The fire was unlike anything she had ever seen. It was much taller than a man, and she was only a toddler. So it towered over her like a giant, shooting its hypnotic sparks into the dark sky. She sensed that the fire was somehow connected to the other strange sights and smells of that day.
First, the tepees had appeared on a gentle slope of the prairie. And then she noticed the herd of horses.
It seemed there was always sweet wood smoke in the air, but now it was laced with new smells that made her mouth water. By the time night fell and she found herself sitting cross-legged beside her father in front of the bonfire, she understood that the flavorful smells had come from cooking salmon, venison, elk, and buffalo. Kindly strangers had given her bites of the tangy meat, along with berries and cold water to drink. Inside the tepees, she explored among furs and pelts that gave off a comforting musk. Children played everywhere, and grownups watched them and laughed.
Old people sat around the fire and took turns talking. Light and shadow danced over their furrowed faces and high cheekbones. They had a soft, musical way of talking that almost made it sound as if they were singing lullabies.
There was drumming, and wild hymnal singing and dancing, and the reedy call of flutes. Sometimes she craned her head away from the fire and gazed back between the tepees. Far off in the distance she saw the familiar eastern wall of the world, the snow-capped Mission Mountains, fading to black silhouettes. They were like big quiet people, watching.
Right then she felt the fire go inside her. Beyond the mountains, beyond the flames, beyond the stars, she hented another world—the real world where everything came from. And returned. This would be her first conscious memory. Her father saw the wonder on her face. “Her eyes were as big as saucers,” he would say more than half-a-century later.
When it was bedtime, Earl Barlow gathered up his sleepy toddler and picked his way through the cars and pickup trucks at the edge of the encampment. He strolled the few blocks through Hot Springs, a village nestled in a seam of prairie and forest in western Montana. Yellow light poured from the windows of a tiny house where his wife, Arlene, waited with their second daughter, an infant.
It was a few days before the summer solstice of 1950. Cherie Barlow was two years old.
She had no idea that it was her father, a Stanford- and Montana Normal School-educated teacher, who had organized the powwow that brought two hundred Indians together as though history had spared them after all. All Cherie knew was that the world suddenly made sense to her. It had Indians in it, and she was one of them. And now she knew that the world was magic.
She soon understood that it was tragic, too. She began absorbing that over the next few years as the old people’s stories slowly came into focus. This happened not just at the Hot Springs powwow but at powwows in the surrounding hamlets of Dixon, Arlee, Big Arm, and Charlo. Like creatures beckoned from some mysterious ocean by the drums and flames, the terrible events of the Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek and countless other massacres swam into her life. It would be years, of course, before she knew what genocide was. Even so, she recognized that these strange names meant suffering, sorrow, death, loss, injustice.
What haunted her most, though, was not that such awful things happened, but that the elders had survived to tell of them with such equanimity. She knew by now that she, like her father, was Blackfeet, the fourth generation in her family to be raised on a reservation. She understood that the natives of the western Montana prairie were Flatheads, and that it was their Salish dialect that imparted such a lilting quality to their English. But she also recognized that their tranquil manner was an artifact, not of speech, but of the spirit. The Flathead elders seemed devoid of anger, fear, and grief. They were like souls purged of the world’s passions and sins, and they offered her a living example of what the human spirit is capable of.
It would be years, of course, before she understood that, too. But she got an inkling of how the elders’ message was taking root in her one day when she was riding her tricycle at the end of her unpaved street.
Out of nowhere, an old black Ford with running boards pulled up beside her.
“Get in the car,” a voice growled.
Cherie felt her heart surge. From the powwows she knew about death.
“No!” she said.
A gruff stranger got out of the car and started for her. Cherie pedaled furiously into the middle of a big mud puddle. She hoped the muddy water would deter her attacker, who was wearing pleated slacks and leather shoes, but it didn’t. He splashed in after her. Beneath a shock of white-blond hair his sick blue eyes burned with a weird light. His face was deeply pockmarked. The water now lapping his ankles, he grabbed Cherie by both wrists.
“Get in the car!” he snarled.
“No!”
The beast tried to snatch her off her trike, but her hands became talons clinched on the handlebars, and her feet hooked under the pedals. Suddenly she was jerked into the air, trike and all, dirty water streaming. The sleeves of the stranger’s white shirt were rolled up, and Cherie saw the muscles of his forearms bulging like thick cords.
Just then, Cherie glimpsed a neighbor woman coming down the road.
“There’s my mom! Mom!” she shouted.
Cherie dropped with a splash. The car sped off.
Cherie’s mother reported the incident to the sheriff, but the man was never found.
Although Cherie had been petrified, fear wasn’t the emotion that lingered afterward. Instead, she was in awe of the animal strength and cunning sparked from somewhere inside her. She never dreamed she was so strong. She began to realize that the powwows were somehow infusing her with a quiet confidence and identity that she knew couldn’t be coming from anywhere else. Cherie hadn’t yet entered kindergarten, but now she knew: she herself was a warrior and survivor.
She thought she could survive anything.
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