Big Dreams Read online

  Late that night, an old woman won a special prize—a black 4 × 4 Nissan truck that was parked in the hall. There was a smattering of polite applause, but nobody whooped or blushed or giggled uncontrollably, as they did on television game shows. I was reminded of something that I’d once, read about the Pit River tribe. Jaime de Angulo, a gifted amateur anthropologist, had described a peculiar, “passionless,” Indian state of being that was removed from all desire, beyond all expectations, outside the scope of ordinary time, and unaffected by the notion of change.

  After fourteen games, I threw over my cards to Wayne. My eyes were burning from the cigarette smoke, and I was ready for bed.

  “I didn’t know there were so many ways to lose,” I said to him, and he smiled and watched me go.

  In my motel room, the phone rang ten minutes later. It was Wayne. He wanted to borrow eight dollars, so that he could play the final Bingo games. He proposed to give me a haircut in exchange.

  The call upset me. How did he get my room number? But then I remembered how small Hoopa was, and how few guests were at the Best Western, and I saw, too, that the request might seem natural and even logical to Wayne, particularly after he had invited me into his family circle. So I met him at the motel desk and made the loan. He acted sheepish.

  “Business was real slow today,” he said, in apology. “Not many customers.”

  “That’s all right,” I told him.

  He studied the bills in his hand, and his round face brightened. “Now I can play the last two games. The big money games!” He gave me a business card with the address of Margaret’s House of Beauty. “Stop by tomorrow for your haircut, okay? Any time is fine with me.”

  BEFORE THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN, the Hupa and the Yurok used Dentalium shells for money. Dentalia are mollusks that inhabit the sand in deep water along the Pacific Coast. Their shells are small, whitish, opalescent, and delicate.

  The Indians in California seem not to have harvested the mollusks themselves. Professor Alfred Kroeber, in his classic of anthropology, Handbook of the Indians of California (1925), suggested that each shell probably traveled many miles from Oregon or even Vancouver Island to be traded as currency among “a series of mutually unknown nations.”

  Dentalia were kept on strings, often long ones of more than three yards. They were strung by size and graded by length—the fewer shells to a string, the higher its value. In the animistic universe of the two tribes, dentalia were viewed as living beings that had free will, entities that could be talked to, or argued with, or implored. The Yurok thought the shells were difficult to get along with, hard to seduce, even snobbish. Dentalia chose their associates with care.

  If a Yurok gained some wealth, he frequently traded it for other things, all rated on a scale. A large boat was worth two 12-shell strings, but it could also be bought for ten big woodpecker scalps, soft and brilliantly scarlet. A small boat cost one 13-shell string or three big woodpecker scalps, but if you had two deer hides sewn together and painted, you could get the boat even up.

  Desirable brides were expensive, fetching at least ten strings of various types, plus, say, a headband of fifty woodpecker scalps, some black obsidian, a boat, and so on. Doctors’ fees were steep, too, but not as steep as the price you paid if you killed a man—fifteen strings, some rare red obsidian, some deerskins, a boat, and, in most cases, a daughter.

  Once the Hupa took possession of their reservation in 1864, they started leading a regulated, orderly, Western-influenced life. The Yurok had always been less organized, more prone to chaos, and maybe more poetical. The tribe had no chiefs in the usual sense. A person’s status in each village was determined by his wealth, or sometimes by his age.

  To Kroeber, Yuroks appeared cautious and fearful, “touchy to slight and sensitive to shaming,” quick to anger, and capable of hating “wholeheartedly, persistently, often irreconcilably.” They were also perceptive, courteous, and affable, he said.

  Stephen Powers, who visited the two tribes in 1871, was much less critical. The Yurok were lively, he reported, and they were monogamous and excelled at social dancing. Often they dressed in “civilized suits” and were mounted on horseback.

  Of the Hupa, Powers was positively admiring. He considered them the Romans of northern California. Their language was as rigorous as Latin, he felt, “rude, strong, and laconic.” They were politically adept, skilled in relations with other tribes, and so “fatally democratic” that they had no leaders during a war. Every man fought according to his own lights, in a way that seemed good to him.

