixteen year-old kids endure some variation of entrapment during the years before moving out; but on the Oklahoma Cherokee Reservation, growing sick of your surroundings became not just an annoyance, but a lifestyle. And sending Waya to this new immersion school only made me want to turn up my music even louder to block out all the antiquated words and bullshit traditions that only reinforced the rest of the world’s view of us as non-modern, savage freaks. The Reservation leaders said this movement to prevent the extinction of the language or culture or whatever was meant to “de-stigmatize” our Cherokee ways, but “destigmitization” my ass. I could be getting called down for burgers right now, but instead I was being babbled at by an old Indian lady in a cryptic tribal language. I turned up my CD to full blast just to remind myself of how much it didn’t sound like ancestral chanting.
A minute later, a faint “Adahy, howatsu!” surfaced through my headphones. I let out a much less private groan and pressed Pause on my Walkman instead of Stop, preparing an excuse not to have to engage in Cherokee table conversation for long enough to wear out the batteries. I stood up from my bed, adjusted my purposefully oversized secondhand jeans, and headed for the stairs. Truthfully, I was pretty hungry, and the smell of Elisi’s Fry Bread and eggs was enough to motivate me to put a little hustle in my step as I descended the short, shag-carpeted staircase.
I entered the kitchen and was handed a freshly prepared plate.
“Gv-li-e-li-ga,” cooed my grandmother, winking at Waya, who was already planted at our foldout dinner table.
“Adahy, that means ‘you’re welcome!’ I learned it at school today,” beamed the six-year-old, a piece of egg shooting out of his upturned mouth.
“Whatever,” I responded, and plunged into my chair and plate.
“Nidusdvi,” Elisi said to Waya, as she raised her eyebrows and pointed to her mouth. Waya smiled apologetically and took a napkin to wipe away the spewed egg. “What else did you learn today, little one?”
“Ummmm, well…” Waya scrunched his nose and dangled his feet. “Oh I remember! We learned the names of peoples’ jobs! Like, ‘a-su-hi-s’ is fisherman… and ‘a-yo-s-gi’ is soldier… and ‘ka-na-ti’ is hunter!” Elisi scuttled over to the table with her plate, and her wrinkled face folded into a proud smile. I always found it equal parts charming and freaky how she seemed to have the face of someone 110 years old, but the agility of someone over half a century younger. And a mind of someone aged somewhere in between. “Oh yeah!” added Waya, “and Elisi! The word for cook is ‘a-da-s-ta-yu-hu-s.’ That’s a hard one, but I remembered it for you.” Elisi playfully tussled Waya’s hair. I dropped my fork, mid-bite, and it landed with a loud clink on my plate.
“Hey, Waya,” I started. “Did they teach you the word for President? Or CEO?” Waya sat there still. “What about Entrepreneur? Or Engineer? Or Astro-physicist? None of them?” I was looking at Waya, but Elisi knew my words were directed at her.
“That’ll be enough, Adahy,” she interrupted. Elisi’s eyes and mine locked in a bit of a standoff for a few seconds, until I finally gave up with a “Whatever,” and resumed my Fry Bread and egg consumption.
I was pretty bitter that Elisi was so intent on forcing the language into our lives ever since Waya was put in the immersion school. She never spoke it when I was little, but the Reservation’s whole language-resurrection movement seemed to give her an unrelenting agenda to turn Waya into her personally crafted Cherokee minion. I was certain it would do nothing but damage both his and my chances of having real lives outside the Reservation. This was the type of bitterness I let my grandmother see. But secretly, I was mostly angry that the whole discrepancy had caused a rift between us. Elisi had been my only caretaker, since shortly after I was born, my mother skipped town and my dad followed a few weeks later. Waya was technically my cousin; he was given to Elisi after my aunt died from a heart problem when Waya was barely one year old. But I always thought of him as my brother, and thought of Elisi as our wise and all-knowing protector. I sometimes paused my music long enough to remember scenes from my early childhood of Elisi teaching me about the shapes the stars made in the sky and how to be the quickest kid at the pond to catch a fish. But at the table that evening, I saw myself as an adult. And as I got older, I came to understand my parents’ leaving not through feelings of abandonment, but instead of almost jealousy. If I had the chance to escape, god knows I’d take it. I’d even take my kid brother with me. I would get us to the East Coast and find some entry-level job in finance where I’d work my way up like a real American. For all I knew, that’s exactly what my parents were doing.
