The Graveyard at the End of the Lane
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.
While there are certainly racist overtones here, I am more struck by the pervasive sense of unprocessed guilt this narrative speaks to. The closer one looks, the more clearly one is able to discern the heap of unmetabolized grief that permeates the soil of the American continent, both North and South, piling up like bison skulls.
Martín Prechtel says that the more unmetabolized grief a person or culture is sitting on, the more manic, defensive, and angry they become. Soon, this grief becomes the primary force animating their personality and behaviors. On a cultural level, unprocessed grief becomes the fuel that drives fascism and other acts of collective violence–a rapidly encroaching reality for many of us in the good ol’ US of A.
Let me ask: what are ghosts if not the spirits of unmetabolized grief and loss emerging from the land itself, winding their way into the unconscious of a people and a place? Might not the “irrational” hold some key to explaining incomprehensible acts of violence that go far beyond rationality themselves? What is possession if not this?
It's been said before, that the whole of America is an Indian burial ground. This land is thick with ghosts. This shouldn’t be news to anyone.
But here’s the rub: not all of them are from here.
My haphazard stumbling across this hallowed ground exemplifies the ways in which I find myself relating to the place I now live, and the places I have always lived: Blind. Uninformed. Clumsy. Silent. Shocked. Like most people I know who are interested in changing this dynamic, I am grasping for some clear story that might illuminate what actually happened here.
Perhaps you’re one of the rare few who have gone the many extra miles to forge a deep relationship to the land where you, and many people before you, call home. Perhaps you’ve found a miraculous way of dealing with the buried and inherited wounds of living on such a continent, in such a time. Perhaps you’ve taken the time to build meaningful connections to the tribal communities around you. Perhaps you hail from one yourself. Sadly, I can’t say as much.
But I am beginning to get more curious about what it actually means to be authentically connected to a place that by all rights might not be “mine,” a place that I ended up in due to a cascade of what can only be a series of heartbreaking stories and difficult decisions that I am not fully aware of. I am trying to establish a connection to place that goes beyond whatever nice feelings I might have about the pretty trees and waterways that adorn it.
I’ve gone down the road of “appreciating nature” about as far as I can, and now I am being plainly confronted with what lies at the end of it.
All the tobacco and sage in the world wouldn't be enough to fix this problem. There is no “land-acknowledgement” long or heartfelt enough to heal this wound, no prayer or animistic ritual to make it all better. Your guess is as good as mine as to how to move forward.
But this much I know: being connected to the land means being connected to death.
Stories of dispossession and loss spring forth from this earth, no matter where your ancestors hail from. Tales of death and departures are carried over lands and across oceans, never quite knowing how to land into the new soil they are nonconsensually planted in. How do the stories of my ancestors fleeing their homelands commingle, dine, and dance with the stories of the people in the graveyard who lost their own?
In stumbling upon this Native cemetery, I was equally confronted with my lack of understanding for what happened to the people here, just as much as I was with what happened to my people there.
I don’t have any answers, and I’m beginning to think that not many people do. I’m currently trudging my way through a series of unfolding conversations between Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson, taking place in a course called Never Land/Sever Land.
They don’t pretend to have the answers either. But we’re unearthing some damn good questions. I’ll share a few with you now. Perhaps they will serve you like they are serving me, like a small lamp in this dark time of the year:
Is the search for “ancestors” a part of our relationship to them? Do they respond to our very searching? What are we communicating to the dead by way of our search?
Are the dead disbelieving in us, just as much as we are disbelieving in them?
Does it matter if we “believe” in the relevancyof our ancestors or not?
Is striving and longing mutual between the living and the dead?
What is the function of “indigeneity?” Who has the right to “re-indigenize?” And is such a thing even possible, ethical, or valid?
Is it possible that one’s “indigenous soul,” as Prechtel calls it, can finally be eclipsed, worn out, and abandoned?
What changes when we consider that most European ancestral departures were not voluntary, happy, or good?
How do we square ancient mythologies of movement and wandering with the current dilemma of white, Euro-American people?
If there is reciprocity between the living and the dead, what are the consequences of losing contact with and neglecting them?
Is the very search, or longing for ancestry becoming a tradition in itself? Can dislocation become a part of one’s identity just as much location?
What roles do the dead play in our current conversations and ideas around identity and culture?
What happens when a guest overstays, but does not, or cannot leave?
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