Author and Podcast Host:
Sandi Ault
Episode 11
I’m not sleeping well these days. Are you? No matter how late I go to bed, I inevitably wake before dawn. Oh, I try to roll over and doze some more…I do. But a turbulent mix of dread, anger, and anxiety starts to churn, and I can seldom shake it and return to slumberland. I have tried every trick in the known universe. In the quiet—in the still-dark-time, I try to calm, to celebrate the comfort and sanctuary of the place where I lie. I try to melt into the comfort of the flannel sheets, lulled by the rhythmic breathing of my beloved beside me, the purr of the kitty curled up next to me, and the occasional soft sigh of the wolf on his lambskin rug nearby. But, no matter how I try to hold onto the bliss state that allowed me those precious few hours of hibernation, the first, faraway lightning strike of consciousness tugs me out of my stronghold like a child being pulled from its mother’s arms. And then, once again… I’m in the Badlands.
This is where we live now. THE BADLANDS. Our country—once at least glossed by the veneer of civility, decency, the pursuit of equality and justice—and sometimes containing some decent measure of the above—has been handed over to a slum of sewer rats and cannibalistic two-legged-fungi determined to devour or destroy everything. No evil is too egregious in pursuit of the junkie-high that feeds their greed and power jones. (By the way, even though I have not yet found adequately foul terms to distinctly describe them—still, I feel honor-bound to regale you with their horribility at least once every post.) And here, I must. Because control, in the BADLANDS, is taken by those with the most coin. And maintained by those most willing to do the worst. And this is where we all wake up now. Every single day.
In my sleeplessness, a parade of the latest crimes against humanity committed by the government I support with my taxes loops on auto-play like a trailer for a much-worse horror movie to come. I cannot unsee the image of innocent children made to sit and smile at school desks in the East Room of the White House while a bloated buffoon in orange makeup signs an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. I cannot disappear the disgusting performance of a proud puppy killer posing for a tight-tee porn post in front of shirtless incarcerated men imprisoned in a foreign country’s gulag-for-hire after being deported there without due process. I am mentally plagued by the plague-promoting no-vaxx heretic heading our health and human services gargling sand while he pushes cod liver oil for killing off kids who contracted measles after he convinced their parents that the disease would be good for them and to go out and catch more. And a video spools on replay of an engineering student—a Fulbright scholar working on her doctorate at Tufts University—as she is kidnapped off the street by masked militia wearing no insignia or markings—who whisk their victim away in an unmarked car, then send her to a detention camp in Louisiana. For co-authoring an op-ed in the school’s newspaper calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. In between these teasers floats a parade of horrible headlines: Florida seeks to relax child labor laws, allowing children as young as fourteen to work all-night shifts during the school week to cover vacated immigrant labor jobs. Or: US to stop funding vaccines around the world. Who are we now that the masks are off? Where are we? Is this America? No. America was the dream I was having when I was asleep. I woke up just like you did today and every day since January 20th this year: in the BADLANDS.
I’m going to get to my customary story from the WILD in a moment. But first let me zoom out to a wide shot so we can get the full picture of how this real-life story fits in the BADLANDS we woke up in today.
In the telling of our country’s history, there are numerous similar-to-now episodes to cite, several of them just as all-encompassing as this one. There is the story of the genocide committed upon the first people who live(d) here, to whom this land belonged when the first white European perpetrators arrived. There has never been a reckoning for this in our country. There is the story of slavery, a story that has never ended, but—until recently—had been defeated in some measures while still lingering, barely suppressed, in other iterations. Now it erupts again into full-blown, unconstrained government-sponsored racism. There has never been a reckoning here either; the sickness has been allowed, even encouraged, to metastasize. Deep within the roots of Manifest Destiny, and growing into abhorrent off-shoots, there are still more brutal tales of taking the West from and seeking to decimate the remaining tribes who still survived there, plus the stories of atrocities against Asian-Americans—of railroads built on the backs of Chinese slaves, then the same sort of savagery growing from those poisoned roots into internment camps during world wars.[1] There has been a constant war on women, and…wait!…you do not want to get me started on this, believe me…so let’s just leave that right there and move on. We have made war on those with certain sexual orientations. And there has always been some version of the ongoing and ugly suspicion, discrimination, and mistreatment of immigrants. We have a history of horrible persecution of those practicing non-Christian religions—only slightly more hideous than it is ironic when we consider that those white Europeans who came here fled the very same for their own brand of worship. I believe the identical degeneracy is rooted in the quest for annihilation of wildlife, still a murder practice in play today in this country. None of these things have ever been owned or healed or even eliminated. All this…and the thievery and cruelty in the current regime now tearing down whatever was good in our government are all the same. Evil. And evil rules the BADLANDS.
