Chains of the Past

The Chains That Bind Me

In June of 1967 I was released from highschool. My twelve-year mandatory sentence was over. Like a dog unchained from a tree, the frayed collor that I had worn was greatfuly unbuckled by the California State School Board. I was free at last, or lest it seemed as so.
Years earlier my father had told me how lucky I was because the goverment could no longer snatch children from their families and send them to schools in different states. Such a thing had happened to my grandmother, which had caused a sadness in my great-grandermother's heart that never healed. My great-grandmother had been lucky too, she was blind, so the goverment didn't want her. My two grandmothers didn't see eye-to-eye on most things.
All these things were passed on to me. Having two belief systems living side-by-side is not an easy thing to deal with. It had twisted my father's heart so that he drank himself to death when I was in the sixth grade. How do you make sense out of other people's nonsense?
"Pay attention Chicken", my dad would say, "It's all about how you look at things". Now I know why so many Native people's last names include the word "look", or "looking". Names that begin or end with the word "heart" have also been passed down. Some things never change. I have spent many years trying to find some kind of balance between what my eyes see, and what my heart feels.
I learned many things at school, but it was hard to distinguish what was true. My dad had discribed stories about how the U.S. Army had freed thousands of people from "Concentration camps" in Europe near the end of World War II., and how millions of good people had died because they differed in what they believed. He said that World Was II. was about the U.S. Goverment stopping other countries from doing bad things. Then he told me how forty miles away in Susanville, the Goverment had imprisoned all the Japanese people that lived along the West Coast in what was called, "Internment Camps". I ask him, "What's the difference between "Concentration Camps" and "Internment Camps?" He told me to look it up in the dictionary.
At school things were either right or wrong. Books held all the answers in black and white. "If you read it in a book, it must be the truth." My dad would say this very seriously, then he would wink and hold his hands out with one palm up and the other down, then he would rotate them back and forth several times. That hand gesture would drive me crazy for many years. I hated the fact, he would never give me a straight answer.
My dad was different, guess that's why my mother loved him so. She would always say she, "she worshipped the ground he walked on.", which I thought strange because she was a Christen. It was my father who held ground sacred.
We would sit at the kitchen table and my mother would tell me different Bible stories while she fixed dinner. My dad would say, "Now chicken, pay attention." Later he would tell me different stories, stories his grandmother had told him. He belived all things had a voice and could talk when they wanted to, one just had to learn how to listen. It was all very confusing.
At school I was taught to be ashamed of my father. He was a crazy drunken Indian, but he held my hand, and brought me to the doorway of my own understanding to the best of his ability. I can see him in my minds-eye turning with his hands out to the four directions saying, "Look, but don't get a twisted heart". I didn't have a clue as to what he meant at the time.