GRAND FORKS, ND

The drive from Fargo to Grand Forks is much like the drive from Minneapolis to Fargo, especially in winter. Except on the northern ride there are no hills. The total trip takes six to seven hours, less if you drive at L.A. speed, like my sister does. We pass an uninterrupted ribbon of stubbly ochre fields, gleaming with snow and pooled with snow shadows, an ice blue that deepens to cobalt as the short day ends. This is the blue I watch for, a dusky glacial glow that makes the contrasting grasses sing yellow. It's a visual break from the wide, nearly white sky that's only occasionally peppered with crows, slowly wheeling hawks and, once in a while, a spotted eagle.

The reason the countryside looks empty is that the farms are so large, with few fences. In the summer, fields of potatoes, soy beans, sugar beets, sunflowers and spring wheat make their owners capital-rich but profit-poor. The North Dakota growing season is short, and the major markets are far away, so the state is dependent on outside economies. For small farmers, it's safer to take federal subsidies and grow nothing, so as not to flood the market and drive prices down.

Except for five counties, the state loses population every year; there's anywhere from a three to thirty percent loss among the other 49 counties. In a 70,702-square-mile state with only about 640,800 people, most of them in the three largest cities, there's a lot of space between rural people, and it's growing.

It's not unusual to see town signs reading population: 2. Those two are probably a pair of farm widows abiding on government checks after the town around them emptied out and shut down. We drive past abandoned farm buildings that appear to be melting back into the land; they're weathered the color of dry grass and dissolving in the wind. "The land claims," I'm thinking. And "the land claims."

I open a local newspaper to break the monotony, not one of the city papers, but a thin, regional one, like the Turtle Mountain Times. Between the front-page stories about reservation politics and the back pages devoted to high school sports is the real news: two spreads about who showed up where. All you have to do to get in the paper is leave your house. "On Sunday morning, Linda Halvorsen stopped in for coffee at the house of Gladys Snow. Brenda Brave Bull was a Tuesday Minot shopper." The rest is all about dying and being born, and what's for lunch at the Senior Center‹a life working for Old Dutch Chips; fifty ways to spell Brittany; wax beans, tuna hotdish and poke cake.

A half-mile outside Grand Forks, a former barn is collapsing outward. Across its convex, brackish brown belly, someone has spray-painted in white letters six feet high: nd sucks. "Guess the kids are bored, huh?" my sister comments.

Grand Forks is my birthplace, and our father's, and our grandmother's. My father and I were born in the same hospital, even delivered by the same doctor. Although my father is a mixed-blood Native American, when my blond, blue-eyed Norwegian mother finally delivered little light-skinned me, one of the nuns said, "Bless you, my dear. We need more of your kind in this world. Less of them."

My father and I are both eldest children. So is my mother, who was born in Fort Ransom. But on this trip, on Christmas Day, 1992, my sister Stephanie and I blow past our mother's parents in Fargo and will pass through Grand Forks, where our father's parents live. We're headed for East Grand Forks, on the Minnesota side of the Red River of the North. As our Grandma Lil would say, "We have our reasons." We're looking for a sweat lodge.

Grand Forks is a city of 50,000 at the confluence of two major rivers, the Red Lake River and the Red River of the North (one of the few rivers that flows north). It became a produce-processing town when the Great Northern Railroad arrived in 1880. A former fur trade outpost, GF has always had a wild reputation, enhanced by its proximity to the Sioux reservation at Devil's Lake. Near the Canadian border, it's a party town for truckers and soldiers from the airbase 15 miles west of town. The boys need something to do when they're not guarding the Minuteman missiles that were buried in silos under the prairie in the sixties. Finally, the campus of UND adds to the need for countless bars.

Nevertheless, when I called my Grandma Lil before our trip, she said, "There'll be no one here and nothing to do. And it will be terribly cold." Besides, she and our grandfather would be out of town, visiting our aunt down south.

I told her we were interested in finding out about our Indian heritage, and hoping to visit the Turtle Mountain reservation with our Aunt Shirley, who is Chippewa. (She's married to our Uncle Dick.) I also told her that a Dakota medicine man had invited us to see him.

