The Graveyard at the End of the Lane

Wonderings on Land, Death, and Dislocation

“To tell stories is to attend directly to the dead.” 

-Martin Shaw

There’s a Native graveyard at the end of my road. No sign. No plaque. No Google map. Just headstones, plastic pinwheels, and lichen-covered memories beneath quiet pines.

Seriously.

In my last post I wrote about how I recently moved out to the Columbia River Gorge with my partner. When we first visited this place, over six months back, we decided to explore some back roads, just to get the lay of the land. It was at the end of one of these roads that were abruptly confronted with the skinny metal fence that contains this pensive village of the dead.

I suppose I should have taken seriously the assertion that the “Indian Cemetery” road held something of consequence at the end of it. My mistake.

I know how ‘80’s horror film all of this sounds. But it's true. This isn't to say that I stumbled upon some hidden ceremonial site, complete with buffalo skulls and prayer ties. I don’t know if things like that happen any more. At least, I hope they don’t, for the sake of the people who are still practicing these ancient ways in a country where once upon a not-so-long-ago-time, such a thing could get you killed.

But stumbling would be an accurate way to describe the unceremonial manner in which I approached this place, located a frighteningly short distance from where I now call home.

I hadn’t thought about the graveyard until my first night here, half a year later.

At 3am, my partner and I awaken to the winds raging outside, unable to sleep. In my mind’s eye I see the land behind our house filled with cookfires and smoke rising from tipis. I once heard that there was a village on this site–an elevated meadow located at the confluence of a wide creek and the churning White Salmon river. An ideal place to live.

But I don’t say a word.

My partner stirs. “All I can think about are the people who used to live here,” she says.

Finally, the winds stop.

There is a reason why the trope of the “Indian burial ground” is such a deep-seeded cliche in American pop-culture. We could blame films like Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, or my personal favorite, The Shining, which some say was Kubrick’s coded statement about the genocide inflicted upon Native Americans.

It's a predictable stone in the shoe of modern America’s cultural unconscious, and rightfully so. That the desecrated graves of Native Americans would be the cause of seemingly genteel, clean cut white folks to lose their shit and commit horrendous acts of violence is both absurd and somehow completely understandable. On second glance, it is one of the most reasonable storylines I’ve ever seen emerge from Hollywood.