46. Focusing on racism

I’ m about to turn 78. One would think that “focus” is a lesson learned long ago. And maybe there have been times in my life when I was able to focus intensely for days, weeks, or even months at a time. 

My first months in a Turkish village come to mind. I walked village streets and sat in coffee houses, visited the gunsmith’s shop and rode the “dolmush”—a van crammed with people, grain sacks, and chickens—from the village to the city once a week with a Turkish-English dictionary in my pocket. I wrote words down, and at night I worked that dictionary and a grammar book so that I would do better the next day.

The coronavirus is like that, like living in an alien village for the first time in your life. In early weeks I wore my mask and washed my hands dry. I distanced and became religious about morning bike rides, daily dog walks, and afternoon swims in cold Wallowa Lake. A conscious health regime was my Turkish dictionary. 

All the while I worked at the Josephy Library, assembling books and papers on Nez Perce and broader Indian history. A book group we’d started with The Real All-Americans, a story of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School, went virtual with Nez Perce writer Beth Piatote’s Beadworkers. And then, with BLM and the lens Covid-19 was shining on race, we read White Fragility. Viral disease itself was our next book, Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. 

I began reading for the first hour of each morning. I plowed through books as I haven’t done for years. And then I began these short meditations on disease and race—the hour of reading now followed by an hour of writing.

I learn by reading—and with writing. The act of writing elicits relationships of reading and experience, and new thoughts come to mind. I see clearly now that I did not prepare my Brown son and Brown grandchildren for the world; that I did not link the consequences of their Indian-American heritage to the American-Indian heritage that is my daily work, nor, importantly, to the general history and practice of racism in America.

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