Respond to one or two of the questions below in one to two paragraphs implementing at least one example from the Robinson or Santiago reading. Make sure your respo

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My name is Eden Robinson. My mother is Heiltsuk1 from Bella Bella, and my father is Haisla from Kitamaat Village, both small reserves on the northwest coast of British Columbia. My maternal grandmother’s family was originally from Rivers Inlet. Since both sides of my family are matri- lineal, my clan name should have come from my mother’s side and I should belong to the Eagle Clan. When I was ten years old, my father’s family decided to give my sister and me Beaver Clan names at a Settlement Feast for a Beaver Clan chief who had died a year earlier.

When a chief died, his body was embalmed in a Terrace funeral home and then he was brought back to his house, where he lay for at least three days, attended around the clock by family members, or people hired by his family, to keep him safe from harm as he rested in the living room. Community members paid respects by visiting him in his home and at his memorial. After the funeral itself, the Thank You Supper was held for peo- ple who had helped out emotionally, financially, and organizationally. After a year of planning and preparation, the family announced the date of the Settlement Feast and, finally, of the headstone moving. Modern feasts are truncated affairs lasting six hours at the most. Much of the dancing has gone, but the important dirges are sung, names are distributed and redis- tributed to clan members, and people from the community are gifted according to their status and involvement with the family. In general, headstone moving is considered an affair of the immediate family and close friends. Space in the graveyard is tight, and imposing yourself on the family’s grief is considered the height of rudeness.

You aren’t supposed to attend a feast or a potlatch without an Indian2

name, and since we were living in Kitamaat Village, my mother, though annoyed, agreed for the sake of convenience to let us become Beaver Clan. My younger sister and I received our names at the Settlement Feast. Towards the end of the evening, we were told to go and line up with other children receiving names. I mostly remember being embarrassed to stand in front of everyone and not have any idea what I was supposed to do. At the feast, one of my aunts told me that if I wanted to learn more about my name, I should go visit my grandmother, my ma-ma-oo (pronounced ma-MAH-ew).

The Sasquatch at Home

E D E N R O B I N S O N

The next day, we went to Ma-ma-oo’s house. She told my sister that her name was Sigadum’na’x, which meant Sent Back Chief Lady. A long time ago, a marriage was arranged between a high-ranking lady from up the line and a Haisla chief. They fell deeply in love. Unfortunately, his four other wives became extremely jealous and kept trying to poison her. He couldn’t divorce them because they came from powerful families and insulting them in this way would mean, at the very least, nasty feuds. So despite his feelings, he decided to send his love back to her home. He couldn’t divorce her without causing her shame, so he made her a chief. I’ve since learned two other versions of the story behind my sister’s name, but I like this one the best.

“Wow,” I said when I heard the story. “What does my name mean?” “Big lady.” “Um, what else does it mean?” Ma-ma-oo paused. “Biiiiiig lady.” I paused. Names come loaded with rights and histories. Within the

Beaver Clan, the name of The Chief of All Haislas (Jasee) is hotly contested and has started many family quarrels. My father is one of the younger sons of a high-ranking family, so my siblings and I receive noble names, but nothing that garners too much prestige and thus requires extensive feasting or that can get me into too much trouble. My name, Wiwltx°, was obtained through marriage and only given to women of noble birth, so it suggests a high rank. I was disappointed in my name, and it had nothing to do with rank: I had story envy. No heartbroken women were standing beside rivers with their long hair unbound as they sang their sadness to the world.

Unfortunately, to change my name I’d have to throw a feast. Putting up a feast is a cross between organizing a large wedding and a small confer- ence. Family politics aside, the minimum cost—if you cheap out and just invite the chiefs and gift them to witness your event—will run you $5,000. But then your name would be marred by your miserliness and people would remember long after you’d died how poorly you’d done things. A real feast starts at $10,000 and goes up very, very quickly.

My aunts also gave my mother a name not long after she’d married my father. My mother had just returned to Bella Bella from residential school in Port Alberni. Meanwhile, in the Village, my father was under pressure from his family to get married. They were worried that he, at age thirty- three, was going to be an embarrassing bachelor forever. Ma-ma-oo was trying to arrange a marriage with someone suitable. My father decided to go fishing instead.