  Both the Hupa and the Yurok were profoundly interested in the supernatural. Instead of confronting an enemy, for example, the Hupa liked to hire a sorcerer to avenge an insult or score a victory. Sorcerers brewed poisonous potions; fired invisible arrows at their victims; collected hair, spittle, feces, and pieces of clothing for casting spells; and performed incantatory chants to do harm.

  An Indian devil, a kitdongwe, was the most horrible type of Hupa sorcerer. He painted his face black, carried a weapon made of human bones and sinew, and did his prowling at night. A kitdongwe could change into a wolf or a bear and could travel at blinding speeds, almost flying. He hoped to keep his secrets from his relatives, hiding his weapon under a rock or in a tree hollow, but it betrayed him sometimes by shooting out sparks and flashes.

  Shamanism was sorcery’s benign counterpart. A shaman dealt in healing, not in harming. Among the Yurok, shamans were ordinarily women. Guardian spirits came to them and bestowed power while they were in trances. The spirit took the form of a dead person—often a dead shaman—or an animal, such as a hawk or a whale. It had the job of putting a teloget, or a “pain,” into the dreamer.

  The pain allowed a shaman to cure some diseases. It could be sought after as well as bestowed, but it needed to be paired with another pain to become active. So a shaman would climb to a stony, sacred spot in the mountains, and there she would dance alone until her guardian spirit put another pain into her. That caused her to lose her senses.

  After recuperating in a sweathouse, the shaman was ready to begin. In her body, the pains became a slimy substance capable of sucking the actual, corporeal pains from a sick person. She would then stick her fingers down her throat and regurgitate the illness.

  The Yurok felt that illnesses were the result of many things. Sometimes a spirit took a person’s soul, requiring a ritual to set matters straight. Sin could also make a Yurok sick, and only a full confession could heal him. Maybe the sick person had robbed a grave or had kept a monster as a pet. A shaman listened to the confession and judged whether or not it was pertinent. If it wasn’t, the patient died, but a pertinent confession blew away the disease, like a righteous wind.

  Some illnesses had nothing to do with teloget or spirits and couldn’t be treated by a shaman. Among them were cuts, bruises, a wound from a bullet or an arrow, and a slipped disc.

  MARGARET’S HOUSE OF BEAUTY was indeed a small house off Highway 96 in Hoopa. When I arrived, Wayne Kinney jumped up from the barber chair where he was relaxing and, with a sweep of his arm, gestured that I should take it. The gesture seemed to say, Here is your magic-carpet ride to hair perfection.

  Wayne’s boss, Margaret, a Hupa who had once run for a seat on the Tribal Council, was giving a woman a perm in a chair across the room. There were mousses, sprays, and gels spread on counters, and they gave off an aroma of innocence, part bubblegum and part floral perfume, that was an ideal complement to the entire adventure of hairstyling, with its devoted but largely unsuccessful attempts to turn an ordinary head into the item of wonder that rested on the necks of handsome men and glorious women in fashion magazines.

  Wayne was glad for the chance to pay off his debt, but when he touched my hair and wondered aloud how much to trim, I became nervous and made some excuses. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, although, heaven help me, the notion that I might be misunderstood as in my boyhood days, when militant barbers always reduced my crew cut to a field of
quarter-inch nubbins regardless of instructions, did cross my mind. I was just experiencing the tiny panic that every vain Californian feels in the presence of an unfamiliar stylist.

  California, after all, was the capital of hair in the United States. The shampoo flowed like water and the sales of Rogaine were off the board. If you went to the movies or a concert or a ball game, you had to be amazed at the shiny, silky hair all around you, great masses of it, every strand washed and conditioned and brushed to a luster—so different from the oily, greasy, matted, Vitalised and Brylcreemed hair I used to see at Ebbets Field.

  At first, Wayne didn’t know what to do about being rejected. Had he offended me? He was so gentle I couldn’t imagine him raising his voice. After some deliberation, he solved his dilemma by insisting on buying me coffee in town. That cheered him up, and he grabbed his snappy hat and waved good-bye to Margaret. On the way out, he said that it didn’t bother him to work for a Hupa. He had no animosity toward the other tribe. There were good Hupa and bad Hupa, the same as with the Yurok.