Her response was that Shirley's busy running her taxi company (she hates Shirley), and we're not Indians‹"Don't you think we know who we are?"

My grandmother Lillian has such an aversion to Indians that she not only denies her husband's Dakota (and Jewish) heritage, but she also slips in identifying her own mother as variously Polish, French or Russian. Lil's adamant denials were further contradicted when my youngest sister, Carrie, called her from L.A., waking her from a sound sleep. When Carrie asked, "What tribe was your mother from?" Lil answered, "Odeebwa." Now, Odibwa is not an existing tribe, but Ojibwa is. She mispronounced it, just as she refers to K-Mart as "K-Mark."

Ojibwa Indians are called Chippewa in North Dakota. Ojibwa is not their original name. It's a Cree word for top-sewn moccasins. Chippewa is a further anglicization.

The Anishinaabe, or "Human Beings," as we call ourselves, originated in Delaware. Following a prophesy, they migrated northwest in the 1500s, which saved them from being exterminated by European diseases, as many east coast tribes were. The influx of Europeans demanding furs drew tribes into competition to trade for guns and whiskey, resulting in the devastating Beaver Wars (and the near-extinction of beaver). Then 18th-century European conflicts were fought in the Americas, using Indian allies. This destruction drove many of the Anishinaabe farther west, where they displaced the Sioux (not without a fight) from their hospitable Minnesota valleys to the severe Plains of the Dakotas.

The northern Plains had previously been an area crossed by nomadic tribal bands in summer as they hunted buffalo and other animals, which they later enjoyed in the comforts of their sheltered winter camps. The sacred Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota were sites of spiritual pilgrimages. Except for a few river valleys, Dakota was no place to live.

Yet in the 1860s the great land grab in Dakota Territory began. For once, the Americans got the name right. Dakota, Lakota and Nakota (friendly ones) are what the nation known as the Sioux calls itself. "Sioux" is a French version of naadessiew, an unflattering Ojibwa word meaning "snakes in the grass."

When white settlers arrived in North Dakota, they were trespassing on the hunting grounds of the Dakota, Ojibwa, Cree, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Nakota, Assiniboine and Crow. Thousands of years of intertribal trade and competition designated this land inseparable from the lives of northern Plains people.

Today, Native Americans comprise the largest minority in North Dakota, at three percent of the population. Counties including the four reservations are the poorest in the state. While the average yearly median income per capita for non-Indians is $14,667, an Indian's average yearly income is $6,148 (in 1989 dollars). Native life expectancy is about 55 for men and 60 for women. And as Russell Means says, "Prison is the fastest-growing Indian reservation."

But Grandma Lil's not interested in history. She decided I need to know that Indians, Mexicans and blacks are just taking over. "It's terrible." She advised me to come in April "when we can do things," like go play the slot machines and try out the new restaurants and visit the new mall.

I wasn't all that surprised, since the last time I had been to Grand Forks was the summer when I was 17 and had worked in Phil and Lil's cafe. That's how it happens in our family. Rothenbergers are really good at not talking to each other. Sometime in 1971, my father and his mother had an argument, and he didn't visit for 15 years. Somehow their long silence filtered down to my sisters and me.

The silence must have been hard for Lil because my father was her favorite son. Phil Junior was known as the best-looking guy in town, and the best dancer. In high school he was invited to parties given by what passes for a social set in Grand Forks. At one of those parties he'd overheard the host's parents talking about him: "That Philip is so attractive. So charming. You wouldn't know he was one of them."

He met my mother in the drama department at UND. The drama students had all-night parties in Jerry Foote's basement, where they got drunk, listened to opera records and acted out scenes from Shakespeare. Jerry, who has been my father's best friend since junior high, received threats in the mail from people who thought the kids were worshipping Satan. It's no wonder they left for New York City immediately after graduation.

It was Jerry who had invited us to stay with him in East Grand Forks. He had moved back home after retiring. Although he is one hundred percent Swedish, he's thrilled that we're coming home to search for our Indian heritage. He's taking a Native American literature class at the university and is eager to discuss it with me.

