The Dance Boots Read Free

story taking root in my brain and in my heart and saw that the day was coming that I would continue Shirley’s task of listening and watching, remembering, and then doing my part to pass on and continue the story. When she started I was a young mother; when she finished, a grandmother.
    In the meantime, Shirley went into treatment twice; to keep her company during her second thirty days of absence, I practiced controlling my thirst and sorrow. The next year, her first year of sobriety, I began to dance. My dress, dark blue with red ribbons, was sent to me by Aunt Shirley in a dream.
    The story she told me is a multigenerational one of Indian boarding schools, homesickness and cruelty, racism, and most of all, the hopes broken and revived in the survival of an extended family. From the beginning of her story, when my grandmother was sent to a Catholic mission school in Canada, to the heyday of boarding schools in the 1910s and 1920s, through the 1930s when the Indian Reorganization Act provided money incentives for local school districts to admit Indian children, I experienced through Shirley my family’s role as participants in and witnesses to a vast experiment in the breaking of a culture through the education of its young. She would talk for an hour or so, until she had shared enough of our story to become tired and until I had absorbed enough to becomesleepless. Drained by the tale and honored with the burden, I lay awake for hours, knowing how hard it was going to be to get up in the morning to get ready for work. To pass the time, I would repeat the story to myself, silently, to the rhythm and drone of Stan’s and the girls’ snores and sleep sighs. I was learning by rote but not yet by heart.
    One morning the feeling of my littlest girl’s fine, straight hair in my hands as I braided then crossed and tied her braids in ribbons behind her ears brought to mind that she was the age my grandmother had been when she left home for boarding school, just five years old. I would be walking my own five-year-old to school; we would see each other again that same afternoon after I finished work. I began to appreciate more the struggles and tenacity of my family as well as of all Indian people, whose valuing of family and tribal culture made it possible for people like me to live with our own families and have our children experience an education that is in so many ways so different from that of our grandparents. I began to see that as Indian people our interactions with society and with each other include the specter of all that happened to those who went before us. As their schooling experiences defined too much of their lives, so that legacy continues to define much of ours. Yet without it, we disappear.
    The last time we visited Aunt Shirley at home, my dad and I, she was waiting for us and opened the screen door as soon as we got out of the truck in front of her trailer. She stood in the doorway, waving and smiling while we walked over the boards laid over the muddy yard and up the stairs to the vestibule outside the kitchen.
    â€œBuster! Artense! Come in; biindigen! Come on in!”
    Above the reddened dryness of her high, high cheekbones, stars rose in delight from the dark, dark depths of her eyes and danced. “Boozhoo, boozhoo! N’madabin; have a chair!”
    Her appearance was not shocking: she was thin, and a little pale,like she’d been up all night. And she acted the same, not as though she was dying, which she was, and which was the reason for our visit. This might not have been real. She might have only been dieting, and our visit only social; perhaps her death was not grinning at us from the corner of the room, where he leaned with the patience and anticipation of inevitability. Maagizhaa; maybe.
    Her manners were flawless, traditional: She made sure that we had the most comfortable place to sit, on her couch, which she had covered with her good afghan. She accepted the