My Name Is Not Easy (3 page)

M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y / L u k e
when I’m old enough to take the kick. Next spring maybe.

“Boys?” Mom says. “You hear? Get your stuff . Plane’s come.”

I’m twelve years old, all right, and Bunna, he’s ten. But Isaac, he’s only six, and all I can think of is those Catholics and what they say about kids.
Why can’t we wait until Isaac turns seven?

When I climb up into that plane, the wind’s blowing hard, same as always.

“Take care of your brothers,” Mom calls, and I turn around quick. One last time.

Th

e wind sweeps my hair across my eyes and carries Mom’s words backward. It pulls me backward, too.

Stay here,
the wind says.
Stay
.

Mom stands on the edge of the runway right next to Jack, my
aapa
and
aaka
and all our aunties and uncles with their babies. Some of our aunties are crying, but not Mom. Mom says we’re Eskimo and Eskimos know how to survive. She says we have to learn things, things we can’t learn here in the village. Mom does not cry, and neither do we.

Take care of your brothers
. I hang on tight to those words as I sit down inside the plane. It’s full of kids, this plane, kids going off to boarding school, mostly teens, because there’s no high schools in none of our villages. Every single teen from every single village in the whole world, maybe—all of us being swept off to some place where there won’t be no parents, no grandparents, no babies. Only big orange buses and trees and teachers choking on our names.

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

Bunna and Isaac are looking around with wide eyes.

“Th

ey all going to Sacred Heart?” Bunna whispers.

“Naw,” I say. “Most of them going off to BIA schools.”

Bureau of Indian Aff airs schools don’t take kids as young as us—that’s what the man who convinced mom to send us said. He said we’d get a better education at a Catholic school. I don’t say any of this to Bunna. I don’t think Bunna cares much about his education right now. Me neither. And Isaac, sitting in between the two of us, doesn’t even know what it means, yet, to get educated.

I gaze out the window at our family: a little knot on a fringe of tundra, waving in the wind. When she sees me, Mom opens her mouth and hollers. I can’t hear her voice, but I can read my name on the shape of her lips, my real name.

Th

e name I’m leaving behind.

“How come we don’t get to go BIA schools?” Bunna asks.

“Guess we’re special,” I say, and the kid sprawled out on the seat across the aisle grins big.

“You going to Sacred Heart?” he asks.

Bunna fl ops his head up and down.

“Hey. Put her there,” the kid says, extending his hand.

“Me, too.”

And right then and there you know he owns Bunna.

“You ever been to Sacred Heart before?” Bunna asks.

“Sure,” the kid says. “Sure have.” Like he’s been everywhere and back again.

“So what’s it like?”

“Well, it’s not like home, all right, but you get used to it.

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y / L u k e
Know what I mean?”

We nod our heads, even Isaac, like we really do know.

Th

en I turn to watch out the window as the plane noses up into the sky. All the families get smaller and smaller, slipping away from us like peas off a plate.

“How far is it to Sacred Heart School?” Bunna asks.

“’Bout as far as the moon,” the kid says.

Bunna looks out the window quick, his eyes big.

“I jokes,” the kid says.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

He leans over onto his elbow, like a cowboy in front of a campfi re.

“Amiq,” he says. He says it slow and sure, like he’s daring the world to get it right.

Th

en the plane levels out and sweeps across the tundra, rising slowly up toward the sliver of moon that still hangs in the morning sky.

For a fraction of a second it feels like the earth below us has split wide open and swallowed up everything I ever knew.

Like the earth itself is fl ipping over and falling away like it did a long time ago. Like there’s a big scar down there on the tundra, a jagged place where the edges will never ever line up smooth again.

Not ever.

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18/07/2011 8:25 PM

Looking for a Tree

SEPTEMBER 6, 1960

CHICKIE

—

I was fi ve years old before I fi gured out I wasn’t really Eskimo. It’s weird it took me so long since I have hair as blond as snow, freckles like crazy, and a dad named Swede.

I mean, who ever heard of an Eskimo with freckles, for Heaven’s sake? But I never thought about this when I was a little girl in Kotzebue, Alaska, because Swede didn’t have any use for mirrors, so our house never had one. Th ey say

I look like my momma, but I wouldn’t know about that, either. Swede never had pictures. Now here I am at Sacred Heart School in a room with four beds, one huge mirror, and a picture of Mother Mary, big as life.

Th

e one thing Swede told me about Sacred Heart was that I’d see a lot of trees here, and he was right about that—Sacred Heart School is in a valley that’s full to the brim with trees.

In the late afternoon sun, the ones outside my window shake their yellow leaves and wave their papery white trunks like dancers. Farther off in the distance are great big ones, dark as
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L O O K I N G F O R A T R E E / C h i c k i e
priests, poking holes in the sky with their prickly tops. Th is

is all brand new to me because in Kotzebue, Alaska, there are no trees—not real ones anyhow.

Swede says the fi st time he ever saw my momma, that’s where she was—high up in a tree. She was so far up, he didn’t even see her at fi rst, didn’t even think to look up until he took his suspenders off to make a slingshot, and a couple of birds started laughing at him. Th