Elissa Washuta
Photo by Amber Cortez
Bio
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She has received fellowships and awards from Artist Trust, 4Culture, Potlatch Fund, and Hugo House, and her essays have been published by Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Ninth Letter, and other journals. Born and raised in the wooded, glacially-carved New Jersey Highlands, Elissa now lives in Ohio, where she works as an assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University.
I’ve been toiling over a draft of this book for years—it’s taken so much longer than I thought it would, and its shape and subject have morphed dramatically (I thought it was about food allergies, but it turns out to be about magic). Just when the book had snapped into clear focus and started growing unfathomably quickly, I learned that I’d be receiving an NEA Fellowship. What incredible timing: now, I’m weeks away from beginning the summer during which I hope to finish a large part of the draft. The fellowship has given me the financial freedom to say no to the side jobs that would pull me from my work. Thinking less about how to cover my basic needs has freed me to think more about this book.
Excerpt from "Apocalypse Logic"
At the end of Dances with Wolves, Wind in His Hair shouts down to Lt. Dunbar from a cliff. The English subtitles read, “Do you see that you are my friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?”
Because I don’t want boston-tilixam to think I am a nasty woman—there is already a word for this when applied to Native women, a word we don’t use, which is squaw—I want to explain that I love many boston-tilixam. Some are relatives; some I love so much that they are family to me; this has nothing to do with anything and I’m embarrassed that I even feel the need to say it. There are some boston-tilixam I don’t like, but it’s not because of their whiteness. Sometimes, it is about the things their whiteness motivates them to say and do, but none of that is really my business. The boston-tilixam are responsible for their own whiteness.
When the boston-tilixam came here, we traded at the river.
When they wanted our land, representatives of Boston Ilahee killed and relocated us.
I am descended from many boston-tilixam and I hold them inside my Indigenous body. I look like them. I have never said that I “walk in two worlds.” I walk in the world in which Native nations welcomed visitors who responded by creating a government on our forever land whose mistreatment benefits them.
I don’t know of a chinkuk wawa word that translates exactly to whiteness, maybe because we experience it not as an abstract noun but as an action verb. None of us can choose the legacy we are born within, but all of us choose our alliances. We make and reinforce our commitments with every action.
The problem: that Indigeneity is viewed by the boston-tilixam as a burden while whiteness is not.
The result: some boston-tilixam pour energy into defending the wearing of safety pins.
The weather forecast for Standing Rock: blizzards.
("Apocalypse Logic" was originally published by The Offing)