“All done!” proclaimed Waya, I think partially attempting to break the tension.
“Okay, little one, go get ready for your adawosgv.” Waya tilted his head slightly like a perplexed Chihuahua.
“Bath, Waya,” revealed Elisi. Waya shrugged and bounced out of his seat and up the stairs. Elisi stood to clear the table. Halfway to the sink, she stopped and shut her eyes tightly.
“Ooooof,” I heard her expel.
“What is it?” I muttered, trying to maintain my surliness.
“The migraines,” Elisi replied, squinting in concentration. “They come so suddenly these days.” She stood there tense for a minute or two and then resumed her cleaning.
“You know, a doctor could actually help you with that,” I offered, hearing myself sound sarcastic, but not really meaning to be. Elisi hated all doctors and hospitals. She often reminded us that if anything were ever to happen to her that we simply take her home to bed, and let no one but her family and her Healer care for her. No matter what.
“That isn’t for me, you know that,” Elisi responded, a little louder than normal, as if trying to appear suddenly younger and more robust. “The Cat Tail I get from my Healer is all I need to keep these things at bay. I don’t need to pay all that money to have a man in a white coat give me a bottle of expensive little pills. You know, Adahy, you could even do the same. If you eat this Cat Tail like I do, you’ll see, it’ll be all the medicine you need.” I imagined a scenario of myself on the East Coast playing football with some buds, spraining an ankle or something, and when someone on the team says to call a doctor, me responding “No! No! Don’t call a doctor! Just alert the medicine man to bring his herbs!” I snickered, and heard my grandmother heave a sigh from across the room. Normally, when I wasn’t exactly polite to her, she’d remain sort of sadly calm, save her energy, and just walk away; but this particular snicker must have struck a nerve, because all the sudden, she was whipping around from her cleaning station at the counter to face me. Again, the agility. It made me jump.
“I’ve had enough of your hostility, Adahy,” she hissed. I had never heard her hiss. “This is our home, and you are poisoning it. I don’t know why you feel like you know exactly what type of life you do or don’t want to live, but this is your life now. Show some respect.” Not having a response made me unbelievably uncomfortable. I kept my gaze averted, like I was thinking about something else and couldn’t hear her. “Can’t you see that our way of life is dying? Once my generation is gone, our heritage will be gone. Unless we do something.” Her voice was growing louder. “You cannot change. Who you are. Adahy Degotoga Ridge.”
I could have chosen to apologize to Elisi, or just to sit there, or to go back up to my room, but instead, within seconds, I was bolting out the door. Anger was a much easier reaction to my wise and all-knowing protector telling me I was poisoning her life than guilt. I needed to get out of there.
The only place I ever went when I needed to get out of the house was a convenience store about a quarter-mile away. I typically got a Mountain Dew and a Slim Jim. On autopilot, my body headed right in that direction. My anxiety only worsened as I realized I didn’t have my Walkman with me. Without my music, I was forced to actually pay attention to the landscape on the way to the store. I had never noticed how many tumble weeds there were along the street. Endless tumbleweeds. It looked like the movie set of Dances with Wolves. I couldn’t believe how ridiculous it looked, like someone had strategically placed all those tumbleweeds along that road specifically to make me furious. Those tumbleweeds were like a glaring beacon of exactly what was wrong with my life on the Reservation—it was an utter exaggeration, a stereotype of itself, and I couldn’t take it. I got to the store, paid for my usual, and gulped down the Dew and Slim Jim far before I was ready to go back home. There was no way I wanted to spend the next few hours until sleep in that house, but the prospect of kicking around that tumble weed-infested neighborhood made me nauseated. There was nothing to do but stay in the convenience store. So for the next two hours, that’s what I did. I paid for a Playboy and an accumulative nine or ten other Slim Jims. I planted myself in the rearmost left corner of the store, and the dark-skinned middle-aged man at the counter just let me stay there as I looked at every photo in that September 2002 issue and then went back and read the articles. I memorized the chip labels on the display in front of me. That place didn’t sell Sour Cream & Onion flavor, which I thought was kind of weird.
