ONE
Sumac Berries, Acorn Stew, and the Force
I was born in the northeastern part of Arizona, the ancestral homeland of the White Mountain Apache people. Nestled along the foothills of our sacred mountains, my hometown of Whiteriver is the largest community on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, with several thousand residents spread out across dozens of small housing tracts.
Like every other Indigenous community in the United States, Whiteriver is a place steeped in tragedy, violence, and hardship. It’s situated just down the road from the remnants of the fort where the U.S. military launched its campaign to stamp out the Native American renegades of the so-called Apache Wars. At the same time, Whiteriver is also a beautiful and magical place, encompassing the wettest watershed in Arizona, where blue spruce, pine, cedar, and oak color our world, giving us all four seasons.
To a kid, it was paradise.
Our family of five-Mom, Dad, my older brother Dustinn, baby brother Shiloh, and I-lived in a neighborhood called Whiskey Flats, which got its name from Old Man Whiskey, who had once owned the surrounding land and now lived alone next door. I didn’t know much about him, apart from the fact that he kept his house lit with an old kerosene lantern and only spoke Apache. My parents both grew up speaking their Native tongues-Apache and Navajo-but they never formally taught us their language. As teenagers, both of my parents had been sent away from the Rez to Utah as part of the Mormon placement program, finishing high school in predominantly white schools. I know they watched their own parents struggle to learn English and communicate with white people, and they wanted to equip their sons to succeed in a changing world.
The brick houses on our street were all built in the 1970s, so when I was born, in February of 1980, they were still pretty new, with tidy yards, recently planted trees, and perfectly smooth sidewalks. From the outside, our house, where my mom still lives, looked just like all the others on the street, but inside it was different. My dad built a beautiful glass-front cabinet in our dining nook and replaced the linoleum flooring in the living room with soft, forest green carpet. Our house was cozy and welcoming, a gathering place for birthday celebrations, graduation parties, and holidays.
During the eighties, the neighborhood was bursting with little Apache kids, and we all traveled as a pack. Floyd and Lloyd, the twin brothers who lived directly across the street, became my best friends, and this tall, smiley kid named Delmore, who was two years older than me, became like an older brother once Dustinn got too cool for us.
Delmore’s mom worked at Whiteriver’s only movie theater, and she’d sneak us in and hook us up with free popcorn. The movies we watched in that little theater-everything from
Gremlins to The Breakfast Club-offered a window into the American world, teaching us that the nuclear family was the most important social unit and exposing us to suburban neighborhoods with big, fancy houses and shiny, new cars. We were ingesting the fantasy of the American dream long before we understood that that dream wasn’t meant for us, that it had been built on our people’s destruction.
I remember watching
Red Dawn-about a group of teenagers who fight to defend their town from a Russian invasion-and then pretending the same thing was going to happen to us, training in the woods with my buddies. Of course, none of us were old enough to pick up on the irony of the film’s tagline-“No foreign army has ever occupied American soil . . . until now.”
Most days after school, my friends and I would run around in the hills behind our houses, but in summertime, our favorite activity was sneaking down to the river where our people had camped for centuries. We called it Down Below, pronounced as one word-
Downbelow.
Everyone would tell their parents they were going to someone else’s house to hang out, and, when my mom wasn’t looking, I’d stuff my backpack with a towel, a military-issue canteen, and a can of Beanee Weenees or sardines. I always carried my pocketknife and a lighter with me just in case, like my father had taught me.
We’d run down to the cattle guard next to the two-lane county road that cut through the reservation, and, when the coast was clear, we’d duck into the bushes and clamber through the drainage ditch to the other side. After maneuvering through clumps of jumping cactuses and cholla, yucca, juniper, and oak, we’d scoot down these huge lava rocks on our butts before turning around and climbing down backward, feeling into the foot holes. Once we were all down, we’d stash our bags under a bush and make our way barefoot across slippery basalt. We spent hours Downbelow splashing around in the cold water, the orange sun pouring through the towering ponderosas.