If we ever get there. My sister has no problem with highways, but cities confuse her. She pauses at every intersection, unsure which way is north or east. She looks at me at each snow-covered corner, not wanting to ask. The pause is heavy with her frustration.

"Right?"

"No, left."

Stephanie steadies herself by fluffing her straight rootbeer-colored bangs with a quick, dithering movement of her fingers. When she's satisfied with the effect in the rearview mirror, she turns the car around, but the signs say 81. "You said this was Washington, but it's not. See? You're not always right." My sister is the family scorekeeper.

"I'm pretty sure this turns into Washington." I'll know when I see that jeweler's billboard with the giant diamond ring made of what looks like tinsel. When we get to the intersection of Washington and Demers, there's the ring, blowing and glittering in the wind. Below it is the bank clock with a digital display that also gives the temperature: ­6 degrees.

She says, "Right?"

"Right takes us to Devil's Lake."

That's when her hands tighten on the steering wheel. Her brown eyes contract and glint hard as BBs. I know what it is. We're hungry and we're supposed to be home, but we feel like orphans here. Our main childhood landmark and oasis, Phil and Lil's, has been torn down, replaced by a hairdresser's. The strip along 81 is lined with every kind of fast food place imaginable, but nothing we want to eat. It's Christmas, and the whole town is closed.

We both say it at the same time: "Let's go see their house."

When we get to North Fifth Street, Steph recognizes it first. The paint is a battered gray and the windows are dark with icicle fangs, but somehow, the house doesn't feel quite empty. By mutual silent assent, we get out and climb over the curbside snowbank to stand in the front yard.

"There's the clothes pole we used to swing from, remember?" asks Steph.

"Look!" I point to the ground. The walk is shoveled, and fresh footprints, human and dog, mark the light snow on the porch and down the walk beside the house.

We follow them and find our grandparents' cars parked by their garage, facing the alley. The cars are free of snow.

Steph touches the hood of the brown LeBaron. "It's warm."

"Well, the engine's plugged in to that outlet. Maybe someone's walking their dog." I study the tracks in the snow. "Do you think they lied?"

"They lied."

On the way to the bridge, Steph says "Really?" at each turn, then breaks into laughter at her unerring instinct for the wrong direction. We're both giggly; somehow their absurd betrayal has made us feel giddy and brave in this alien place.

"It's Grand Forks," Steph says. "There's something in the air or in the ground that confuses me."

East Second Street runs roughly parallel to the Red River, two blocks from its east bank. If it wasn't Christmas, the darkness would make the bland houses invisible, but following Jerry's signposts of different-colored lights that bead the outlines of the buildings, we come at last to his white-shingled house with its two red electric candles in the porch window.

I haven't seen Jerry in ten years and am expecting him to be puffy, with a bleached blonde afro and tinted aviator glasses. Posing dramatically in his doorway with a menthol cigarette, he's thin in a cornflower velveteen suit under his floor-length silver fox fur coat. A tall, barrel-shaped fox hat perches on his upswept platinum hair. His face is bone-white, his eyes ice blue. He looks like a well-preserved Swedish rock star promoted to ambassador.

"Welcome to the tundra!" Kisses all around. "I wanted you to see my hat."

Jerry's deceptively nondescript indoor porch betrays nothing of the inner rooms, which are absolutely crammed with Victorian velvet furniture, satin draperies, tapestries, Turkish rugs, tapers in elaborate sconces, faux-Grecian busts and gold-framed paintings of wig-headed lovers, all discreetly lit by the orange glow of antique globe lamps. The house is like a Ukrainian Easter egg that's decorated only on the inside.

In the upstairs bedrooms, the oak beds have towering carved poles and massive historiated headboards that reach the ceiling. "I hope this will be comfortable enough for two hedonistic adventurers," he says.

He's made a venison roast. While we're eating he admits that his house in Dover was much larger, but he couldn't part with any of his things.

I need to know why Jerry moved back to Grand Forks.