So now—now that I’m awake, and after that sordid summation may never get to sleep again, most of you know what happens next. I’m going to tell you a story I learned from some of the people who lived it.
A wee bit of setup here: In an extraordinary stroke of luck, my husband and I happened to get adopted into a family of Native Puebloans. We stumbled into this blessing by way of ignorance and grace, all tied up in one ask. I could go on now to tell you that story, but it wouldn’t relate to the one I most want to relate today about the BADLANDS we live in, so let me just say that we became family because of a previously-unknown-to-us tribal tradition honored by those who adopted us when my husband and I married.
In our new status, we were included in many rich cultural occasions: feasts, some non-secret ceremonies, beautiful ancient practices, and lots of adventures. One of my favorites among these was Storytime. On the long, dark nights during the winter, the men would build bonfires of fragrant piñon wood around the plaza in the old part of the village; the women would cook and bake, creating generous feasts of traditional dishes. Sometimes, there would be dances and drumming or singing, and then all would gather around the fires for the stories the elders would tell. When there was not a gathering in the plaza, our family would have a roaring fire in their own kiva fireplace, a simple dinner of posole or stew and fresh baked bread, and stories were still the high point of the evening.
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It was on one of these occasions when our Puebloan dad told about being forced to attend an Indian Boarding School. He conveyed that night—as he often did—a scant, snapshot-like memory, frozen in time without prelude or epilogue, but simply surrounded by a few distinct details. Among the storytellers I heard at the pueblo, there were definitely some good yarn-spinners. But our dad was not one of them. He was a plain-spoken but deep-feeling man. Sometimes he recalled a little vignette of a happy time, or something that made us all laugh. But tradition demanded that the elders remember and share stories from the old times as well as their struggles, too, so that the younger ones would know how they and the ancestors had survived.
“We had a good meal just now, and we are lucky to have plenty to eat,” he said, smiling at our mom. “But I remember being at that school over there when I was just a kid. I was always hungry, and we didn’t say anything, you know, because then they would make us work all day without eating anything. We couldn’t even take a break, they would just make us work, you know, at a man’s job. They would beat us if we didn’t work. And we were just little kids. So skinny because they didn’t hardly feed us anything. We didn’t learn anything in that school but how to work.”
That was it, essentially, although I had to paraphrase because it was over twenty years ago. But it’s at least close because it so startled me to learn this, that it imprinted on my brain like the grill marks on a steak. I can still smell the sap of the piñon from the fire, feel the warmth of the stew in my belly. And I can still see the firelight dancing on his high forehead beneath our dad’s still-black hair. At the time, I knew almost nothing about Indian Boarding Schools, but somehow I thought they were from somewhere way in our nation’s scarred and sordid past. Here was proof of my entitled and deliberately-curated-by-white-supremacy ignorance. And here was confirmation of how very alive this chapter in our saga still is.
Dad’s uncle—also a survivor of the school, chimed in and added significant background. Had Uncle Sam not been there—for he was the talkative one—this might have been a mere reference to an unhappiness that passed without elaboration. And since questions were frowned upon, we might have gleaned little more than what was initially said.
But Sam had more to say, and he liked to laugh. He told of getting out of work and classes because he knew how to trap meat, and there was never enough food at the school. His Pueblo training as a hunter had begun when he was very young, and the first thing he learned to hunt was rabbit. There were plenty of rabbits in the high desert of New Mexico, if you knew where to find them and how to catch them. He grinned, and the men all laughed, because it was like Sam had pulled a fast one on his captors. But to me, thinking of a small child sent out to hunt all day every day, away from his family and his culture and his home, never being taught the things he would need to survive in the modern world… I wanted to cry. This is how Sam survived in those badlands. And this was why Sam could still barely read. In 21st century America.
I learned that others in the extended family were survivors of Indian Boarding Schools, too. A whole generation of family before our dad. Nearly every one of the elders. And I learned there were too many who never came back once they were taken away.
