there have certainly been struggles, but Mar-
tha really has done everything to make their
lives true and considered and rooted in Lako-
ta ways. When my wife and I have questions
about parenting, Martha is the first (and only)
person we call. She is the epitome of a model
parent. When Jeffrey was little, he wanted long
hair, and Martha allowed him to wear dish tow-
els on his head, first around the house and then
to school. “I had all these dress-up phases,”
he told me. “I’d go to preschool dressed like
crazy.” Jeffrey now has long black hair that I
can’t imagine he’ll stop wearing long. It’s not
a stereotype to wear your hair long as a Native
man; it’s a cultural value, and he’ll no more cut
his value system than he will his hair. Martha
brushes it for him all the time.
I don’t always like to use the words wise and
wisdom, because they’ve been overused to de-
scribe Native people. But Martha is wise, and
this is not the same as being smart, which Mar-
tha is, too. Wisdom is as hard-earned as it is de-
ceptively simple. It cuts to the heart of matters.
Martha and Geri have that way about them, so
Jeffrey was raised in a home rich with wisdom.
If wisdom is an overused and underrespect-
ed quality employed to describe Native people,
I feel that there are other qualities we’re not al-
lowed to ascribe to ourselves, to our tribes, to
our cultures. Words like fortitude, and generosi-
ty. We’ve been given stoic and brave, drunk and
dumb, wise and sage, and anything referring to
us being mystically connected to the earth. We
find ourselves caught between the polar oppo-
sites of subhuman and superhuman. I’ve of-
ten been asked by non-Natives what makes me
Native American, and how will I teach my son
to be a Native American? I don’t feel I can tell
them how much generosity is a part of Chey-
enne culture. A value I was taught as a Chey-
enne value. It’s not enough. They want some-
thing familiar, a popular depiction of Native
Americans, not that a spirit of generosity is one
of the things that make me Cheyenne. I knew
from early on that if someone said something
nice about something you owned, you gave
it to them. Last year, while visiting my dad, I
saw a very nice (and very expensive) Pendle-
ton jacket in his closet. I told him I liked it, for-
getting that this would result in him immedi-
ately giving it to me, which he did. I ended up
taking my author photo in that jacket. I don’t
like that I can’t avoid seeing that photograph
a lot these days, but then I like it because it
makes me remember my dad.
Jeffrey was wearing a faded black hood-
ie with an incomprehensible (to me) math-
ematical equation and the phrase ESCAPE
VELOCITY. I asked what it means. “The speed
at which you have to shoot something directly
up, or at least perpendicular to the surface, in
order to get it to escape the gravitational field
of an object,” he said. Like an orbit? “No, be-
cause orbit is described as you’re falling to-
wards an object, but you’re going so fast that
you always miss it.” He helps me understand.
“Say I was talking about you. If I shot you up
at escape velocity, you’d escape Earth’s grav-
itational field, which means you wouldn’t fall
back down.” While he explained, I inadver-
tently looked up to the sky and imagined mov-
ing beyond the blue and into the black, getting
very cold very fast and then dead.
There’s more to the hoodie than a space joke.
He wants to be an astrophysicist, but it’s not
just that, either. “My mom always talks abouther father, and how he sort of spiraled down
after they came from South Dakota to Oak-
land,” he said. “It’s happened to all the men
in the family. My dad and all his brothers have
passed away. There’s this theme of the men
falling out, mainly because of the historical
trauma that has trickled down. Being able to
overcome that mentally is very important. My
mom always talks about breaking the chain,
breaking that cycle, that downward trend.”
He understands the gravity of his situation,
and he’s still figuring out the speed he’ll need
to escape the field. He knows that to succeed
will be the exception.ANOTHER THING you should
know about Jeffrey is that he is fierce. He is
kind and gentle and sweet, right down to the
way his voice sounds, but to see him in the
dojo is to fear him. When he moves, his face
is intense. There’s no anger, just a ferocity
and a precision of movement that you can
tell comes from countless hours of practice.
The day after we talked in his backyard, I
met up with Jeffrey at West Wind, the mar-
tial-arts school where he was training for the
test to earn his third-degree black belt. He’d
started taking lessons after an incident at space
camp the summer before fifth grade, when
another camper hit him. Martha decided she
wanted her son to learn how to defend himself
and enrolled him at West Wind. He took to it
right away. With Jeffrey, that’s no small thing.
“When I dive into something, I usually go pret-
ty deep,” he told me. “I’ve always been natu-
rally focused. My mom calls them ‘phases.’ I
won’t stop until I’ve learned as much as I pos-THIS PAGE: Jeffrey’s intricate cardboard
replicas, like that of Hogwarts
Castle, can take him weeks to build.
OPPOSITE: Martha, his mother, brushes
his long black hair all the time.