Momma's Love Itch

by Elizabeth Woody

Elizabeth Tapper and Elizabeth Woody, *Coyote and Woma*n, etching, 13.5 x 10.75 inches, date unknown. Courtesy of the artists.

Momma's Love Itch

Elizabeth Woody | DEC 2024 | Issue 40

In the worst snowstorm in the High Mountain Desert of the Navajo Nation, your father and his brothers sat in the truck back under sheepskin. You are kicking away in my womb in the cab. Your uncle-in-law navigates blind in the snow as Aunt Bessie directs us on the rough unpaved roads. No signs anywhere. On every bump I scream. We get stuck over and over.

Your dad and uncles push on the pickup when it is stuck. They jack up the truck and push it over out of ruts. I am still screaming. Your uncle-in-law gets a charley horse and we both scream. Your Aunty starts laughing hysterically at this point.

We didn’t make it to the Catholic hospital I wanted. We ended up at the Presbyterian Church Mission hospital at Ganado. The doctor is tiny. So small he can’t push my gurney in. I am crying, “Get me a life-size doctor.” It was the most pain I ever felt.

When you were born, the sun broke through and lit up the windows. The drops melting on the icicles on the window rang out music in the light. It was the most beautiful music. This was your birth, and I knew I would never be alone anymore. You are my light. My blood song.

My first mothers did not have wombs. I have two original ancient mothers in this glittering world. They imparted wisdom to us when we were not yet real people. Their mythical bodies enliven the stone they rest in and watch by their grace this new generation. I carry my mother’s and grandmother’s eggs — their blood.

Our lives are expanding sacredness. This fourth world comes from three previous and unsuccessful First World or Niʼ Hodiłhił, Second World or Niʼ Hodootłʼizh, Third World or Niʼ Hałtsooí. Earth People must maintain balance with the Mother Earth. The stories are epic and detailed. The Fourth World — the Glittering World or Niʼ Hodisxǫsglittering World — is jittery and cacophonous of sound and thumping technology outside the natural earth. I learned of the previous worlds from various sources.

My Institute of American Indian Arts student told me that he despised the English language. Using it, we are unaware of the sacredness that emanates from our tongues. This is outside our sacred trust to the land, Dinétah, “among the people.” The four sacred mountains are traditional boundaries for Dinétah: Hesperus Peak to the north, Mount Taylor to the south, Blanca Peak to the east, and the San Francisco Peaks to the west. It maps the foundation of our stories, practices and ceremony. When we speak, it is the wind of life that draws power from this source.

Spider Woman in the third world wove a map of the universe and the geometrical patterns of the stars. She taught the people to weave for beauty in one’s life and to teach balance. Several levels of “coming into being,” for People as weavings are all sourced back to this powerful woman. She wove and bestowed her creative strength to the People. She is the stone Spider Rock and wisdom I originate from.

My other original mother is along the Columbia River as an image set above the site of my great-great grandmother’s village Nixluidix who is called Tsgaglallal, or She Who Watches. A woman chief who taught the first people how to build houses and live well. Coyote changed her into the rock image she is now. She wanted to watch over her people in perpetuity. Nixluidix was the Wishram’s main village and trading spot. Lewis and Clark were the first American visitors who marked a significant change to come, much like Coyote the trickster coming down the river changing the place and punishing at leisure. It was the pulling of the fibers in our weavings from Beautyway shape and form. The earthy designs of love raveled and rewove.

While neither of these ancestresses had wombs, they possessed creative powers. They were just and intelligent. They embody dream and design. They are here and how my mother and grandmothers passed their brilliance and their eggs and fecundity in the Glittering World to me. Where they rest today is my homeland and core strength. She Who Watches is above the former village on the Wimahl or Big River and Spider Rock is in the Dinétah homeland at Canyon De Chelly, where my mother hiked barefoot while pregnant with me.

This is the Fourth World my soulful body slid into. All the previous worlds were troubled and only the good people made it through each time. A Nahuatl elder named Capitan spoke to a group of young indigenous leaders I was part of called Americans for Indian Opportunity in Mexico City. He told us, “we are entering the age of Justice!” We cheered. His intense eyes scanned us. According to the Aztec Calendar, a stone book of the ancient libraries that survived Spanish conflagrations, his words settled into our bones and chilled our hearts, “Justice is hard. Learn your peoples’ wisdoms to survive the time that is coming.”