The river taught us how to be White Mountain Apache: strong and self-sufficient. Once we were done swimming, we dried off and collected kindling, making a fire so we could warm up the tinned rations we’d packed. On the way back home, we’d look for a stand of skunkbush to pluck tsínk’ózhé. The sour pop of the native red sumac berries made our lips pucker just like they probably did to our ancestors when they went foraging. My mom loved tsínk’ózhé, so I always made sure to carry an empty Ziploc in my pack so I could bring some home. The fruit reminded her of her childhood, she’d told me once, when she and her sister used to collect berries, which the “older ladies” would use to make refreshing Apache Kool-Aid.
My mother, Mariddie Johnson Craig, was my first cooking instructor and so much more. From a young age, I saw the impact she had on other people in our community and how much they respected her. She treated our neighbors and the people in our community with love, generosity, and kindness, delivering food to Old Man Whiskey-who was crazy about her pineapple upside-down cake-and organizing a caroling group during Christmas, where she’d hand out small paper sacks containing fruit, hard candy, and hazelnuts and almonds still in their shells.
My mother is someone who chooses her words carefully; people have always leaned in to hear what she had to say. She bought me my first journal, encouraging me to record events and feelings and emphasizing that memories and thoughts were very important. I’d see her at the kitchen table, filling her own journal with her beautiful handwriting. She had volumes and volumes of stories from her life written down.
A nurturing presence to everyone around her, my mother was the oldest of five children. She grew up in a home impacted by crushing poverty and hardship; even before her parents died from complications related to alcoholism when she was in her early twenties, she held the family together, acting as the matriarch and helping raise her two younger siblings who had fetal alcohol syndrome. She taught herself to cook, and by the time she became a mother herself, she knew how to make a delicious meal-even when there was very little in our fridge or pantry.
Some of my happiest early memories involve baking with my mom, leafing through her copy of
The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, with its glossy, golden-brown soufflé on the cover, looking for a recipe to make with whatever we had on hand. During one of these kitchen sessions, she told me how she’d discovered her love of baking when she lived with her foster family in Utah. Some of the recipes we prepared, like my favorite chocolate chip cookies, actually came from her foster mother, a friendly, soft-spoken white woman with crinkled eyes whom we kids called Grandma Bush. I imagine that, for my mother, who grew up in a chaotic environment, Grandma Bush’s home would have seemed especially calm and orderly. I can see now that, by inviting me to cook with her, my mother was sharing an important discovery-that the kitchen could be a warm, safe place, a little slice of heaven.
My parents actually met in Hawaii, where my mom was a student at Brigham Young University and my dad was stationed with the Marine Corps. The story goes that when my father first proposed to my mother, she said no.
“You have no direction in life,” he recalled her telling him.
My dad, Vincent Craig-a well-known singer-songwriter who performed across Indian Country-regularly recounted this story during his shows. He’d tell the audience that, after this rejection, he had returned home, to Crownpoint, New Mexico, where he climbed the nine-story water tower, intending to end his life. Instead, he watched the sun rise over the Navajo Nation, realizing that he wanted to live and be a positive influence on the people around him. He climbed down, went back to his mom’s house, shaved his beard, and cut off his long black hair, marching into the Navajo Police Department and telling them he wanted to help pursue justice in his community.
By the time I started elementary school, my father, a lifelong learner, had decided to enroll at the University of New Mexico and deepen his knowledge of Indian law and legal issues on and off the reservation. Once he started taking those college classes, it was just us three boys and my mom during the week. Our family budget, which had always been tight, got even tighter, so my mom and I started selling our baked goods to neighbors for extra money. We’d make triple batches of chocolate chip cookies and brownies, portioning them in little plastic baggies, and I’d pull our red Flyer wagon from house to house, a mobile bakery.