My maternal grandmother lived in a house near the docks in Bella Bella. One day, my mother was looking out the front picture window when she saw my father coming up the gangplank. According to Gran, Mom said, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” Mom’s version is that she simply asked if Gran knew who he was. They met later that night at a jukebox

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Robinson � Sasquatch at Home 83

party held in a house. My father was a hottie and all the girls wanted to dance with him, but he only wanted to dance with my mother. They were getting along so well that they lost track of time. Back then, the air-raid siren left over from a World War II naval base would sound and mark the time when the generator was shut off. The streets went dark. Mom’s house was on the other side of the reserve. Dad offered to walk her home.

My father took my mother back to the Village after they were married. Dad’s family was upset because Mom was twelve years younger than he was. She was annoyed that they thought she was too young for him, and she expressed her opinion forcefully. My aunts gifted her with an Indian name so that she could attend the feasts in the Village. Mom’s new name was Halh.qala.ghum.ne’x, which meant Sea Monster Turning the Other Way. Although it lacks the romance of my sister’s name, I like the attitude it sug- gests and hope to inherit it.

I had been introduced to the concept of “nusa” (the traditional way of teaching Haisla nuyem, or protocols) as a child, but had never really under- stood it until my trip to Graceland with my mother. In 1997, I received £800 for winning the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. In Canadian dollars, it worked out to $2,000 after taxes and currency exchange. One of my co-workers at the time suggested I put it into Regis- tered Retirement Savings Plans or at the very least a Guaranteed Investment Certificate, but I had always wanted a black leather couch. I spent a few weeks searching for just the right one and anxiously awaited its delivery. Once it was in my apartment, it seemed monolithic. And it squeaked. And it felt sticky when the room was hot. I returned it the next day, deciding what I really wanted was a tropical vacation.

I flipped through travel magazines, trying to insert myself into the happy, sunny pictures. Overwhelmed by the choices, I phoned my mother. I asked her where she would go if she could go anywhere in the world.

“Graceland,” Mom said. “Really?” “I would go in a heartbeat.” I was impressed by her certainty. “Okay.” She laughed, and we chatted a bit longer. I spent the rest of the evening

surfing the Internet for cheap flights and a passable hotel. There were some incredible deals on flights, but the cheapest ones had multiple con- nections. Mom hated flying, especially take-offs and landings, so the fewer of those we could get away with the better. The Days Inn at Graceland promised Presley-inspired decor, a guitar-shaped pool, and a twenty- four-hour Elvis movie channel. The shoulder season rates were great, and it was right beside Graceland, so we wouldn’t have to rent a car or grab a cab to get there.

“Hey, how’d you like to spend your birthday in Graceland?” I said. There was a long silence over the phone. “Are you kidding?”

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“I just want to make sure you really want to go, because everything’s non-refundable.”

Another silence. “You’re serious.” “Yeah, we’ve got a couple of options for flights, but I think our best bet

is a connection out of Seattle.” “I don’t think I can afford that.” I explained about the Royal Society prize money and the black leather

couch and the desire to go somewhere I had never been before. “That seems like a lot of money,” she said. “Do you want to go to Graceland?” “Well, yes.” “Then let’s go.” Dad wasn’t interested in going with us, so it was just Mom and me. Dad

had his heart set on driving from Kitamaat to the hundredth anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush in Dawson City. Mom hates driving vacations, so she said she’d save her money for Graceland, which Dad said sounded like a glorified shopping trip. We drove up to Dawson that July in his denim- blue standard Ford F-150, but that is a story for another time.

Mom hadn’t travelled much, except to visit her grandchildren in Ontario and her mother in Vancouver. Three weeks before we were scheduled to leave, her fears about flying were not soothed by the infamous crash of Swissair 111 near Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia and the near-constant media coverage of the wreckage and grieving relatives. At that point, a series of hurricanes marched across the Gulf States, causing widespread damage and flooding. I had a shaky grasp of American geography, so trying to convince Mom that our plane would not be blown out of the sky was difficult.

“It’s a sign,” Mom said. “It’s not a sign.” “We aren’t meant to go.” “The tickets are non-refundable.” And then our airline pilots went on strike, which was probably why the

tickets had been dirt cheap. Another airline offered to carry its rival’s pas- sengers, but things were still iffy when Mom flew into the Vancouver air- port to meet up with me. From her pale complexion and bug-eyed expres- sion, I knew the only things that could have gotten her on that plane were her grandchildren or Graceland.

We landed in Memphis at night. The cab ride to the hotel was quiet. We were both exhausted. I think I was expecting a longer ride because the blue billboard announcing our arrival at Graceland seemed to appear abruptly. After dragging our luggage to our room, I asked if she wanted to look around or just pass out.

