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"Hey what're you doing?" asked my cousin, Bonnie as I stood over the kitchen sink half undressed and wearing plastic gloves.

 

"Lightening my hair. It comes out a nice shade of red," I told her. She didn't think it was a good idea and when she got a whiff of the L'Oreale I had bought to do the job (To lighten my very dark brown hair you have to use permanent stuff besides I'm not burning my scalp or having dye come off all over my clothes.) she was sure I was headed for serious trouble.

 

To tell the truth, I have never been in trouble for dying my hair or lightening it and I have done it twice before. The first time was when my mother was very sick. She had breast cancer and eventually it took over her whole body.

 

I was fourteen and facing becoming an orphan. My dad as far as I know is still alive, but he's a stinking drunk and I want nothing to do with him. I have his last name, but it is not worth fifty dollars to change it. My mom said that my dad was educated. He was a business man selling stoves and bottle gas for cooking. He must have gotten bored or had one drink too many. I know that by the time I was four, my mom had an order of protection against my dad and by the time I was six we were in Rosebud where my mom had a job for the IHS. That's Indian Health Service. My mom was a nurse. My grandmother with whom I'll be living for another six days repairs watches at a place in the mall.

 

Well there was my mom lying in bed and my half sister, Koleen and I had just gotten the news she wasn't getting any better. One of my mom's colleagues told us. I was too tired to cry at that point. Some people say I was angry but I didn't feel angry. I did sneak out to the drug store and get the L'Oreale and bleach my hair. My mom wouldn't ever let me do that when she was well, but she wasn't ever going to be well again so why not. I showed up at the hospital with flaming red hair and the nurses and aides all said how cute it looked. My mom was too sick to care. That expletive deleted.

 

My mom faded out like a bad TV program and we buried her right in Rosebud. My mom's second husband's family wanted Koleen. They lived up in Lame Deer, the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. My dad's peopel were in Browning, but I wasn't going back there and they didn't really want me in Lame Deer since I was not their grand kid. They took Koleen and left me with a foster family where the mother worked at the same hospital as my mom which wasn't awful. It wasn't great. I hung in there.

 

I dyed my hair a second time for mom's funeral. Mom took a long time to die and my hair grew out at the roots and I dyed it a second time. People said: "That looks so good Kelli." After that I didn't dye my hair any more, but I still have big red streaks and blotches from when my mother died. It's been nearly a year. I guess the dye was really permanent.

 

So here I am dying my hair again so I look cute. Go figure. Do you all want to know how I got my I-pod. The answer is life insurance. We had some left over after we buried my mom soI bought an I-pod. Don't get one. They eat batteries. That expeltive deleteds.

 

Do you want to know about my grandmother? She's my mother's mother and she is the soul of sadness. She lost two of her four children and might as well have lost a third. Mom is dead and has been for nearly a year. Sheryl, Koleen's mom is in jail on drug charges. Daryl has just plain run off. That leaves Colby who is married and has four children and lives in Lame Deer. This is the Cheyenne side of the family in case you are curious. I'm an Indian girl though the politically correct and fashionable word is Native American. I say Indian though or Cheyenne. My dad is Blackfoot.

 

I've got relatives all over the west and no room at the Inn. It's bad enough for me to go east. It's bad enough for me to try living among strangers since family isn't working. I'm just going to be one more lost kid and I've got to do what I can to stop that. I'm too tired to cry. I think it's better to look cute. I even have batteries for the I-pod this time around and thanks Vijaya Naipul. I don't care how weird your house mates are as long as I can make some school friends, finish high school, and maybe go to college.

 

Deep down this is what mom would have wanted and what grandma also wants. That's why grandma is letting me come to Ithaca. She said it's a lot like the boarding schools people used to complain about. She never complained. She went to one and liked it. She learned to read and write and do a bit more and she learned a trade. One of her daughters even became a nurse and then she up and died and left her with more grandkids to raise. There's no moral in a story like that, is there?

 

Kelli Ann Jackson

Apt #11

Thunderbird Heights Apartment Complex

Missoula, Montana

Point Two-Five

 

I had my first day at Ithaca High School today. I think the Rose Among Thorns tutors got me to run so scaird, that it wasn't half as hard as I imagined. I went to the board and did a proof in Math 2 and answered several questions. I am working on a map of Africa for Global Studies Nonwestern Civilizations, and I also have to learn to conjugate a new class of irregular French verbs. The kids are nice enough. Isabella and Basia, the other female high school students are both a year older than I am and Basia is one year ahead in most subjects so that really makes her two years ahead of me. Basia just got a head start in private schools in New Jersey. Isabella works hard and is also smart, in an odd sort of way. She is very good at math, but has gotten lots of writing help from Lay-Lay, as we call Leonie, the freshperson humanities tutor.

 

When I got home from school today, our first shipment of Renard Dupree fruit was here. Tareisia got me a box cutter and we unpacked the honeybell oranges, blood oranges, cara-cara oranges, and clementines. Naomi who is staying here so she can be with her boyfriend, Sherman who sometimes gets called vermin (Yes Lay-Lay, I know that is passive voice), wants to make orange flavored beets. I'm not sure I like beets. Naomi insists that roast beets are a delicacy and orange flavored ones are even better.

 

Naama wants to make orange puff cake and tonight, Basia had to grate the zest off half a dozen cara-cara oranges. Later we cut up the denuded oranges which were all white on the outside since Basia had grated off their orange skins leaving only the white rind, and ate them for a snack.

