Knitting Socks with Grandmother

“Grandmother, what’s in that box, that cedar box?” a child asks.

“Nothing that would interest you, you snoop,” a grandmother responds and grabs the box to put up on a high shelf.

“I see it every time I come here,” a child continues.

“Work on knitting your socks, child,” a grandmother sits beside the small child, who clicks knitting needles together as she creates what will eventually become a sock.

“Why do I have to knit socks anyways?” a child wonders aloud.

“So we have something to sell, so we can make money, so we can eat,” a grandmother wearily replies. “Why do you talk so much, granddaughter? You are exhausting an already exhausted elder.”

The granddaughter smiles. “You like my questions.”

The grandmother narrows her eyes and smirks at the granddaughter. She picks up her own knitting needles and starts to knit her own sock. For several moments, they share the silence together.

“kaya,” the granddaughter begins, “Are we different?”

“What’s different?” the grandmother asked. “Different how?”

“Well, why did that man get mad at us yesterday,” the child continued. “We were only picking berries. You said that we should take from the land what we need. But that man got so mad. And he said things that I didn’t understand.”

“Never you mind what he said,” the grandmother sternly said, raising her voice ever so slightly. “We are only doing as Creator has wanted us to do for years.”

More silence. The sun was shining high through the trees but the clouds were rolling in. The grandmother anticipated the rain; she could feel it in her marrow. Soon it would be pouring. It was autumn now. The leaves began to fall from the trees. Soon, the grandmother would have to set about chopping wood, if she couldn’t get her son to help her.

“Kaya,” the child began again. This time she waited for a response.

“Yes, child,” kaya answered.

“Why was that man so angry at us?”

The child’s voice was so small, so unknowing of the world beyond the reservation. It was hard to get her to understand how everything was changing, despite the lessons her grandmother taught her.

“My granddaughter,” kaya started. “There are a lot of things I haven’t taught you about this world we live in.”

“Teach me, kaya,” the child said in an almost whisper. The grandmother’s eyes filled with tears of both joy and sadness.

“The history of our people is not always pretty,” kaya began. “But we are a strong people. We used to live everywhere. All over this country. We didn’t own the land, but we cared for it and tended it so that it would care for us and tend to us when we needed it. In that way, we lived tandem with the earth.”

The grandmother took a deep breath before she continued. There was a slight roll of thunder in the distance. The sun was no longer shining as the clouds had overtaken it. Rain was here. “Time changes everything. The white people changed everything around us, forcing us to change too.”

“Why should we have to change?” the granddaughter asked.

“It was either change or be killed.”

“But we lived here first, didn’t we?” the granddaughter inquired. “Why didn’t we fight them away?”

“There were more of them than there were of us,” kaya went on. “Now hush up and listen. I’m trying to teach you.”

“Yes kaya,” the granddaughter whispered as she continue clicking the knitting needles together.

“We used to live in different villages at different rivers,” kaya reminisced. “Different villages in the summer; different villages in the winter. When the white man came and forced us to sign the treaty, we were forced to move away from our fishing grounds and gathering grounds. Our longhouses were burned to the ground to discourage us from returning to our familiar areas. We settled on the reservation without food, water, or housing. Many people died. They died of hunger, thirst, disease, and white man.”

“How?”

“When I was a girl, a bit older than you,” the grandmother continued. “My sister and I used to leave the reservation to go pick berries, like what you and I did the other day. Unfortunately, where the berries were, a white man lived nearby. He had a farm and a family near the woods where the berries thrive. We thought if we could sneak around through the longer grass, he wouldn’t see us cutting through his property. And we were right. We snuck through with our baskets and the farmer never saw us. We filled our baskets as full as we could carry. Then my sister and I left for home. We’d had a very good day.”

“What kind of berries?” the child asked.

“The berries are not important,” the grandmother snapped. She thought for a moment. “They were blackberries. I only remember the kind of berries they were because of how they stained my sister’s dress. You see, my granddaughter, my sister and I were having such a good time, such a good day. We had traveled this way many times. Somehow we had forgotten that the white man and his farm were there.”

The grandmother got quiet as she remembered. The anger. The rage. The sadness. She hadn’t thought on this moment in ages. Yet here she was, relaying the tale to her granddaughter. It was a memory she had ignored for years. A lump formed in her throat as she relived once more that terrible day that her and her sister went berry picking together for the last time.”

“Grandmother,” the child gently spoke. “What happened?”

“It happened so fast, I could barely fathom what had happened.”

“What do you mean?” the child asked.

The old woman swallowed back the lump in her throat. “The farmer hated us Indians. He was not a respectful man. My sister and I walked side by side with our baskets full of berries. Talking, laughing and then there was a sound. At first I thought it was thunder growling in the distance, but it was a bright sunny day with no clouds in the sky. My sister fell to the ground. I realized someone was shooting at us and I did what my sister did and fell to the ground, covering my head. I heard two or three more gun shots, and as I lay on the ground, waiting for whatever would happen next, I turned to my sister to ask what we should do. My sister laid still on the ground next to me, her back turned to me.”

