Like Lightning Between The Clouds

Labor Day weekend is an appropriate time to reflect on the work we do in life. A time to look at how destiny, family history and natural talents shape the work we ultimately choose and pursue. Here, writer Kara Briggs looks at three generations of women in her family and how their unique work made possible the work of the generations that followed.

I am a writer. My mother was a teacher. My grandmother was a healer.

In our ways we wrapped our hands around destiny.

We found our own room, made our own way and, with the blessing of the creator, changed the world in which we live.

Our family always has educated its young. The breath of grandparents brushed over our faces as history was told. The winds whipping through the Yakama Valley taught us seasons. The salmon taught us death. And rebirth.

In the early 20th century, the system of education changed.

My grandmother was sent from Medicine Valley in the shadow of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. There her father’s Arabian horses kicked up the dust, treaded on the sage and sent up a sweet scent.

Her name was Ochmean. She was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Tacoma. There the Franciscan sisters gave her a name, one of their names. Ermina. It sounded almost the same, they told her.

Later her family way of gathering herbs in the mountains gave way to modern medicine and nursing school at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tacoma.

Ermina found herself in the whitewashed hallways. She was left alone at night to comfort the dying. She gathered their stories like herbs and tucked them in the pouch of her imagination. Their stories became her medicine.

Years later she applied their stories like a balm whenever she wanted to teach me something of life. In her imagination they were reborn.

When she married she moved home to White Swan in the valley where she was born. Her children came one after another like the clouds crossing the sky. One died. Six lived.

Then her husband turned violent. She turned bitter. The marriage ended as World War II began.

Ermina wanted to look for work. But as she thought about the hospitals in Toppenish, on the Yakama Indian Reservation, and Hoquiam, where she lived, she knew that the white administrators would turn her away.

An Indian woman nurse. A college graduate. A preposterous idea in 1942.

She packed up the children and moved to Tacoma, where she was a nurse before. Only the hospital that issued her diploma would believe that an Indian woman had one.

They would have to.

She slept days while her children fended for themselves on M Street in the Hilltop neighborhood.

She worked nights alone, again tending the dying when even their families forsook them.

She told me that it hurt to be alone, the only Indian in the hospital and the only Indian family in the neighborhood.

A Yakama farmer sent over some of his crops to keep the family from starving.

In the summers Ermina left the hospital. She and her six children picking crops could make more money in two months than she could the rest of the year working as a nurse. They followed the crops. First strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. Then the beans. Then the late summer melons.

Farmers knew Ermina’s children. They knew she stretched out her strict hand to make them work hard. Pick more. Stop bickering. Work faster. Earn more.

The farmers hired the children as often as they showed up to work.

When it was time, she sent her girls to college, her boys to the military.

Evelyn was the fourth child. She was one of the brilliant ones. And indisputably the pretty one.

Evelyn was a model in 1958. She fitted and pinched her 5-foot-6-inch frame into Jackie O suits. She lined her lips and swept up her hair.

And she studied at Catholic universities. The words of Browning and Hopkins and George Eliot filled her mind.

When a high school teacher told her little brother that he should join the Marines because college wasn’t for Indians, she charged into his office to object. But the advice already had taken. Her brother shipped out to Vietnam. He was captured and imprisoned.

Evelyn believed in justice, but she didn’t see a lot of it. She thought a good education would save a child from a life of pain.

She learned to teach what she loved. It came naturally. The inspiration flowed from her mind into the high school students in her classes.

She greatly loved everyone in her reach - nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters. Finally, completely, unceasingly, she loved me, her only daughter.

She read poems she wrote, letting the words wrap sweetly around my infant body. She wanted the words to live through me. I was her final student.

Evelyn taught my father to speak poetry to me, to read to me, to hold me. So when she died, when I was not quite 4, her words would live on through him.

They did. My father, Greg Briggs, filled my imagination with literature, our conversation with politics and my mind with history. The dates and places he found took my mind and stayed.

One telling, and I could repeat it word for word.

He came from a white world. He liked the printed word.

When I was 7, I began to write. It came out in verse. Sure, free form. Once it started it never stopped.

The words pour like a river from my spirit constantly. I dream the words. They resonate in my mind until my hand writes them.

My dad prophesied over my words. He said I would write like no one had written before. Somehow something no one thought of before. I would stretch imaginations. I would help people who didn’t know how to help themselves.

He didn’t live to see my name in print.

But for five years it appeared in Spokane, his hometown, in the newspaper he had read.

In my own way - half Yakama and half white - I use my words as a bridge.

In words I find the source of my strength.

My name describes the strength I have been given. It’s the name that was given to me by the elders.

Betawasinoquay. Lightning between the clouds.

I have strengths that the women before me gave me.

It’s the strength to fight in an era when a Yakama Indian woman can fight and win.

When someone tried to hold me back from my work, I hired a lawyer and fought like lightning in the clouds.

But I prefer to use my strengths to help people.

My grandmother helped with her hands. My mother helped with her spoken word.

I help with the written word.

It doesn’t fade away. It’s always preserved, if only on someone’s refrigerator or scrapbook.

Many other words are still inside me, waiting to be written.

They come from the women before me. They come from generations of mothers. They are memories that stir my spirit.

I am their progeny. I keep their stories alive.

MEMO: Kara Briggs grew up in Spokane, graduated from Whitworth College and was a reporter for The Spokesman-Review from 1990 to 1995. She is now a local government reporter for The Oregonian and vice president of the Native American Journalists Association.