He tells us that he loves the Plains. Life doesn't have to be devoid of culture in the hinterlands, although he couldn't survive without cable TV, Winnipeg public radio and high-powered vodka. As for what his neighbors think of his decor: "It's beyond their comprehension. But my activities have always raised eyebrows in this town. My mother's friends don't understand why I work when I'm supposed to be retired."

Jerry puts in more than 70 hours a week at the Youthful Offenders Hall. "If these kids had someone to talk to, they wouldn't be in trouble in the first place. For most of them, I'm the first person who's ever listened. These aren't bad kids‹the system's to blame."

He takes a swig of vodka, straight up. "I'm a true sixties radical‹I hate the System and I hate the Church. We'd all be a lot better off without them. I've been against the Church since I was in elementary school. All it does is spread intolerance, ignorance and conformity! Oh, I don't mind being controversial. When I was in college I was outraged by the McCarthy hearings, I wrote letters to the newspaper, and I received hate mail. It still upsets my mother if you bring it up.

"It's hard to imagine with the conservatism that's rampant today, but North Dakota was a Socialist state until 1920. Did you know that we had a state bank and a state mill run by the farmers' collective? Oh, yes, the farmers wanted to protect our economy from eastern monopolies. Did you ever hear of the Dakota Mavericks? They refused to pay federal taxes‹they were opposed to our involvement in both world wars because they knew war profits were lining Wall Street's pockets."

"What happened to the Socialists?" I ask.

"They fossilized, my dear. Into Democrats."

We spend the next day at the Grand Forks Public Library, looking through copies of the Herald on microfilm to try to find out how our grandmother's murder trial was covered in the press. She did time in Shakopee Women's prison in the forties, but no one talks about it. Annoyingly, the reels for those years, and only those years, are missing. But I catch plenty of stories out of the corner of my eye about people freezing to death in their cars when they skid into ditches. One woman had walked less than a mile when she suffocated‹moisture from her breath had frozen her scarf to her face.

In the afternoon we drive to a ranch just west of town to sneak up on the buffalo herd. It's really two herds, male and females bunched in separate groups. They all run away as we come close‹it's hard to sneak when you're waddling through hip-deep snow. They come back, watching us with curious sideways glances, ready to bound off again if we move. In their dark masks, they look like ghosts, shadow-black dancers. Even though they're fenced in, the spirit is strong in them. There's something very old and individual about each buffalo's face that shakes me up. Then the rancher kind of ruins it by driving by in his pick-up and dumping a load of red-skinned potatoes on the ground. The buffalo jostle around, chewing like a herd of dairy cows. It's demeaning.

We go into one of those "family" chain restaurants by the Columbia mall, and all conversation ceases. Forks hit their plates with a clatter. Everyone stares ostentatiously as we walk to an empty booth. The people at the tables next to us even turn all the way around in their chairs to stare. I make eye contact with a few of them, thinking they will either say hello, or they'll get embarrassed and look away. It doesn't work. Eerie.

Stephanie is fuming. She stares back at the woman turned around in the booth next to us and growls at her, "These people are so rude! Don't they have the sense not to stare like that? In New York they could get shot." The woman turns away. "Good, turn around," Steph mutters loudly, "blonde poof-hair head."

We agree to ignore the rest of them, and after bringing our food, the waitress ignores us. Steph needs more napkins, and as a former waitress, she knows where to find them. She skips (with a little ronde de jambe) across the restaurant and grabs some from a shelf next to the kitchen. Gasps are audible all around us. We start laughing and can't stop.

That night, we call our father in Brooklyn. I tell him about the staring thing and ask why. "Is it because we're Indians?"

"I doubt it."

"Do they know we're Rothenbergers?"

"Probably not."

"Do they think we're dykes?"

He laughs. "No."

"What is it then?"

"Were you talking in an animated way?" he asks. "Smiling? Having a good time? Occasionally laughing out loud?"

"Yeah, but‹"

"Well, they don't do those kinds of things in North Dakota."