When it had been dark for about half an hour, I decided that Waya would be long asleep and Elisi would be reading in her room. I tossed my Playboy and gave the old guy at the counter a polite smile as I exited the store. He depressed me almost as much as the tumbleweeds, which luckily, since it was dark now, were harder to see on my way back home.
Like usual, I woke up the next morning to the blaring three-tone beep of my alarm clock. Head still buried under the quilt, I thrust out my arm to sloppily smack the Off button. I yanked myself out of bed, and grabbed a Run DMC t-shirt and yesterday’s jeans off the floor. Eyes still half shut, I put them on and trudged to the bathroom to brush my teeth. While scrubbing my canines, I noticed the thunderous gurgles in my stomach and wondered if Elisi had Pop-Tarts downstairs. I didn’t hear any sizzling of bacon, so I figured it was a toaster kind of morning. I swished and spit. Waya didn’t seem to be noisily bouncing around downstairs, and I wondered if he was still sleeping. I peeked inside his room and saw that he was, which was highly abnormal. As I headed down the stairs and into the kitchen, I started to ask, “Hey, Elisi? Is Waya sick or something? He’s still sleeping in his…” But I didn’t get to finish, because suddenly I saw her—Elisi with a frying pan lying limp on the linoleum. I froze. “Elisi?” I approached her like a Zombie. “Oh my god, Elisi?” I said much louder. Kneeling down close to her, I saw that she was definitely still breathing. On impulse, I snapped up to standing, grabbed the nozzle from the sink, and sprayed a gust of water directly at her head. She stirred, and her bleary eyes opened slightly. I gasped for air in relief, and knelt back down beside her. I began to take hold of her tiny frame, now dripping from the neck down, so I could carry her up to bed like she’d always instructed. “Jesus, Elisi, what happened?” I asked her, my voice quivering. “Do you need something?”
“Ga-na-ga-ti,” she struggled to murmur.
“What?” I panicked.
“Ga-na-ga-ti,” she choked out again.
“Elisi,” I said slowly, but with anxiety in my voice. “I can’t understand you. I need you to speak English.”
“Ga-na-ga-ti,” she repeated. I started sweating.
“Elisi,” I begged. Her upper body was still propped up against my arm. “I can’t help you if you don’t speak English. Please. What are you saying?” She looked up at me with pleading in her eyes. “Fuck,” I whispered to myself, flustered. In an instant, I realized I knew someone very close by who could help. I carefully lay my grandmother back on the kitchen floor, and raced up the stairs. I flew open the door to Waya’s room.
“Waya!” I said energetically, masking my nerves. I started shaking him awake. “Hey, Waya, can you help me with some Cherokee words right now?” Waya rubbed his eyes, and nodded sleepily. I scooped him up and rushed him down to our grandmother.
“Why is Elisi on the floor?” he asked.
“Oh, she just had a little slip,” I responded quickly. “Now, Waya, can you please tell me what the word she’s saying means?” I stared down into Elisi’s half-open eyes.
“What do you need Elisi?” I cued.
“Ga-na-ga-ti,” she whispered. She was fading fast. I looked to Waya in agitation.
“Oh yeah, we learned that word yesterday!” Waya exclaimed. “Ganagati means doctor. And dentist is didanvtesgi. But they don’t sound the same. So it’s hard to remember.”
