The Threads

When constructing a self for others to scrutinize, we rely on memories, on stories, to represent our cultured selves. Memory is the repository of culture and traditions; it is these threads that weave our present selves to the past, holding together our current decisions, words, and actions. Memory anchors the agency in story. It allows for an active nostalgia that Filiapina Mestiza Terese Guinsatao-Monberg writes of (1998, 2002). Memory also allows for the art of techne, Aristotle’s dusty art of using reason to make or produce something, an art that Powell redefines as one “that sees use as a practice which connects the past to the present and future through bodies situated in particular configurations of history, culture, economics, genders, and geographies” (forthcoming 8). Memory drives native stories, and “native stories, no matter what form they take. . .,” says LeAnne Howe, “seem to pull all the elements together of the storyteller’s tribe, meaning the people, the land, and multiple characters and all their manifestations and revelations, and connect these in past, present, and future, milieus” (42). The Native memory serves as the warp threads of the past; it is the basis of the beadwork of the present. The weft thread of our present passes under, over, and through, informing our current actions and aiding our continued (re)creation of our culture and traditions, building our future beadwork designs.

When I am asked to self represent, I find memory to be most elusive – at best, memory is a construction; at worst, a distortion. Born of a generation who would actively forget the hardships they endured, my mother would never answer in any sustained or detailed ways our direct questions:

"Did grandpa speak Cherokee?"

"No, only great grandpa, well maybe a few words."

"What was grandpa like?"

"I remember there was a tornado, we were on the porch and I was scared, a little girl. He took me in his lap in the wheelchair and told me not to worry it would be all right. It’ll pass."

"Where was the tornado?"

"I can’t remember."

Then her willingness to entertain my probes would end.

Abruptly.

"Why are you asking me these questions? I don’t want to remember this. Why do you care about the past? It’s over. Forget it."

The past for Mom was something survived, buried, forgotten. My questions were invasive, nosy. We should move on. Forget. Not look back.

I liked to ride in the third seat of our rumbling station wagon, the seat in the far back that faced the rear window. Mom would say: Why do you want to see where you’ve been instead of where you’re going? She didn’t expect an answer so much as a response, my hopping over a seat to face forward to see where we were headed. Sometimes I obliged by looking out the windshield, kneeling in the far-back seat but facing the front of the car. Then I would turn slowly, doing a 180 scan of the forward view, blurred side view, then facing backward again and sinking into the seat to see where we had been. If I focused on one point, the blurred image of time and place racing past would be held still, almost discernable.

If familial memory is purposely withheld as a matter of survival, then those who have little access to elders are left to thread ourselves and self-representation from the anecdotes, documents, stray photos, and the adapted traditions we have. It means trying to bring into focus a point on the horizon when the peripheries are blurred. Memory as authenticity marker is both interpretation and distortion that at its best provides nothing more than a good read.

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