Aunt Shirley picks us up in her taxi. She's a round Chippewa grandma with a face like a big, soft cookie. She positively glows at the sight of us, although she doesn't say much on the drive, except to comment on my earrings: "Oh, for pretty."

When Steph tells her about being blown off by Phil and Lil, Shirley laughs, then shoots a hand up to cover her missing teeth. "For Pete's sake! Lil's working at the Dairy Mart right now."

I don't know what possesses me. "Let's go see her."

Shirley waits in the car. Lil's at the register, but her back is turned, so Steph and I walk by her and take some juice from the cooler. We set our bottles on the counter and wait for her to turn around. To her perverse credit, her face betrays no emotion. Although she hasn't seen us in more than ten years, Lil looks at us as if we're mildly annoying customers she sees every day.

She already knows we're staying at Jerry's. "I would have called over there, but I never liked him."

I can't speak. Steph's cheeks are red. She tells our grandmother we want to stop by when we get back from Canada.

"Well, I don't know," Lil says in her helium voice. "I'm all alone in the store this week, and I have to do the cigarette inventory." A stabbing glance out the window. "Is that Shirley's car?"

That's all we need to know. Lil won't take our money. She seems surprised that we don't want anything else from the store.

Shirley's not shocked. "Lil's always been like that. It's not Phil, you know. He's okay. Did you know we live four blocks away and she's never been to our house? Uffda!"

Dick and Shirley's living room is covered in Indian kitsch, the kind that's made in Taiwan and is the native equivalent of crying clown paintings. Dick's sitting on a high stool at a cluttered desk, smoking and manning the taxi phone and radio. At 300 pounds, Dick is not fat by North Dakota standards. As they say, "He eats good."

Before I can take off my coat, he grabs the top of my head and booms, "Ya dyed your hair black, but I can still see the gray!" He laughs hard at his own wit, which brings on an attack of wheezing.

Our cousins don't get up. They're watching wrestling and sucking down cokes. Their toddler-aged children, two boys and a girl, are taking turns mangling a giant Gumby doll and doing a celebratory bump and grind in imitation of Ravishing Rick Rude. There are more kids, out somewhere with their mothers.

The famous criminal half-breed brothers are tamer now. Their days of gang-banging and B&Es are over, which is a good thing since they are enormous: bison-wide shoulders, solid beer bellies, shaggy hair and eyes like cormorants'. At 28, Michael's the oldest‹he's the same age as Stephanie, two years younger than me‹and he's special, as they say in our family. He speaks intently but doesn't make eye contact, instead addressing a space in midair with eyes that focus in different directions. As my father says, "Michael's got something important to say, but I never know what it is."

Tonight he's drunk and there's no escape from what it is. He leans against me on the couch, drapes his heavy arm around my shoulders and singsongs this refrain into my ear: "You guys have the best dad. I love you guys' dad, see? Your dad's the best.Š"

Rodney's pregnant girlfriend, Sonya, rolls her eyes, and I return the roll. She's Lakota, from Standing Rock, with burgundy-dyed hair and hard black makeup. She must be the source of the golf-ball-sized hickeys on Rodney's neck. The two of them recently got kicked out of Three Tribes Technical College for rowdiness. He's the former high school athlete who "coulda gone pro" in either football or baseball. His body language broadcasts barely contained paranoia and keeps me from asking why he didn't. Right now he's playing a powwow tape in a cracked boom box and trying to make Sonya's three-year-old son dance for us. The kid doesn't want to.

"Rodney's my Indian," Dick says.

Then there's John, the quiet, watchful one with the walrus mustache, and finally Ducky, the baby of the family. He's 18 and the only blonde, and he's flirting with my sister. They're building a house of cards. He's also the only son who doesn't drive a cab.

"Ducky's got a good job at the mattress factory," Shirley says. "We're real proud of him."

We all chain-smoke nervously and chug our sodas. Steph takes a lot of pictures. Sonya's boy climbs into my lap. Steph tells everyone that we're driving to a Dakota rez in Manitoba tomorrow, to visit a medicine man and hopefully get to do a sweat.

They've never heard of him, and they're all looking blank on the sweat lodge concept except Sonya, who snaps that you're not supposed to smoke cigarettes near a sweat lodge.

