Ross, Gyasi. How to Say I Love You in Indian. Cut Bank Creek Press: Montana. 2013.

Introduction

​"Where the warriors set up war camps far away from the village so

that the carnage never

Touches the family"

-From the poem Niankhkhnum by Gyasi Rossi in How to Say I Love You in Indian.

Omnia vincit armor, love conquers all, declared the poet, Virgil.  In her foreword to Gyasi Ross’ book How to Say I Love You in Indian author Winona Duke begins the narrative by praising love as a broader ideal, one that heals and nurtures communities in Indian Country still reeling from centuries of economic and social devastation in the aftermath of European conquest and later a harsh American Government Indian policy.  “I love the idea of a love which is forgiving, allows for redemption, and calls us to love with greater depth – our people, our companion, our children, and our earth,” Duke writes, paving the way for Ross to publish his series of very personal stories from youth, to adolescence, to adulthood that illuminate on and magnify both the subtle and not-so-subtle abiding love permeating the Indian reservations where he has lived.

Summing up, Ross acknowledges the effects of structural issues present in many reservations, emphasizing the importance of the family unit and adult community members in protecting and acting as role models for young people on a continual basis to mitigate the longstanding and long-lasting effects of “economic, political, and educational neglect." His short book is a labor of love itself, where Ross takes great care to lead the reader to the place where his heart was as a child, when a stranger in his community acted as a unique type of surrogate father teaching him sports, or when reflecting today on the extraordinary strength two adult male friends displayed after being assaulted and maimed in a hate-crime incident, vowing to remain coupled and persevere, setting an example for their community and children alike.

“Native people know desperately clinging to life better than anybody else.” -Gyasi Ross

How to Say I Love You in Indian is a collection of short stories, essays, poems, and one play that serve as backdrops for the struggles of children and adults in Indian Country today.  Ross grew up in the Blackfoot Nation and has spent a considerable amount of time on reservations for the Suquamish, Puyallup, Landing and Nisqually Tribes. In his introduction Ross discusses Indian men and women noting stereotypes about fatherlessness and engaging a theme he will return to throughout his book, the myth among Indians that “there are no good Native men.” He admonishes Indian women to “demand good and chivalrous treatment. ‘My love doesn’t have conditions, but it does have expectations.’” He notes the strain that lack of money puts on relationships in Indian communities and counters that love is the key ingredient in surviving these challenges.  “The past 500 years does not define us; how we move forward from it will.”

​ In a brief interlude in the form of a one-page poem called Opium Rossi preludes his first chapter with an anecdote about being swept away to his childhood when he encounters a discriminating grandmother in the grocery.  It’s an excellent segue into the first chapter “Warbonnet” which recounts his experience with his best friend from fifth grade to young adulthood.  The Warbonnet is the reservation bar where Gyasi’s best friend Arlen takes it upon himself to drive his alcoholic mother to and from each night, waiting there in the car, rather than at home for unwelcome news of a driving accident.  Arlen is no ordinary best friend, he is the star basketball player on the school team, extremely popular, and highly intelligent, and exhibits superhuman strength caring for his mother and siblings at such a young age.  His mother is popular with his friends and in the community but is prone to alcoholism and without a father in the house, Arlen feels a strong responsibility to make sure she gets home safely.  He learns to drive early in life, wowing his friends at school. One night while sleeping in the car in the parking lot at the Warbonnet, the boys are woken up by an older homeless Indian man living as a town drunk on the reservation.  At first, he annoys them, but as he continues to engage with the boys, Wishy, as he calls himself, begins to open up about his own love of basketball, and the three of them form a fast bond. Wishy dies when Arlen is in high school, but before then he had revealed his own success with youth basketball and imparted his considerable talent and knowledge to Arlen, making him an even better player.  Before he dies, Wishy is seen by Arlen’s friends standing outside the gymnasium door on game nights all through their formative years, and this represents for Ross a show of love from an unexpected person, of the kind that instills in young people confidence as they grow into young adulthood.  Wishy encouraged Arlen to be proud of his long braids when other, distant teams came to play the Indian team and to ignore the “primitive cheering sections” calling him “Chief, or [doing] the weird Atlanta Brave “War Whoop” thing.” Arlen’s mother sobered up entirely in his teenage years and Ross speculates that Wishy would have been proud to know Arlen never had to drive her to the Warbonnet again.

​ A play by Ross acts as an interlude before the next short story.  In “Stew”, in three short acts, a small reservation is taken with an old woman’s “Fishhead Stew” which she carefully crafts every week for the local farmer’s market.  The market is held across the street from the police station, and for years the rotating crew of officers have been suspicious about the stew.  Its popularity is unrivaled and one intrepid officer, Matthew, is determined to find out what is in the stew that makes even schoolchildren come to the market for a bowl.  Suspicious at first that it might be laced with drugs, in act two he spends many months ingratiating himself with the old woman finally to be invited over to watch her cook a batch of Fishhead Stew.  Coming up on her house in the third act, he sees her crying softly over the large pot while she laments the changing times.  Her stew is a labor of love, and she says, “We make do with nothing and make it taste perfect, make it taste like love.  I love those kids so much and want them to understand how beautiful our ways of life are.” (61) Ross dedicates the play to “every single Native woman who makes a miracle happen and spices up their recipes with love, tears, and a prayer.” (61) Matthews notices after a long while that the stew is bringing the community and children together and as the play closes reflects on the ancestral images this conjures up for him.