The grandmother inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. “I thought it weird that she had managed to get berry juice on the back of her dress. I asked my sister what we should do but she didn’t respond. She just laid there. Laid there in the tall grass with me. I pulled at her until she lay on her back and then I saw. My sister had been shot clean through the chest. She had died instantly.”

The granddaughter let the tears glide down her cheeks as she watched the grandmother struggle with her sadness.

The grandmother remembered it too clearly for a memory that had been locked away for ages. How she had sat up and wailed deep from her spirit at discovering her sister was dead. How she shook her sister, called her name, screamed at her to wake up. How the farmer with his gun shoved the barrel in her face and said “take that dead injun off my property now! And don’t let me catch you passing through here again or you’re the next dead injun!”

Wailing and crying, the grandmother had to drag her dead sister off the property of the white man. She had to drag her sister home, crying the entire time. She had to come home and tell her parents, her family what had happened.

“Well,” the grandmother finally spoke. “I never went berry picking again, until you came along.”

“Why?” the granddaughter asked. Another rumble of thunder, a flash of lightening and then a heavy rain began to fall.

“I wanted you to learn about the woods, the forest,” the grandmother said as she got up to open a window. She loved to smell the fresh rain. “I wanted to teach to you the things my sister could never teach to her kids, because she was killed before she could have any.”

“Was it the same man?” the granddaughter asked. “That yelled at us when we went berry picking?”

“No, it wasn’t,” kaya replied. “It could have been his son though. Looked almost like him, and I remember that angry farmer.”

“He didn’t try to kill us though,” the granddaughter said in a hushed tone, as though she was afraid to utter what the grandmother was already thinking.

“No,” kaya said. “He didn’t. Times have changed. The hate is the same, but now killing our people isn’t a sport.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” the child wondered aloud.

“I suppose it is,” kaya answered. “But, we don’t just want to outlaw hateful things; we should be changing the hate into something else.”

“Love?”

“Maybe, child, I don’t know,” kaya said.

There were several moments of silence. The grandmother stood by the window, remembering and the grandchild sat nearby, absorbing her kaya’s words.

“Is it always going to be like this?” the granddaughter asked.

“No, I don’t think it will be.”

“Kaya?”

“Yes child?” the grandmother pulled herself away from the window, eyes full of tears. She stared lovingly at the child knitting socks before her.

“Will I have to go back to that school?” she asked. “I don’t like it there. I like it here with you. I like hearing your stories. I never want to go back there. There’s never enough food. And it’s always cold.”

“Yes, Little Rain, you can stay with me,” the grandmother said through tears. “You can stay with me forever if that’s what you want.”

“Really?” the child asked.

“Of course,” the grandmother said. “But you must remember something Little Rain. You must remember that just like the rain outside, you will come and go. And you should come and go as well. Don’t stay in one place for too long. Spread yourself across the land. Help things grow. That is why I call you Little Rain. This is what our family wanted for you.”

Little Rain smiled and went back to her knitting, happy that she would be able to stay with her grandmother for as long as she liked.

The grandmother, weathered by her many years on this land, shook with sadness. She choked back a sob. The old ways were dying. All that she wanted for her granddaughter was to have her learn the old ways, so that she could pass them on to her future children, and so on and so forth.

That would never happen. Kaya closed her eyes, willing the tears to stop. She placed a hand delicately over her mouth to smother any sob that wanted to escape. Her heart was so heavy with sadness that she could feel it leaking into her stomach, making her feel sick. Little Rain would never pass these traditions and teachings on. Little Rain would probably never leave this house. And she would definitely never have children.

Little Rain had died in that school she hated so much. Her poor little body was never found. Kaya’s son had received a letter saying Little Rain had perished due to disease. The body was never sent home for a proper burial. All that kaya had left of Little Rain were various trinkets and toys that she’d put in a cedar box for when she returned from that school, but she had never returned. The box became a sacred tomb of Little Rain’s various treasures left about the house.

Her son went to demand Little Rain’s body, but the school acted like they had no idea what he was talking about. After much poking and prodding, the superintendent of the school admitted that the body had been “taken care of,” but then wouldn’t say what that meant. They never got to see Little Rain again once she set foot in that school.

It made kaya sick to her stomach, as Little Rain was only sent to the school so that she’d be well fed. Times on the reservation were hard and food and money were scarce. The school was supposed to take care of Little Rain and all the other kids. There were other families who had sent their kids off to the boarding schools and had never heard from them again.

The grandmother looks out at the rain, which was slowing to a stop. She looked over at Little Rain and wondered how long before she joined her in the spirit world. Her heart heavy, kaya walked over to sit beside her granddaughter. Together, they knitted socks in silence, with occasional rainfall interrupting their peace.