In “False Star,” your story in this week’s issue, the narrator, a young Blackfeet man, turns eighteen and comes into money due to him from a claim check. Can you tell us what a claim check is, and how it came to be a rite of passage for certain people, and how and why it ended?
A claim check was money that Blackfeet tribal members got for about a forty-year period following a land-claim settlement with the federal government in 1962. Incredibly, there was for a brief period this thing called the Indian Claims Commission, which allowed tribes to sue the government for various past infractions, we’ll say. A lot of tribes settled claims with the government during that period, but I have no idea what they called the money they got. We called what we got claim checks. People usually got their money when they turned eighteen and then went about spending it. Tribal members were getting this money for long enough that it did become a kind of rite of passage, but the thing about money from a court settlement is that it does run out. People born around the time I was were the last to get this money. I didn’t get a claim, because I’m not enrolled, I’m considered a descendant, because my tribe is shortsighted enough to use blood-quantum laws to determine citizenship—but that is another story entirely. Suffice to say, I watched a lot of friends and cousins get this money and saw how they spent it and what it did and didn’t do to their lives, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. In my twenties, I started talking to older people in the community, trying to understand what this money was, where it came from, why we got it. It took a while, but I eventually figured it out, and of course when you find out what it’s about and what the long-term implications of such a claim settlement are, well, it’s devastating. It was a very significant period on my reservation, but I think you would be hard pressed to find a person there under the age of thirty who knew what a claim check was. So I felt the need to write about this for a number of reasons, not the least of which was to make some kind of aesthetic record of this period of modern Blackfeet history. Time destroys things very quickly if we don’t do something to resist that, and art is one of the best ways we have to mount that resistance. If you do it well enough, the book or painting or film or sculpture you made will hold off time, in a way, for a while, and that is an extraordinary thing, and for me it’s the highest aim of art.
With the money, the narrator goes to the nearest large town to buy his first car. That’s a rite of passage for many people of his age—what makes it an even more significant event for someone of his background and culture?
There is nothing like that first car, particularly if you live in the rural American West, where the distance to anywhere can be vast. But, as I say in the story, there is something different about the way we relate to vehicles; I’ve never really heard anyone talk about it, it’s just something I’ve noticed and thought about for a long time. Part of this is a kind of restlessness that is built into Blackfeet culture, combined with a very strong sense of individuality. I’ve had friends from other tribes comment on this before. I have this restlessness in me; it’s very hard for me to be in one place for very long. So a vehicle is a way of doing something with that energy, a way of giving it direction, even if it means you’re just cruising around town looking for something to do, waiting to run into someone you want to talk to.
Your writing is vivid and masterly, and obviously draws on many influences. What feels to you especially Native, or Blackfeet, about your writing, and is this something you think a lot about, or try to calibrate?
This question made me realize I’m drawing on two distinct lines of influence: that of literature, and that of Indian Country, and more specifically the Blackfeet Reservation, where all my formative language experience took place. These things happened together, of course, because I was reading all the time as I was growing up while I was experiencing the spoken language around me, which was very different than what I was reading in books. One of the things I worked on for a long time was figuring out how to bring these two things together. I’m fairly sensitive to how people speak, as in the timbre of their voice, patterns of speech, accents, changes in grammar relative to place, etc. There is a way of speaking English on my reservation that is entirely distinct, and it’s related to the fact that until relatively recently most people were not first-language English speakers. So there are syntactical structures that are carried over from the Blackfoot language, a tendency to add a lot of modifiers in order to emphasize something, and a kind of slightly modified repetition of information that creates a circular or looping sense of things, particularly if it is an older person speaking. So a lot of my writing life has been trying to reconcile those two lines of influence, trying to make them work together. I cut my teeth on the modernists. I was drawn to their incredible sense of language, but the one who really started me down the path of understanding how to do that was Faulkner, because he has such a spectacular ear for vernacular and such a strong sense of place. I don’t know if anything is particularly Native about my work, unless we just mean the general subject matter, which I think is something that would be eminently recognizable to any indian reader. In some way or another, all of it is Blackfeet, top to bottom, because I’m writing it, so the language is a product of my consciousness. But, in a more concrete sense, the dialogue in particular is. I can hear the voices of characters when I’m writing dialogue. And there are certain ways of phrasing things that are typical to Blackfeet in the exposition. I’m not sure most people would notice, but it’s important to me to build that into the sentences, so to speak.