Elizabeth Woody, *She Who Watches,* digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

My father was born into Bitter Water (Todích'íí'nii) rubbed from Spider Woman’s skin. The four original clans of the Navajo people are Kinyaa'áanii (The Towering House clan), Honágháahnii (One-walks-around clan), Tódich'ii'nii (Bitter Water clan) and Hashtł'ishnii (Mud clan). His mother Annie was a stern-looking weaver woman, a master. I do not carry her eggs as I do my maternal grandmother’s eggs. I carry her bloodline. I bled for her promise to bring beauty into this glittering world.

My maternal grandmother Elizabeth, or Mohalla, was born into Milee-thłama in 1908. People of the Hot Springs. Her father is Wyampum — People of the Echo of Water Upon the Rocks — or Celilo Falls. Both places are ancient and healing. One is a place of continuous inhabitation of over 14,000 years. The hot springs presently named Kah Nee Ta are from the volcanoes of the Cascades, which were once real people. Kah Nee Ta is her great-grandmother. Her grandmother Widow Wilson raised Mohalla at this birthplace. Widow Wilson was deemed competent enough to manage her lands and money on her own. Unfortunately, my grandmother’s mother and brother's family died from the Spanish Flu, so she was left alone and learned from her grandmother.

A wagon ran over Mohalla as a child, and they told her she would never bear children. She did not go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Boarding School for long, as she was “sickly.” It spared her from the atrocities of the system. The U.S. laws forbade the speaking of American Indian languages. The girls learned to be maids with housekeeping skills. It is said the Boarding school staff beat children into submission, and many died in the system. She learned to read from newspapers and a dictionary. American Women had no credit and could not open a bank account in the U.S. until the last part of the 20th century. As a young Indian woman, she was not a citizen of the US until 1924. She worked, managed her own bank account and drove a car she owned outright. She told me, “I wasn’t going to get married. At twenty-nine I was an old maid. You don’t have to marry unless you really love someone. Then you will know why.”

She said, “My girlfriends teased me all the time. One day I saw your grandfather walking down the road with his friends. He was laughing. I asked who he was. I declared I would go out with him. I did ask him out, picked him up in my car. I kissed him first. I married him and then had all you kids.” I am a rare, exotic woman who descends from Mohalla, who once looked at and fell in love with a vivacious, laughing and girl-shy man.

My grandmother Mohalla was a strong woman, a feminist crone of the old-time wisdoms. She said that one can’t help how one looks. That is what the Creator made us into. That is, it is unfair to use our beauty and allure with men, as they are weak. She said, to go to school and whatever it costs was like money in the bank. You get it back with interest. Work for your money, live on your own, and learn all your life, was her advice. She married, had children, and lived to be a grandmother and guide me in all the ways I let her. She was my sturdy rock, and her nickname was Stonewall. Yes, my five-foot tall grandmother was a force — an Indian Doctor or “Twati”— and a unique spiritual entity. Like when she told me of the tug on her womb when she first saw Grandpa.

My grandmother lost a child. When she was gestating my mother, her second child, she laid in bed for nine months in a place for pregnant, unwed mothers. The healthcare of the last two generations was atrocious. The birth rate and longevity of Indian people is short. In my generation the life expectancy was 54 years of age. Due to poverty, Indian Health Service limitations, and horrendous exposure to racism, our lives are short. If we did receive care, it was in an emergency. Four in five American Indian women experience violence in their lifetime and men are victimized at similar rates. A third of the victims do not have access to medical or legal services. Many are murdered, trafficked, and it can be said there are colonial roots of violence against American Indian women and men. The stress of being in the mix of horrible systems and environment of hate is killing people in ways that cannot be counted.

My mother didn’t receive prenatal care. She lived on the Navajo Nation Reservation. She never mentioned going to the Doctor. She said she walked down a trail in Canyon DeChelly in her bare feet. She rubbed her belly on the warm reddish rocks. That was my prenatal care. When she went into labor, it was in the worst snowstorm she ever saw. They could not make it to the Catholic Hospital she wanted to go to. I was born at a hospital in Ganado, Arizona, that is famous for having the best birthrate success as far as reservations go. It became a teaching hospital for Navajo nurses. I was lucky.