  As we drove to a restaurant Wayne liked, the only sit-down spot in Hoopa, he scouted the roads for people he knew. “There goes my cousin,” he said, waving when another car went by.

  Wayne enjoyed riding in a new Taurus, even though it marked him as a bit of an outsider, somebody who was comfortable with the possessions and the rewards of the white world. Other Indians on the reservation sometimes took him to task for acting too white, he confessed. His interest in tribal affairs was recent, in fact. Until the past year or so, he hadn’t paid much attention to being a Yurok, but he’d been in a couple of ceremonial dances lately and had a dawning pride in his ancestry. He told me that he had been reading the ancient myths and tales.

  “At the museum in Golden Gate Park, there’s a big display of Yurok culture,” he said, and then he added, so as not to sound cocky, “I don’t know why they chose us.”

  In the restaurant, Wayne’s outgoing nature flourished. A very old white man entered, tottering along on the arm of his wife. A surgeon had done something to his ear, which was scarred, bandaged, and a little bloody, as if a dog had chewed on it. Wayne offered his condolences.

  “You be sure to take care of that,” he instructed the old man. “Soak the ear or whatever you’re supposed to do.” His concern was genuine. I could see the worry on his face.

  When our waitress came, Wayne urged me to have a pastry with my coffee, or a sandwich or a slice of cake. He had the sort of generosity that could get a man in trouble, the makings of a soft touch.

  He spoke for a while, almost wistfully, about his parents, who were childhood sweethearts and had lived on opposite sides of the Trinity River, in Weitchpec. His mother still lived there, and so did his brothers. One of them taught school, and another had lost a leg in a motorcycle wreck. Wayne’s own talents tended to be artistic. He loved to paint and draw, and that had motivated him to enroll in a beauty college in San Francisco and seek a career as a hairdresser.

  Out of the blue, he asked, “Do you like to travel? Where have you been?”

  I reeled off a list of foreign cities and countries that I’d visited, including London. At the mention of London, Wayne leaned forward, and his soft voice grew even softer and more intimate. He had been there, too, he said, a few years ago, hanging around in pubs and playing darts. The game became his obsession. Back in California, he had started searching for pub-type taverns that had dartboards, wasting too much of his time.

  I was curious about whether Wayne planned to go back to the city someday.

  “I’m not ready yet,” he said flatly. “I need more confidence in myself. Maybe I’ll go back or maybe not.”

  In a way, it seemed that he was suspended between worlds, the white one and the Indian one, with a foot planted in each. I felt that he might be waiting for a sign, feathers blowing in a breeze, to show him which direction to go.

  For now, the reservation served Wayne as a haven, but he saw its hazards, too. Unemployment could run as high as 70 percent. If you had no money, you fell below the poverty line and were just another statistic on the county rolls. When he had first moved to the Far North, he said, he had rented a nice trailer at a park in Hoopa, but burglars kept breaking in. He knew who they were, stoner kids in their late teens who came from bad homes and ran in packs, stealing to buy liquor and amphetamines.

  Wayne had got tired of the break-ins and had moved to another trailer, in Weitchpec, but he didn’t like it as much. He wanted to give me a tour of Yurok country, he said, but his difficult circumstances prevented him from doing it. They reflected nothing of his status as a man who had once operated a beauty salon in San Francisco, so we sat where we were, drank our coffee, and talked of distant places.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN HOOPA VALLEY, while I was driving around to no purpose, I crossed over a bridge and went down a dirt road to a bluff by the Trinity River. On the bluff, there were some wood structures, the remnants of an old Hupa village. The tribe still used such sites for its rituals and its dances.

  The main dwellings, or xonta, were almost hidden in thick grass and clumps of bluish lupine. They were made from cedar planks and built partially underground. The entry holes were just big enough to admit an adult and just small enough to keep out a bear. The xonta measured about twenty square feet from one end to the other, and the space inside looked cozy and inviting. It must have been wonderful, I thought, to be so tightly connected to a human community that you could sleep on the ground in the unbroken circle of your family.