John says his first words since we've walked in‹he warns us not to go to Canada. His brothers agree that there are video cameras on all the roads to catch speeders.

Dick jumps in with the information that when they catch you for speeding in Canada, they don't just give you a ticket, "They throw your ass in jail. And don't expect us to come and bail you out."

I can see from Shirley's smirk that her men are indulging in a favorite North Dakota pastime‹trying to scare you (and themselves) from doing anything different or unusual, like leaving town. But Shirley cuts in and says she wouldn't take a trip this time of year. Storms can come up out of nowhere. "Well, do what you want to do. As long as you make it back here for New Year's Eve."

There really isn't much to see. Driving west on the Canadian side we pass more of the same endlessly flat farmland. Needless to say, there are no video cameras. The emergency oranges and cans of soda that Jerry gave us are frozen solid in the back seat. So are the pizzas in the trunk. They're for Galen's family on the reserve.

We agree that Winnipeg is a dump. We'll avoid it on the way back. We hit Brandon near sunset and head north. The land grows hilly and wooded, with long chains of frozen lakes. Ours is the only car on the icy road as we drive through Riding Mountain National Park, and there's just enough light to see a female moose grazing on tree branches by the side of the road. She's pregnant. We pull over and watch her.

The moon rises full as we reach Dauphin, the closest major town to Galen's reserve. Or what passes for a town in this lonely part of the province. We've been on the road for nine hours and consider ourselves lucky to find a motel. We want to get some sleep and look for Galen's place in the morning.

"I thought Galen lived in South Dakota," Steph says through a mouthful of trail mix. We're flopped on our hotel beds watching vampires on TV. "I mean, when Vic and Jason went to Sundance, wasn't it in South Dakota?"

"I think Galen's wife is from Rosebud. From what Vic said, they spend part of the year in Canada where Galen's from."

"Isn't Galen Lakota?"

"He must be Dakota if he's from this reserve. Good thing the Winnebagel gave me both numbers or we'd be driving all the way to South Dakota for nothing."

"Jason, pfeh. Ojewboy tribe," Steph says, curling her lip like Vic would have. Suddenly I miss Vic so bad it hurts.

Vic Delaney had a Dakota-style inipi, or sweat lodge, on his property in Woodstock, New York. The lodge had been set up by Galen Bonneau, a Dakota medicine man and friend of Vic's. Vic had no native blood but had lived in a tipi on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota in the sixties and had joined the Longest Walk to Washington to bring attention to Native American rights. He went to Sundance ceremonies in the summer, where until recently, whites were not allowed.

Vic was not a typical Indian wannabe. He believed that it's healthy and creative to follow another culture's ways as long as those things truly resonate with you, and not out of self-hatred for your own culture. As a charismatic gay man, a notorious former Studio 54 doorman and leather designer with a rock-star clientele, Vic attracted all sorts of people to his lodge, but only if they had also found sobriety. He needed all their prayers because, at 36, Vic was dying of AIDS.

The firekeeper at Vic's was Jason Adler, an oddly native-looking Jewish guy (well, if you didn't look too closely) who modelled at Vic's fashion shows. He tried to get people to call him Jimmy Eagle, but at least he had the sense of humor to say he was from the Ojewboy tribe. He had been to Sundance once with Vic and had been given the honor of assisting one of the firekeepers there. Jason saw firekeeping as a glamorous job, not the humble responsibility that it is.

The fire that heats the rocks for the sweat lodge is sacred, and there are secret rules for its construction and upkeep. It's hard work, first chainsawing logs and axe-spitting chunks of wood, then gathering wheelbarrowsful of melon-size rocks (they have to be the right rocks). Then there's carrying red-hot rocks on a pitchfork into a dark sweat lodge without burning anybody.

In the summer of '91, Jason went to Sundance alone. Vic was too sick to travel. The Sundance was given by the White Crows, relatives of Galen's wife. Jason loaded up his Volvo with gifts‹beds-in-a-bag, toys, Tupperware‹he had to host a giveaway for the White Crow family since he was planning to be pierced for the first time.