Elizabeth Woody, photographed at the 2014 Indigenous Leadership Award. Photo credit: Jan Sonnenmair.

When I reached childbearing age, there was a United States policy to sterilize Indigenous mothers. My mother and her generation who did not receive gynecological health care was a precedent to the time of my fertility. They received hysterectomies and, in my generation, sterilizations. My sister and I have no children. Who knows what happened to us.

In the 1960s and 70s the IHS forced sterilizations on 25 to 50 percent of Native American women of childbearing age. No branch of the US government has acknowledged this or apologized for this act of eugenics. When I read this in Akwesasne Notes as an activist teen, I felt fear. (The Akwesasne Notes, a newspaper published by the Mohawk Nation, features an article on Dr Connie Redbird Pinkerman-Uri’s investigation into involuntary sterilizations by the IHS. Image from Akwesasne Notes (1977: Vol. 9, No. 4), quote courtesy of The American Indian Digital History Archive.) Well documented, the xenophobic discourse is: women of color are unfit. The Indian Health Service subjected Childbearing Native women to institutional violence. The hospital sterilized my sister’s best friend right after her second child. She told us she did not recall giving permission.

My mother’s nickname was Sugar. She wasn't as sweet as her nickname Sugar, as she was named after the first Sugar Ray. Sugar was an Indian cowgirl, a street fighter, and became an alcoholic. She had a 148-point IQ on that biased test and people tell me she looked like an Indian Ava Gardner. My inheritance from her is her bold intellect, not her superior athletic and aesthetically pleasing body. One time she bemoaned to me, “My legs were once an asset and now they are a liability.” In the early seventies, after years of drinking and dying at least once, Harvard accepted her, and she received a full scholarship. She turned it down and remained in Oregon. She was a natural challenger and radical community activist.

Sugar was a catalyst to organizations that didn’t exist before; Native and spiritually-based Alcohol and Drug treatment, the founding of the first American Indian Movement house in Portland, Oregon. She was part of the first free medical clinic on Skid Row, serving as the first woman board member of the Urban Indian Center, and we marched with Cesar Chavez, connected to the West Coast Political Movement of social change. We are her two activist daughters. There stood my tiny four-year-old sister with our hankied and barking dog-friend holding a Union sign and flashing the peace sign. Twelve-year-old me stood beside her and absorbed the hateful glares, giving the mean conservative sorts “the militant face.”

After all that, Sugar went back to school. While sitting in a class at Portland State University, she experienced “abnormal uterine bleeding.” She discovered the horror of overgrown fibroids. Transported to Providence Hospital, she underwent a hysterectomy. She wept for the loss of children she couldn’t bear. Without medical care, the masses in her uterine wall sterilized her. She knew her early life of alcoholic oblivion was part of the process of losing her will to live, but her body and its heart still rose from its pain to change what she could for her daughters. She wanted to finish her college degree. She didn’t go back.

Her loss of blood happened many times. She hemorrhaged once from drinking, and doctors pronounced her dead. She went to the Great Light. She saw my sister and myself to the side and she turned back. When my “little mother” Aunt Lillian saw her, she fainted. Another time she almost died from the rotten-aimed head shot of a sociopathic woman in a violent frenzy. She was in a party car and the drunken imbeciles thought her dead. They threw her body out of the car near a freeway. Later, she escaped the university hospital she woke up in and ran to the bottom of the hill in a sheet. There she stopped a car and talked a man out of his clothes. Later, she walked into one of the Indian bars and the woman who shot her turned white. Sugar never turned her into the cops. In fact, they had no idea who she was or her shooter. She still had fragments of the bullet in her brain until her death.

That night, “the local news” featured the story of the shooting. She escaped the hospital. The police looked for a five-foot-ten, 170-pound American Indian Woman. My mother! I knew it by the cold dagger through my heart. This was the start of the strange violent era of serial killers of our modern times. The news of the first Manson Family LaBianca Murders was the same night my mother nearly died.

For centuries, people have shot down, beaten, raped, enslaved, and killed American Indian women with impunity. We kill one another randomly now. What can I say, but murder became the new normal when we denied its historical roots.