 

I just got done doing homework plus the extra studying that the tutors said is necessary to keep up and look sharp. I know you will get tired of hearing it, but no one is going to call me a dumb Indian. Yes, those two words went together in Missoula like peanut butter and jelly and I don't mean fancy fruit preserves.

 

Speaking of fruit preserves, our breakfasts are something else. The college students do not have school again until the middle of January so they could sleep all day. Nothing would stop them. Well we stop them. They take turns getting up to eat with us. Aunt Naama is always there. She put up this awful embarassing sign in the kitchen. Actually, she had Isabella make it. The sign says. "Did you take your meds today?" It's intended for Codi who hates taking his ADHD meds. Isabella always takes hers because she says it's the only way she can get through school. Naama says Isabella is very mature. I'm not sure why the whole sign thing rubs me the wrong way.

 

I guess I've just never met people who believe in "meds" before. Tareisia tonight gave us all the story of how her mother found the right medication or rather the doctors found it for her. It was one of the new atypical antipsychotics. This got rid of Tareisia's mother's schizophrenia and let her and her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother all live normal lives. Tareisia also wondered why the medications weren't working for Maxine Chung. She wondered if on Maxine's world they weren't as advanced with antipsychotics or had forgotten how to make a lot of them. Maxine's world is the same one that has the Serious Gate Ship in it where the people are starving to death but they're not really starving to death yet. They're just scaird of it. I guess I'd be scaird of it too, but I'd wait until there was nothing to eat before I decided I was really starving. One thing I have learned is that if you think things expletive deleted, they can always get worse.

 

Kelli Ann Jackson

Rose Among Thorns #2

411 Hillview Place

Ithaca, New York 14850

Point Two-Five

 

Dear LayLay,

 

You write so well. I wish I could write as well as you about all sorts of delicate emotions. Me, I just came to Ithaca to get an education. I'd like to find myself all there at the end of the day. I don't want to be a soda bottle or anything like that. People don't recycle soda bottles back in Montana. They throw them away. They leave them to rot like cattle carcasses. Sometimes when I was young and we lived in Lame Deer, we used to find dead cows. They were all bones. You could make things out of bone, jewelry. I always said I wanted to learn. Sometimes people from back East thing a cow's skull is beautiful. To me it just looks sad and dead.

 

Well, I'm not ending up a cow's skull or any body's beads. That's for sure. I came to Ithaca to get an education. That I can keep up surprises me. That it takes work doesn't bother me because I know the kinds of kids who don't work and that's not going to be me. Case closed. No delicate emotions there.

 

The only time I felt delicate emotions is when you and Lindsay, the art major, took me to the top of Bradley Hall on the Ag Quad, thirty-five stories up. I guess, coming from out west, I haven't been in very many tall buildings I got to see all of Cornell which was one big city devoted to learning. That impressed me, but I could also look down and see Ithaca, High which is my school where lots of kids take French and where people talk about getting in to good schools.

 

I'm scaird about leaving all this in the summer to go learn Cheyenne which is my mother's people's native tongue but in a way it's a good thing. I mean everyone says you have to care about the good parts of where you come from, and I'm estranged from my good parts. Fine...they've never lived on a rez. They should try it some time. It's disgusting.

 

Kelli Ann Jackson

Ithaca, High School

1616 N. Cayuga St.

Ithaca, New York 14850

Point Two-Five

 

Dear Lydia,

You finally got me to write to the list. It seems there's bigots all over so I hope you're not one of them. My name is Kelli Ann Jackson and I am a Natiave American which is the politically correct word for Indian. I am currently spending the summer in Lame Deer, Montana on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. My mother was Cheyenne and my father was and still is Blackfoot. I don't have anything to do with him because he is an alcoholic and a bum. There I said it, but don't you ever say it.

The Europeans nearly destroyed my people about a hundred and twenty five years ago (The year is 2007 where I am). They not only killed most of us off with starvation and disease but they also broke our culture or maybe breaking us physically did that. I don't know. All I know is I have an English name and speak English as my first language due to cultural genocide. That's a scarey thought. Saying it the way I said it  makes it bloodless and cold.

This summer I am in Lame Deer in the Far West to learn Cheyenne. My teacher is from a world where my people on both sides of my family survived. My teacher's name is Kokqi and she is my own age, but she puts on airs and acts very snobby and makes us honor her. "If you want to speak the mother tongue, you need to recover your manners," she says and you can say that in Cheyenne. You can say anything in Cheyenne just like any other language. That I suppose is the interesting part. My classes are not about old timey stuff at all. We even have to conjugate verbs just like in French.

By the way there are days when I think Kokqi is totally looney toons and days when she makes perfect sense, kind of like this telegraph list. Hey kids at New York Secondary, do you know they used to send Indians to boarding school whether they liked it or not and it was not a posh place in New York City. Get that!

Kelli Ann Jackson

#8 Rural Route #5

Lame Deer, Montana 59043

Point Two-Five

 

Dear Mr. Mason,

I wasn't referring to Lydia. I was warning her. You read about that boy who insulted the black girl from New York Secondary in the drug store didn't you? Well the telegraph doesn't need more like him. Some one ought to wash out that Phineas Whitman's mouth with soap.

As for Kokqi, were' the same age. She's putting on airs.  I also hate Lame Deer. It's so poor and empty and there's nothing to do so I study very hard. I'm going to use this language I can't use to talk to any body when I get back to school. I don't think there's anything written in Cheyenne, not in this world anyway. I could ask Kokqi. It's a written language in her world. I wonder what alphabet they use.

Kelli Ann Jackson

#8 Rural Route #5

Lame Deer, Montana 59043

Point Two-Five