“Waya,” I looked at him right in the eyes. “Are you sure that word means doctor?” Waya nodded his head wildly up and down.
“And dentist is didanvtesgi,” he assured.
“Okay, thanks kid,” I said, reaching for the phone. “Can you go upstairs and play in your room now? You don’t have to go to school today.”
“Why?” he squealed.
“Holiday,” I answered. “Now go ahead.” Waya scurried up to his room as my right thumb quickly dialed the numbers 9-1-1.
I had never been in an ambulance before. Neither had Waya, obviously, and since he didn’t really understand what was going on, he found it pretty exciting. Elisi was rushed to the Talehquah City Hospital outside the Reservation. I guess she got scared and figured her body needed something more than what me, Waya and her Healer could give her. After she was taken into the ER, Waya and I sat for a long time playing Go Fish in the waiting room until a white-coated man with thick-rimmed glasses found us and said that Elisi had a massive stroke. He said that there wasn’t much they could do for her, but that we could see her now.
“Come on, kid,” I heard myself mutter to Waya. I piggy-backed him down the hall to Elisi’s little room. She was sleeping, and hooked up to an irritating machine that beeped, but I still held her hand as Waya sang her some Cherokee songs he’d learned in music class at school. I figured she’d like that. Sometimes, I swore I could even see her face fold into that familiar smile at the end of a refrain.
We spent that night at the hospital. I put two chairs together, so Waya could have his own makeshift bed, and I got a few hours of sleep myself propped up against the bookshelf in the waiting room. Surprisingly, I didn’t think even once about the fact that my music was still left on Pause, sitting in my room.
Elisi passed away sometime early the next morning. The same guy in thick-rimmed glasses found us sleeping in the waiting room. He wasn’t even wearing his white coat yet when he woke us up to say she “didn’t make it.” I sat there sort of catatonic, because I was afraid that if I moved, my first action would be to strangle the doctor. “Don’t worry, guys,” he continued. “We’ll find someone else in your family to come take care of things.”
Waya crawled up on my lap and asked what was going on, if Elisi was dead.
“Yeah, kid,” I told him in a whisper. “Wanna leave?” He delicately nodded his head. I piggy-backed him right passed the doctor’s face and down the stark white hallway. Breathing heavily, I set him down on the curb at the taxi dispatch and waited for the next cab to take us home. It was a very short twenty-minute ride. When we entered the house, we found the frying pan still lying upside-down on the floor. I put it in the sink, and realized that the only way that pan would ever end up clean, was if I cleaned it myself. I looked at the clock on the microwave. 8:12am. What on Earth were we going to do with the rest of what would be an undoubtedly endless day?
“Hey, Waya,” I said. “Do you wanna go to school today?” He looked up at me with big, dependent brown eyes and nodded yes. “Well, get your backpack, kid.” Waya retrieved his backpack from the downstairs closet and took my hand. I turned off the lights in the kitchen, and we left the house. The morning was quiet, other than the noise Waya was making as he dragged his tiny feet along the blacktop; I felt like I’d never heard a lonelier sound.
“So kid,” I started, after about a minute of walking, “how do you say ‘good morning’ in Cherokee?” He paused for a moment, before I saw a bit of that well-known bounce return to his step.
“O-s-da sunalei,” he said, gesturing a sweeping wave. I nodded, impressed.
“Cool,” I said. Waya started to grin. “How do you say… ‘I’m tired?’”
“Da gi yo `we ga.”
“Oh wow, you’re good,” I teased. He elbowed me.
“What about… ‘I love you?’”
“Ummm, I don’t think I know that one.”
“You don’t know that one?!” I exclaimed, allowing myself some of my usual sarcasm.
“Uh-uh.”
“Oh well, you better ask your teacher when you get to school, okay?” I tussled Waya’s hair.
“Okay,” he promised.
“Good.”
Hand in hand, we walked down the street towards the Cherokee immersion school only a quarter-mile away.