The Sundance is an ancient ceremony. Plains Indian men traditionally danced as a personal sacrifice, an offering, "so my people may live." Now an intertribal event, Sundancing requires months of preparation, a four-day fast alone in a vision pit, and purification in the inipi before being pierced through the skin of the chest. An eagle claw is threaded through the wound and attached to a long leather thong, which is tied to the Sundance pole. Often in blistering sun, the dancers fast for four days, or for however long it takes for their movements to break their skin, freeing them. No one would commit to such a thing without having a clear, unequivocal vision calling them to do so.

Not so for Jason. For him it was an opportunity to cement his spiritual cachet and increase his eligibility for one-night stands. He was that craven, but I also can't take it away from him that he loved Vic. Like all of us who knew Vic, he would do anything to buy him more time.

I got the phone call two weeks later. Jason was in a hospital in Sioux Falls with an infected piercing wound in his chest. He'd had a horrible experience at Sundance. First, he fled the hanblecya (vision) pit on the first night because there were bugs, "Eeew." Then he fainted while being pierced. These were bad signs, and he was not allowed to dance.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Vic was losing weight. He crawled more slowly into the lodge, and when he sang, his pleasantly hoarse voice became a croak. So we prayed, crying, "Tunkasila, Grandfather, make him over."

It was one of those beautiful golden-green August day when Vic was taken to an Albany hospital for a tracheotomy. I knelt by the buffalo skull altar before the inipi and hung a small sage and feather offering from the tiny tree that Vic had planted there. A strong summer breeze blew light clouds quickly across the sky, and when I looked up, I saw a North Dakota sky. A voice made of sunlight and silence surrounded me: "Go home."

Vic died that September, breaking my heart. He had become an uncle to me as he opened the way into my own heritage as an experience, not something I could read in a book. The sweat lodge is an intertribal rite. It's a way of returning to the darkened silence of Mother Earth's womb, and a purification by the hot breath of the Stone People when they are bathed in living water. The heat is intense, and the humble feeling of being at the mercy of the elements is enormously gentling. It's a healing ceremony, and it changes you. It connected me to spiritual information in nature and dreams that has never left me.

However, I didn't know this when Vic died. I felt abandoned and hopeless. I tried other sweats but ran into sick people. I found lodges in New Jersey that were carpeted and covered in plastic tarps, where 40 people crammed in to breathe toxins while competing to endure unbearable heat. I met white people with improbable "Indian" names who said things like "Aho, Sisters, look at Grandmother Moon, aho."

Steph breaks into my memories, wondering why Galen's willing to see us, since I had gotten his number from Jason. Wouldn't he think we were just more white fools?

I tell her what Galen had said when I called: "Jason. He does what he wants." That's the closest thing to a diss you'll get from a traditional native person. They don't like to talk bad about anyone. Steph agrees that we're not like that at all. We wail on everyone.

We get lost on the Santee Lake reserve, where all the shacks look the same and the fields are full of spotted ponies. When we're about to give up and turn back, two eagles appear in the sky ahead of us. A good sign. They make four wide circles as we follow the road to Galen's house.

The first thing he says is that he saw those eagles too, and he knew it meant we were coming. Galen is a stocky guy in his early forties, with warm brown eyes and black hair cut spiky on top and gathered into a thin, tail-like braid in the back.

He leads us into a typical reserve house, a low bunker of concrete blocks with plastic sheeting over the awning as a windbreak. Inside, his wife Hope is folding laundry at the kitchen table. Five children, aged from ten down to two years, are milling around the two main rooms. All of their names begin with G.

Despite the number of people inside, the atmosphere is calm. The peace emanates from Hope, a tall, solidly built native woman whose hair is cut like her husband's. She offers us hot dogs. We politely refuse since we just ate, and we don't want to take anything from people who have so little. Besides, hot dogs are gross.

Galen softly explains that it's an insult to refuse food in a native home. "We're generous people; don't take that away from us." So we eat many hot dogs, and I bring out the pizza.