Saidi lights a candle in honor of her relatives.

She goes to blind school and otherwise lives in an attic. It is there she develops ceremonies that tender fervently the deepest nature of her heartfelt affection for her departed relatives. The composition of these ceremonies causes her to dig deeper and deeper for what she recalls of her vestigial leaning towards her indigenous roots. When Mom was a girl, it was not cool to be Indian. Better to be Italian! Saidi heard her mother telling her sister-in- law one day. Although Grandfather often wore an “Eskimo costume” to birthday parties, weddings, and wakes; it was only part of his private penchant for a deliberate habit of play-acting. At least, that’s what Saidi’s mother often told her.

But that’s not what grandfather told me. He told he was a full-blood Indian. No, you’re totally mistaken. Shut up! He was from Azerbaijan and that’s how things will stand up in the history books. But, Mom, I want to know for sure which town he came from. Don’t you have any pictures left showing how his tipi was? Mom would not give in. She had married a white man; after that, all relatives from both sides of the family were said to have come from Armenia on Wednesday but by Thursday they all seem to have successfully emigrated and to have failed from Kazakhstan Soon Mom made sure her attempts at postcolonial deconstruction would begin a process of disowning whatever spiritual roots they’d ever honored or claimed. Clearly honoring relatives were not part of her repertoire. Not even within the Celtic leanings of Irish culture which my mother claimed through her mother’s stranglehold on her. Not in Indian culture, either, which she so firmly disavowed as ever stemming from her father’s side. After all, weren’t most of his ancestors Scottish lairds?

In trying to put together a suitable grace for a family event, my mother would include a little maxim said to have originated from Seneca, Mother Theresa, Catullus, or even Marcus Aurelius. Problem was, as such, she failed to attribute the little maxims as an authentic way of honoring the elders; the maxims were never properly attributed. Proper luminaries and august historical sources were forgotten. Instead, to cover up her shame of barely having graduated from high school and to obfuscate her fear of being found out she was a half-blood Tlingit from Alaska, Mom always insisted: your Aunt Malvinia, now there was a woman! The God’s truth, she was the one who penned some of the most remarkable words ever known to womankind on this table napkin. I still have those words inked in by the ghost of her own hand intact in my hope chest along with that collection of china soup bowls and Irish linens. What of the proverbs honoring the elders? We children should have known all these by heart and penned them in our little home-schooled journals, but we never did.

If we had dared commit these sayings to memory out leaping the recurrent and somewhat obvious power outages of senior moments, we experience now, there could have been still another way of honoring the elders. However, as children, we weren’t quite tactless enough to challenge the art of a rather scurrilous or scandalous maternally inspired sense of ethnic diplomacy.

It was not unusual for Mom to come forward with one of these honoring remarks and makeovers at the beginning of a thanksgiving meal: Your Aunt Malvinia used to say: Love is just a four letter word offered before the vanity table of the Lord. At another time during the meal, she might be heard to exclaim: your uncle Dana, such a great artist, now he used to say: When you enter the temple of art, you must forget the real artist is god. And yet again after the turkey was consumed, we used to hear: Your Aunt May, she used to stare at the moon until it turned blood red. That’s why she needs to wear glasses that hug her pug nose. Then Mom would spoil the power of the maxim by saying: well, you know what I think of her, or don’t you? The latter statement would unpin the proverb and make the complaint stick like a compliment to the bottom of a wine glass that was never quaffed fully or one that could quench your thirst for—what? Was it learning?

Here is a poem that was penned during one of the private ceremonies honoring the elders that Saidi wrote in braille before she died last year on her sixtieth birthday. It Aunt Edith who knew braille and was able to decode this poem for the benefit of the relatives and anyone else who cares to listen.

Talk-Story and Prayer-Poem for Honoring the Elders

Among elders found camped everywhere around

The region, does anyone have the right to know

Whose voice is this? Only someone who needs shoes, I guess.

Is this the one voice belonging to some of them from Pine Ridge?

Those still living exactly and doing as they do, softly whimpering and groaning

From beneath the confines of a striped smallpox blanket?

In a stuttering stampede, among transcendent ghosts transformed,

In a posse of minutes, who is it that I’m hearing from?

Why does the mountain echo and calibrate the silence of the sages?

What is the nature of ceremonial Time?

In a trading post of minutes, whose cup of wine

Overturned that burns the cedar tailings in the ground?

Softly groaning from beneath a woven blanket,

Still breathing, heartfelt within a sighing breath,

Bone convened within continent of birds and flesh.

Guileless, in bereavement yet still breathing,

Unasked, within each bejeweled gleaming mask,

Revoked, reviewed, rehearsed, in grief-stricken moments

Outlasting momentary redress of grievance,

Outliving and enduring nothing immortal,

Save the presence of countless, nameless synapses

Peopling impartial task of life’s braille particles,

Reversed among interstices of sacred Pleidiean lineage,

In the way of a body stretched out before an altar,

Lying motionless upon perfumed shroud of bedclothes

At the time of death, each story must be foreshortened.

Whence cometh the dreamer? Will I ever be told the truth? Saidi asks.

In the way of Mother Turtle scrambling ashore

Scribbling long forgotten messages

Drawn from far reaching thunder of tumultuous

Churning of sea floor, in metaphor within metaphor,

Love, having no object and no face; if She the One

Reclaiming in momentary time and place,

A coat of many colors, still soldered on, then I

Still honor her, the Beloved, still belonging to the human race.

Elizabeth Bishop, Ph.D. is a candidate for a second doctorate at CIIS and writes poetry incessantly. visit her website by clicking here.