Black Darkness
Piiyuuk Shields
- Trying to relearn how to skin sew is so difficult. I haven’t done it for years. It is like my hands don’t know what they’re doing, but my ears remember everything. The sound of the thread being pulled through the seal skin brings back memories. By the third stitch, I remember being a child, and my grandmother being so frazzled about the upcoming annual dance ceremony. I would sit there and listen to my grandmother sew while I rubbed the seal fur and day dreamed about each black spot being ice sheets as my fingers would ice jump, like the teenagers do every time the ice breaks.
- I am so cold and the sky is so dark. I never knew black could be so dark. The foggy cold wind treats my cheeks like an ice pin cushion, making it harder to feel or smile. We are sitting inside of a sled, watching ourselves slow down to a complete stop as the snow machine’s, that we were once hooked up to, tail lights get smaller and smaller until they disappear. No one moved. No one made any noise. The only noise were the screams in my head as I stared at the black sky filled with tiny white stars, through the patches of fog. I was screaming in my head with fear, because we were in the territory of the little people. The Hawaiians call them Menehune. Some people call them gnomes. We call them ircinrraq. I remembered my grandmother telling me stories about them, with her lips stained with black bull tobacco as dark as the winter night sky. The ircinrraq people are known for taking people into their realm and for being tricksters. It isn’t a coincidence that our sled isn’t connected to the snow machine anymore. I know that they are the reason for us becoming unhitched.
- I’m always the observer or my grandmothers right hand when it comes to piercing babies—but not today. “Hold her ears stretched,” my grandma said as I stared at the black tip of the porcupine quill. “Make sure you poke it straight through, or else her piercing will not heal right.” It’s so unreal because this baby is so new and only two days old. I have never felt so nervous in my life. My heart is pounding and my head feels light. My chest tightens as my hands shake and my world turns black.
- My mom’s fancy parka is my most prized family heirloom. Each bead and stitch is set purposefully. While sewing, the seamstress must sew with good thoughts and intentions, as to not sew those bad thoughts and intentions into the parka. Each color, on the parka means something: red, white, blue and black. I always had the most difficult time understanding the black. Black symbolizes the evil, bad medicine and dark winters. My elders always said that there is a balance in this word that we need to uphold. They always talked about the good shamans and the bad shamans. The good shamans were the healers of illnesses and the keepers of our people. The bad shamans were the ones who cursed others with eternal pains and sicknesses. They were the ones who hunted and killed people in their dreams. Bad shamans are the ones who change the weather, turning your perfect hunting day into a storm you will fight for your life. Now that I’m older, I’m learning there is so much good in this word, but there is also equal amount of bad. The black balances out the white, just like in our world.
- Between the wrinkles of my grandmother’s wrist, I found her traditional tattoos from her childhood. The once black lines are now a faded grey. She tells me about how her mother plucked one of her longer, stronger strands of hair from her head, as she chewed on the leftover charcoal of burned wood from the wood stove. Her mother threaded her hair through the thin bone needle and ran the hair through the chewed-up charcoal paste. Then she pinched her skin and poked through. She pinched my wrist as she said it was my turn to get my tattoos and become a woman.
- This is not my favorite part of cutting seal—washing the seal skin. When men catch seal, they purposefully cover the fur with blood. Our ancestors figured out that if the fur is covered in blood, the oils of the blubber won’t stain the fur yellow. The water is ice cold and the fur is soaked with blood so dark red, it is black. I scrub every inch of the seal skin, as my hand slip everywhere. My arms get so tired from the weight of the skin as I shampoo the fur with dawn dish soap.
- I’m feeling so sick, and they keep telling me to look to the horizon. The horizon is so boring. It is a flat line with one half ocean and the other half sky. I try to fall asleep with my head in my folded arms as I stare down into the ocean. My grandmother always said to always listen to the adults when I am out at sea, because death is always near. But my tummy was hurting like death, and the black backs of the schools of herring were the only entertainment out here.
- “Stop crying or Qamyumaa will be sure to come get you,” my grandma warns us. Qamyumaa is the creature that comes and gets little crying children who won’t go to sleep or are being too loud at night. She crawls out of the ocean in search of children, because she doesn’t have any of her own. She takes the ones that don’t listen because the family will miss them the least. She will breastfeed you with her breast filled with green, beaver river water. You will fight but she is strong and her powers will keep you latched. “Oh no! Qamyumaa is here!” my grandma says as we all scream hide under the thick black blanket.
- I wake up from my nap to a dream of being alone. I remember the house filled with eerie quietness so I went back to bed. I wake up people with black crosses smeared on their foreheads. I go outside to play and everyone I see has this black cross on their foreheads. I try to wake up, but I realize it is not a dream. All of the adults come up to me and hug me and say that they knew I didn’t go to church, but how did they know?
- Every winter, the wind blows warm for a little, then it blows cold. The ground freezes into a slick ice glass floor. The wind blows hardest under the dark night. The wind blows so hard that the children are blown away, sliding down the road. On days like these, I wish I had a big net to catch all the little kids playing outside as I watch through my grandma’s back window.
- Every Sunday after church, elders come over to eat. They think it’s just so cute for a little Black-Yup’ik girl like me to talk all the time. I do not know how to speak in English yet, because all we speak at my grandmother’s house is Yup’ik. The elders would gently tug at my curly hair as I passed by as an act of showing their love in our Yup’ik way. They would create short songs and sing them to me to see me smile and become bashful. Then they would dig their nose into mine and unintentionally smear their strong smelling black bull juices onto my face and sometimes into my mouth. It wouldn’t be until I ran to the back room that I would wipe my face clean of all the black wet smears of tobacco, because it is disrespectful to wipe the elder’s Eskimo kiss right away.
Piiyuuk Shields is pursuing a Baccalaureate of Elementary Education.