A former Marine Corps sharpshooter and sergeant who could build or fix anything, my dad was impressive in many ways, but he wasn’t much of a cook. He was ingenious and creative, though. I recall how he once stuck a few cans of Beanee Weenees in the engine of our truck when we went on a camping trip. At the end of a long drive, we arrived at our campsite, where he proudly presented a hot meal, serving us the mini hot dogs and baked beans with a box of crackers.
Once or twice a year, when my mother packed up her paisley bag and left for a few days to visit some relative or attend a conference on behalf of the tribe, she left my father in charge. I really loved those boys’ weekends, not least because we got to eat my father’s signature dish, a mix of over-browned, crunchy ground beef and a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup served over sticky green spinach noodles-the ultimate comfort food.
“All right, boys, Camouflage Goulash is ready,” my father would yell. “Come and get it!”
My brothers and I would drop everything and run to the kitchen; the first one there could snag the most generous portion.
“Boys, this is made by a real United States Marine,” Dad would say, ladling his trademark concoction into our bowls. He’d smile, then shout, “Oorah!”
My dad’s mother, Grandma Nancy, was the best cook I knew. I always loved driving up to visit her in Crownpoint. She was a typical Navajo grandma, small and loving, always happy to see us. She showered us with kind words and hugs, and her house was always bathed in amazing aromas from the bread baking in the big adobe oven in her backyard and whatever was bubbling on the stove.
One day, my brothers, cousins, and I were kicking up dust in her yard when Grandma marched out with a couple of my aunties, holding bowls and towels. I watched her walk up the driveway to a skinny sheep that was tied up to a stake. She looked down at the animal, mumbling a prayer under her breath, then pulling a giant knife out of her apron pocket.
My eyes got real big. “Whoa, Grandma’s a ninja,” I yelled, trying to get my playmates’ attention.
She looked over at me, putting a finger to her lips, then turned back and, in one quick motion, swiped the blade across the sheep’s throat, snapping its head back and taking a bowl from one of my aunts to catch the blood.
The other boys went back to running around, but I stood there staring at my grandma’s red-stained hands, watching her spend the next half hour or so taking the animal apart methodically. She was the first person I’d ever seen butcher an animal, and from her precise, confident motions it was obvious she’d done it many times before.
I’d only ever seen Grandma Nancy as this sweet, loving person, and then, suddenly, she took a life to feed us, committing this violent, bloody act with serious reverence. By that afternoon, she had mutton cooking on the grill, and the skin of the dead animal was hung and stretched out to dry on her clothesline. Everyone was chatting as my grandma giggled and baked more bread. It blew my mind that this was the same person.
I also learned a lot from my mother’s grandpa, Joseph Carlie Ivins, my great-grandfather. Grandpa Ivins was born on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in 1899, eight years after its establishment by the U.S. government, and when he was eight, he was put on a train and sent to Pennsylvania, where he attended the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, whose founder coined the phrase “Kill the Indian, save the man.” My dad-who recorded an album called
Boarding School Fish Stories when I was eight-made a point of telling us how Joseph and his friends always held on to their languages, as well as their values and beliefs. As a teenager, my great-grandfather managed to leave Carlisle and stay with friends down in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where he learned traditional Native farming techniques. Eventually, in his early thirties, Joseph finally made his way home, where he planted a lush garden down by the river.
I spent hours in that garden with my great-grandfather and my mother’s brother, Uncle Duwayne, digging for snails and learning how to weed, fix the irrigation lines, and sing to the plants. Joseph’s garden was about the size of a swimming pool, but it seemed enormous to a little kid like me. Surrounded by dense, wild vegetation, it opened up into neat rows of corn, beans, tomatoes, and squash-four foundational Indigenous cultivars that changed the way the world ate forever, even if I didn’t know that at the time.
There was a line of rose bushes with giant, fragrant flowers and a pear tree I loved to climb. Near the garden was an old ceremonial site where, every summer, a Sunrise Dance was held to celebrate a girl who was coming of age. I’d sit up in the tree listening to people drumming and singing, enjoying the aroma of roasting corn and eating a perfectly ripe, sweet, soft pear. I remember feeling so happy and safe.
nurbook