  In the old days, the Hupa had gathered acorns from the oaks on the bluff, leached them of their tannic acid, and turned them into a porridge. The river had given them salmon, eels, and candlefish, and there were ducks and geese to be harvested from the sky. Hunters brought back elk and deer from the mountains, while women and children picked the wild berries.

  I sat on the grass in the sunshine and let the moment wash over me. Hoopa Valley still had an immense serenity. The Hupa and the Yurok must once have carried it within them, a peacefulness beyond our understanding.

  HUPA SOVEREIGN DAY, the official day of partitioning, was a grand event. Private jets began flying into town early in the morning with the key political allies of the tribe, along with some dignitaries and some honored guests. At the Hoopa Neighborhood Facility, eighth-graders were serving a chowline breakfast, and you could watch a video about Public Law 100–580. On a lawn outside, TV cameras were drawing a bead on a banner-and-flag-draped stage, where the important speeches were to be delivered.

  The two stars of Hupa Sovereign Day were Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, and U.S. Congressman Doug Bosco, who was from northern California, had authored the partitioning bill, and had married into a wealthy timber-industry family.

  Their speeches were as dull as such speeches always are, but they sounded especially queer in Hoopa Valley. The speakers, too, seemed odd. In their pancake makeup and their crisp, dark suits, they resembled ill-at-ease ambassadors from a foreign country, which, in essence, they were.

  There were protests against Public Law 100–580 in town. At Mike’s Auto Body Shop, four figures were hung in effigy out front, dummies representing Inouye, Bosco, Senator Alan Cranston of California, and an unidentified perpetrator. The shop was owned jointly by Mike McConnell, a Hupa, and Herb O’Neill, a Yurok. They had posted a sign near the dangling bodies that said, “Welcome to Yuropa,” an imaginary land where the tribes would still live together in harmony.

  McConnell and O’Neill had worked with each other for years, a couple of Indians with Irish names who enjoyed banging on fenders and trading quips. O’Neill, at seventy-four, had a face that was creased everywhere. When I asked how old he was when he came to Hoopa Valley, he held his hands about sixteen inches apart, the size of a newborn infant.

  He smiled and said, “I was an orphan.”

  Someone had dispatched him to an orphanage in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, and from there
he enlisted in the army and fought in Germany. After the war, he returned to the reservation because he had nowhere else to go.

  O’Neill wasn’t sure who had won what in the partitioning. Did it have to do with water rights? With logging interests? He just didn’t like the idea of the tribes being separated.

  A customer pulled in while we were talking, attracted by the lynched dummies. He looked at them for a time and said, “Did you know that Inouye has only one arm?”

  “Sure,” O’Neill told him. “That’s why they call him the ‘One-armed Bandit’ in Hawaii.”

  McConnell, the artist responsible for the figures, had never heard about the lost arm before, so he went over and ripped one off the Inouye dummy.

  THE BEST WESTERN IN HOOPA was scheduled to be transformed into the Tsewenaldin Inn at a dedication ceremony on Hupa Sovereign Day, so I had to check out. I looked through my sliding-glass door while I was packing and saw a woman come out of the bushes by the river, her hair matted with leaves and twigs.

  I realized that it was the same woman I had seen on that first afternoon in town, but she no longer wore a white dress. Instead, she had on a rose-colored sweatsuit, and her feet were bare. She was not young and beautiful, as I had naively assumed, but middle-aged and in some kind of mental distress.

  As I observed, she rolled the sweatpants to her knees, waded into the river, and stood at the same spot where I’d noticed her before, staring into the water for about ten minutes without moving a muscle. Then she got out of the river, stripped off her sweatpants to reveal a pair of blue gym shorts, and waded back in. Again, she stood absolutely still in the same spot for about ten minutes, staring, before she stumbled up the bank and walked off toward town.

  As I was leaving the motel, I asked the desk clerk, an agreeable white woman, if she knew anything about the woman in the river.