This was, for me, another B-roll loop that would haunt me when I couldn’t sleep. Until I decided to center the plot of my third book, WILD SORROW, on the survivors of an Indian Boarding School. And, like I always do—thanks to my background in journalism—I researched for that mystery as if I were writing non-fiction. I sought out a prominent Native American journalist who had written a book on his own childhood experience in an Indian Boarding School in South Dakota. He introduced me to a network of survivors, some of whom had plenty to say, and some who broke down and cried when they spoke of siblings they lost, parents who died while they were held captive miles from their homes, of missing their language and their customs and their families, of friends who suffered broken limbs, and devastating sores, and infections in lacerations inflicted upon them by their captors.
My husband and I visited two Indian Boarding Schools that were still being overseen by the Department of the Interior—one in South Dakotah and one in New Mexico. We did not go inside, but merely found them, photographed them, and studied the stones in the graveyards behind them. Children still boarded in these schools, but were no longer taken by force from their homes and families. Both schools were still run by the Catholic church.
I also did deep research to find the location of the school my Puebloan family had shared memories from. Out in arroyo-ridden northwestern New Mexico, not far from the deserted ruin of a Chacoan outlier, we pinpointed the spot on the map where the school had once been. Part of it still stood, although most of it had been destroyed in a fire. The spot was miles from any sign of civilization, likely intentionally chosen so the children could not escape and the crimes against them could not be witnessed. The school was not far from the Bisti Badlands.
I could not ease my family’s suffering, nor that of any of the victims of government authorized cruelty that shaped that saga in our national story. But I knew that part of my mission in writing the WILD Mystery Series was to capture the West before it vanished. And in writing WILD SORROW, even though it was fiction, the truth of that sad part of our history was woven throughout. I told audiences at conferences and book signings that it was likely the book I came here to write, and if I never wrote another one, I’d be content. That particular horror-movie teaser never played in my sleepless moments again because I had done something to keep the truth alive, to move those who could be moved by it, and to honor those who suffered the real life experience of being kidnapped as children, held captive, enslaved, and who endured the attempted eradication of their languages and cultures at the hands of the US Government.
Of course, another story soon sought me out, and I went on to write another book, and then another. And I continue as a storyteller here, too. And so I am always willing to wake up when my muse demands attention, no matter the hour.
But it’s not my muse waking me up these days. It’s not a story that’s haunting me, demanding my attention, moving me into action. It’s reality. No, it’s not the waking up that is bothering me most. It’s the fact that so many of us can sleep at all while we become, again, and again…and even worse this time than perhaps ever before, not the United States of America … but the BADLANDS.
I want to leave you with some hope. I am seeing a lot of people suddenly waking up. I am seeing them band together in great numbers to make their voices heard, to show their anger and resolve. I see the number of protests, the size of the protests growing. And it will take even more than this, but this is a promising beginning. I was among the crowd of 34,000 people who gathered in Denver for the Bernie-AOC Fight Oligarchy rally. I am seeing some US Senators and members of the House get real and get mad. As I write this, Senator Cory Booker is having his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment on the Senate floor.
And here’s a couple of fun facts: a few months after we were adopted into our new Puebloan family during our wedding at the courthouse in Taos, New Mexico, my husband and I had a blessing ceremony for our marriage at the Shawnee Indian Mission in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. The Shawnee Indian Mission is a restored historical site that was originally one of the nation’s first Indian Boarding Schools. We brought the power and magic of love to its big hall with a big drum played by the Redsticks, a group of local Lakota teens. We celebrated our union with everyone joining in a big circle dance. And thirteen years later, on tour for the release of my book WILD SORROW, the local mystery bookseller hosted one of two book signings in the dormitory of that former Indian Boarding School, where the crowd was too large to fit inside, so they spilled out onto the porch and the grounds.
The White Oak Creek Singers brought the big circular drum and played, transfixing the crowd. An old bastion of sorrow and shame became host to the power of love and of story. AGAIN. You just cannot make magic like that up.
I won’t be able to rest well as long as we’re all under siege in the BADLANDS. But like our Dad, like Sam, like all the survivors of previous evil epochs in this country, like the Redsticks and the White Oak Creek Singers and the enduring power of their songs and their drums, I won’t give up without a fight. And neither should you. And you don’t have to do it alone. Look at all those people out there holding signs and demanding an end to the cruelty and the corruption and the destruction of all we managed to create that was democratic, decent, and for the people, in spite of our wretched past.
We may live in the BADLANDS now, baby, but we’re bad-asses when we all get together to make some good noise and get in some good trouble. That’s how you bring things full circle. Bang the drum. Sing the old songs. Form a big damn circle and dance the democracy dance.
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