“I’m going to the gates,” Mom said. We passed an Elvis-themed strip mall called Graceland Plaza. We peered

in at the closed stores and then crossed the street. The manor was lit by

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floodlights. It seemed smaller than I’d been expecting. A stone wall sur- rounding it was covered in graffiti left there by fans, who were invited by a sign to use the black Sharpies provided to leave a note or signature. We took pictures of each other, and then other tourists took pictures of us, looking shell-shocked. In the morning, we went straight to the ticket counter and bought the Platinum Tour, which included all four Elvis museums and the manor.

Mom wanted to go straight to the manor. We were given audio head- sets, which would guide us through the rooms. I put my headphones on. Mom left hers hanging around her neck, ignoring the flow of traffic and irritated glances as she slowly made her way through the entrance. I turned my Walkman on and began the tour. Halfway through the first room, I realized Mom wasn’t with me. I found her staring at a white bed- room with purple furniture. I was about to explain the headphones to her when I realized she was trembling.

“This is his mother’s room,” she said. We spent a week in Memphis, and I got the immersion course in Elvis.

But there, at that moment, while Mom was telling me stories about Elvis and his mother, I was glad we were at Graceland together. You should not go there without an Elvis fan. It’s like Christmas without kids—you lose that sense of wonder. The manor wasn’t that impressive if you just looked at it as a house.

More importantly, as we walked slowly through the house and she touched the walls, I could see everything had a story, a history for her. In each story was everything she valued and loved and wanted me to remem- ber and carry with me.

This is nusa.

notes

1. The Heiltsuk Nation’s main reserve is Waglisla, BC, which is more commonly referred to as Bella Bella, the name given it by Spanish explorers. Kitamaat Vil- lage is known by its residents simply as the Village and was originally a winter camp and then a Methodist mission. It is now the main reserve for the Haisla Nation. The reserve is also referred to as C’imotsa, or Snag Beach, because of all the stumps and logs that decorate the waterfront.

2. Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, and Native Canadian are used interchange- ably in the context of this essay and most of my work.

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three books of essays, including You’re in Canada Now . . . A Memoir of Sorts (2005); four books for children; and seven edited collections. She lives in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands).

Mike O’Connor was born in Aberdeen, Washington. He studied at the University of Washington, the Universidad de las Americas, in Mexico City, and the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley. In the seventies, after working for the U.S. Forest Service, he farmed in the Dungeness-Sequim River Valley and engaged in selective logging and reforestation in the Olympic Mountains. Beginning in 1979, he worked as a journalist and editor in Taiwan, and in 1995, he returned to the U.S. He has published nine books of poetry, including Immortality (2010); a memoir, Unnecessary Talking: The Montesano Stories (2009); and translations of Chinese literature, including When I Find You Again, It Will Be in Mountains: The Selected Poems of Chia Tao (2000).

Louis Owens was born in 1948. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish descent, he grew up in Mississippi and California and worked as a forest ranger and firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. A writer as well as scholar, he is the author of the novels Wolf- song (1995); The Sharpest Sight (1995), which received the Roman Noir Award, France’s equivalent of the Edgar Award; Bone Game (1996), which received the Julian J. Rothbaum Prize; and Nightland (1996), which received the American Book Award. He was a professor of English and Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis, and the director of creative writing. He died in 2002.

Red Pine is the pen name used by Bill Porter in his translations from Chinese. As Red Pine, he has published such books as The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (2000), Diamond Sutra (2001), Poems of the Masters (2003), The Heart Sutra (2004), In Such Hard Times (2009), and Tao Te Ching (2009). Under his own name, he has published the books Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Her- mits (1993) and Zen Baggage (2008). His work in this volume of Mänoa will be published in 2014 by Copper Canyon Press in The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Robert Rice has stories and poems in numerous literary magazines, including Hay- den’s Ferry, New Letters, The North American Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Quiddity, and West Wind Review. He has also published three novels, including the highly acclaimed The Last Pendragon (1992). He lives in Montana.

Eden Robinson was born in Kitamaat, British Columbia, and is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations. She studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. Her books include a collection of short stories, Traplines (1995); two novels, Monkey Beach (2000) and Bloodsports (2006); and a book of nonfiction, The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2011). Sasquatch is about family, culture, and place and was the basis of her 2010 Henry Kreisel Lecture. Robinson is one of Canada’s first female Native writers to gain international attention.

Judith Roche is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Wisdom of the Body (2007), and co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North

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