...time and what fills it has been whirling by far faster and louder than I want it to.
Warm Springs. I never thought I would find a place that I wanted to be at more than here in White Swan, but that's exactly what happened.
While the reservation seems far more hopeful and better off from the outside, the statistics remain the same. They're headed towards a death every week of this year. That makes 52 deaths in one year out of about 4,000 enrolled members. Unemployment is about the same as the Yakama Reservation at about 65% as is the drop out rate.
These are the things that I knew as we were driving down through Washington to Oregon in Gerdy Blue, our glorious, 1989 van. She was stuffed full of food, paint brushes, hammers, rakes, balloons, bubbles, and the various other weapons we wield against hopelessness.
Warm Springs. I never thought I would find a place that I wanted to be at more than here in White Swan, but that's exactly what happened.
While the reservation seems far more hopeful and better off from the outside, the statistics remain the same. They're headed towards a death every week of this year. That makes 52 deaths in one year out of about 4,000 enrolled members. Unemployment is about the same as the Yakama Reservation at about 65% as is the drop out rate.
These are the things that I knew as we were driving down through Washington to Oregon in Gerdy Blue, our glorious, 1989 van. She was stuffed full of food, paint brushes, hammers, rakes, balloons, bubbles, and the various other weapons we wield against hopelessness.
[Yakama Nation's Museum through the trees]
I'm not exactly sure how long we were driving with the gas gage below empty, but somehow we made it to the Colombia River Basin where the next gas station was.
Have you ever noticed how many people check what kind of animal they're eating before they take a bite?
When we arrived at the First Baptist church in Madras, a small town right outside the Rez that we called home for that week, we had a large pot of gravy of an unknown age waiting for us on the kitchen counter along with other various pancake and biscuit paraphernalia.
Soon all was in order however, the dishwasher was chugging away trying to get the gravy off, and lists were made and ready to go.
And so the week began.
[title blatantly taken from Owls on the Answering Machine, crafted by the beautiful Karin Dahl. Y'all should go read some of her tidbits]
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