Chapter 9
I left the reservation the day of my mother’s funeral, moved to Paradise Valley, what I always thought of as The City, as if it were the only city in the world.
I wasn’t the only Indian at Sacajawea Middle School, but you could have counted us on your hands and had enough fingers left over to play with yourself. It’s funny, my school on the res’ was named after a white guy who came to Nez Perce country a hundred years ago to preach at the red-skinned heathens, and my school in Paradise Valley was named after an Shoshone girl who spent a few years keeping white explorers from being killed by their own ignorance. Our football team was called The Savages, changed to The Braves a year or so after I left for the larger hormone factory called high school. Some folks thought The Savag