After “Stew” the reader is presented with another poem, this one longer than “Opium,” with seven chapters.  “Cradleboard: The Ballad of Dustin and Elaine” is a poem about unrequited love and the friendship between two people and the sense of place in the community that grows out of it.  Young Elaine, only part Indian and hopelessly in love with Dustin introduces him to her friend Grace.  Grace and Dustin eventually marry and raise teenage children, while Elaine, rootless, her “dreams deferred” as she dates various men, travels the country, and lives an unencumbered life, realizes in her thirties that her romantic notion of marrying a handsome Indian man and raising children is still with her.  Sadly, though, she is barren.  In the last chapter of the poem, she reaches out to Grace for permission to use Dustin’s sperm to have a child of her own, and they all agree.  The family bonds strengthen, and Dustin ends with a soliloquy to Elaine exclaiming proudly that she is a,

​

“Single mother graceful

With elegance

Maternal spirit

Intelligence

That allows [her] to raise [her] teenage son alone

He’s grown up calling me ‘uncle.’”

The image of Elaine with her baby in a cradleboard is a powerful one for Dustin, cementing in one way his faith in and contribution to his Tribe.

​ The next entry in the collection is “Sutro”, the title referring to a particular type of electronic filter young people use to improve the lighting of their personal photographs (selfies) posted online to social media. “Sutro” is one of the more powerful narrative entries in the collection.  It recounts the story of Delilah Abernathy, a Kootenai Indian woman born and raised in the non-Native community of Nashville, Tennessee.  “She was a cosmopolitan-ass, hunter/gatherer, Indigenous bush woman of the new millennium,” writes Gyasi, “She was stunning.” But at the age of twenty-two, while fiercely independent, she was also not well grounded, having little discipline or showing much appetite for ambition in her work life.  She was obsessed with social media and taking a myriad of photographs of herself, sharing them online with a huge following of, mostly, men, but also some women.  One woman in particular, Lisa, found Delilah and her album of photographs while browsing hashtags on Twitter one afternoon, and they formed an instant, fast bond over conversations about pow-wows and Native spirituality. 

Lisa stands in sharp contrast to Delilah, however, their close Internet-based friendship notwithstanding.  Lisa was also Kootenai, born and raised on the Flathead reservation, and refused “to take ‘selfies’ because [her] family believed that photographs take a piece of your soul.  Lisa didn’t necessarily believe this herself, but she respected her family’s belief enough that she wouldn’t do it.” Lisa is also a college graduate and a full-time employee of the tribal government, raising a family and living a dutiful, responsible life.  Lisa is keen on seeing Delilah settle down in a traditional relationship and works to introduce her to a handsome Native man named Leon, called “The Rock” on the reservation for his chiseled looks.  He has been heartbroken after his girlfriend’s baby turned out to be another man’s child.  He is crushed and confused and writes the title poem “How to Say I Love You in Indian: In Three Parts” to lament the betrayal. 

​

“We are a beautifully flawed race of untrusting peopleExpectation of disappointment and scars of betrayal litters the tissuearound our hearts,” he writes, and“Too many Indian kids suffer from love that’s too convenient.”

​

He finishes the poem of heartbreak listing out the words “I love you” in a myriad of Native languages.  Lisa quickly realized he was not ready for a relationship with Delilah, who lived so far from the reservation, and eventually he loses interest in Delilah as well.

​ One day, after Delilah has lost a series of jobs, she is at the unemployment office chatting with Lisa and taking selfies in front of the restroom mirror and suddenly has a stroke.  After a bright flash of light in the mirror, the narrative cuts away to Lisa a year later, who hadn’t heard from Delilah since before her stroke.  Unaware of the event at the unemployment office, she receives a text from Delilah, detailing her experience.  There are no more selfies or hashtags for Lisa to watch on social media, but she does receive one final picture of Delilah in the mail. “The left half of her face was sagging badly.  But she was finally smiling, not looking fierce at all.”

The penultimate entry in the book is a short story in three acts.  Gyasi is immensely proud to have had “Thank You, Lydia (A True Story)” published in the online news magazine, Gawker.com.  The story recounts Gyasi and his childhood friends’ love for one beautiful girl, particularly Lydia.  Lydia had inspired Gyasi to be affable, “to be comfortable in [his] own skin” and led him to find out that he “was a pretty decent basketball player and could actually be funny if [he] didn’t tense up too much.” One night when Gyasi was about ten years old, he was spending time together with friends when one suggested they all sneak out and meet a girl in her house for sex.  They sneak into Lydia’s house unnoticed, one by one, and have sex with her.  Gyasi was horrified, he “couldn’t participate, even though it was disgustingly erotic.” On reflection he realized that Lydia wasn’t guarded, and that nobody ever knew about that night with her, notably her parents or other family members.  In the postscript Gyasi notes this experience was the catalyst for writing and collecting stories about love in his communities.  “Reckoning with the experience taught me that our young folks – girls and boys – need demonstrations of healthy love, not scalding judgement and disengagement …Lydia should have been protected. My friends and I should have been protected.  Strong Native love should protect our young ones from these sorts of experiences.”

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Conclusion

​ The closing poem “Niankhkhnum” is dedicated to “…James, Jeremy, and Jake and the Suquamish Tribe – for showing the power a community can hold to make its members feel safe and wanted.” It recounts the horrible beating and maiming of two of Gyasi’s close male friends for their public display of affection on the reservation. 

“Even though they don’t understand us

Our people do understand loving through pain

Loving to the point where you should give it up

Where the love seems to be in vain.”

​

Gyasi reflects on these stories of love and shared experiences to bring together a thought-provoking reflection on Indian Country today and offering an insightful opinion about the role of strong family bonds and binding ties of friendship in healing and lifting Native communities.