The last cigarette

My grandma had to lie about being Choctaw just to own her own land. She’s full Choctaw, but on paper she could only claim fifty percent. My auntie told me she had to fabricate information just to get land in her name. Having land is something my family values deeply. We know what it took to hold onto it, and we know it’s meant to provide for the generations coming after us. The language didn’t survive that same fight. It died out somewhere along the way, but the culture stayed important, especially on my great-grandmother’s side, and we’ve made it a point to keep teaching our kids the value of it. We take the kids on field trips through Project Rise to the Choctaw Cultural Center, and my son does the youth advisory board. My wife’s grandmother is still alive, still passing the culture down; fry bread, the old ways, and she sings entirely in Choctaw. Now we’re the ones carrying those songs forward for our kids.

Twins are sacred in our culture. My grandma made a point of buying gifts for the twins in our family because of it. Historically, twins were even brought out to bless the crops. Our twins know that tradition now, and we encourage them to take it further, to their own kids someday.

Tobacco runs through a lot of our family stories, in different ways. My great-grandmother chewed plug tobacco her whole life. It was tied up with stories we heard about her and the Trail of Tears, and why our fry bread has a hole punched through it, so it could be carried differently on that walk. One of my cousins carried a tobacco pouch around his neck. My grandpa used tobacco medicinally. I got stung by a bee once as a kid, and he had me come over, packed tobacco on the sting, and pulled it right out. It worked immediately. My dad grew his own commercial tobacco in the front yard, and he used to make traditional pipes, carved with eagle heads, deer heads, other figures, that got passed around at meetings. He knew how to make traditional arrowheads too, out of deer horn, leather, even glass. I wish he’d taught me. Later in life, when my dad tried to quit smoking, the anxiety it helped mask would come back on him, and I think that’s the honest truth about tobacco used the right way. It has real purpose, real medicine in it, when you use it that way. On my wife’s side, her uncle carries a medicine bag and uses tobacco for prayer and smudging. My wife has worked to bring pieces of that back into the recovery center where she works, the Chiholi Center, “We Care for You,” because if we don’t pass these things down, they get forgotten for good.

Our tribe is leaning hard into our Elders right now to hold onto the stories and the language before it’s too late. I work at our hospital, and we answer the phone with “halitow” which means hello, in Choctaw. There are language initiatives across the tribe, and we recognize our first-language speakers, because there are fewer of them every year. A lot of our people were pushed into westernized schools growing up. Even our traditional dress changed. Real materials were too costly, so a lot of what people wear now isn’t quite authentic, though the diamond pattern still represents the rattlesnake, and the apron is still there. I try never to say “I know,” because the truth is I don’t, not really. I didn’t get taught most of it.

My dad died when my daughter was one. She remembers him a little, Pawpaw who rode the motorcycle. What I miss most is that he never got the chance to teach my kids the things I wish he’d taught me, the arrowheads, the arrows. Those things are just lost now, from where I sit. He didn’t teach me, so I had to learn what I could on my own, which means there’s a whole line of knowledge I can’t hand to my own children, because the man who held it is gone. When he found out he had cancer, he smoked one cigarette on the drive to the hospital, and then he told my sister to quit.