My mother was the great love of my life. Our relationship bent whacky when I told her I was not having children. She changed at that time and had grandchildren through other means and methods. As an alcohol and drug counselor, she worked with families to work primarily with the children. Formerly renowned as the toughest woman on the Skid Row streets, she was sweet and gentler to the babies and the weak. She loved better without the Itch — her womb. What may have been was replaced by the self-destructive bomb planted in her by the history of our people’s oppression. Our human frailty as battle in the Glittering World. It was the source of my self-hatred that traveled through my brilliant genetic schematics. The rapes, the racist blasts of the West, our bodies taken to the ground and our sensitivities dulled by extremes.

I was only twelve when I heard the news talk of my mother escaping the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head. I felt this knowledge in my body. Iron rich blood started for me at this age. I was ripe with an intuition to prepare for my own self-preservation. This was the time strange men threw cat calls at me. I felt the jump of fear and anger in my uterus.

My mother’s rebellion started by having tattoos. Love on the fingers of the left hand and Itch on the right. She never said why she had this done. I guessed once I saw the clip of Robert Mitchem as Rev. Harry Powell in the Night of the Hunter 1955 movie. He had Love and Hate tattooed on his fingers. The story of Good and Evil he had on his fingers were the lettered veins running to the soul of a man to carry out that battle.

These are the Matriarch markers of my record. The Ancestors still loved, still bore more daughters, and we still lead our families with the ceremonies of rite of passage. The first period in Diné daughters is honored by the coming-of-age kinaaldá. Four days of song, prayer and stories shape the young woman. She's expected to run every day, grind corn, and make a corn cake offering. Time passes. More family celebrates.

The big milestones are Menstruation, Marriage, Matriarch of family and then, Menopause. Not mentioned are miscarriages and the misogyny of loss of control over our bodies and will. Our rage and hysteria are the pathos of our wombs. Many patriarchies subdue Female Sexuality to suppress feminine rage and will. A Cheyenne proverb states, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons.”

Genocide is an overt violence in the colonial overtaking the land. Recognize, if you can, the United States is an Infant and Unreliable Government. Our existence as Indigenous Women, is the most violated of all “racial and sexual violence.” One in four American Indian women experience sexual violence. One in seven American Indian men do, too.

The US Confederate Troops forced my great-great grandmothers to march and only take what they could carry. Many carried their children and elders for as long as their starved bodies had strength. This is from the Wasco-WisXam-Watlala villages on the Columbia River to the arid High Desert Country that was our Southern territorial homelands in Oregon. My Diné ancestors marched to Bosque Redondo by the ethnic cleansing and genocidal wrath of Kit Carson. It is the source of generational trauma. Still, we are here because our grandmothers’ hearts still beat, and their physical bodies continued to live. Their hearts and wombs still beat and bled with courage.

My first invasion occurred at the same hospital my mother escaped from. The doctor examined me with a speculum. The doctor looked up my healthy and virgin vagina at pre-period age twelve. I didn’t know what was happening.

I was five foot seven at age twelve with waist length hair. My stepfather tried to kiss me that year. Men hooted and ogled me as I walked down the road. This was the start of the invasion of the Body Maulers. My ceremony into womanhood was to instill fear into my being. I was a free woman, but not really. My menstruation was the arrival of confusing signals to me of young feminine vulnerability. It was a sad preface to my time of social radicalism, feminism, civil rights, and deepening intellect. My blood led me to reveal my vestibule womb of volcanic power.

As it does in fiction, Love wins and the Itch never goes away. Menopause came to my body at 48 years of age. I walked in peace that year up to twelve miles a day. My maternal rage subsided. My Vestibule of Volcanic Molten Desires stopped plumping up the uterine walls. The womb tugged less. The soul, or the potential of inner wholeness, perceived every child as my child. All broken hearts were attracted to my healing waves. There was no skipping of the Matriarchy. I am the big Momma with the L-O-V-E I-T-C-H. Like Rev. Harry Powell says, “It’s love that’s won, and old left-hand hate is down for the count.” I became Momma’s wild love itch. Sugar unleashed to the world Sizzle — my nickname. I am the molten and fiery volcano of her lineage. The incredible daughter of a survivor who instilled courage and the ability to strategize and win a few battles. Most of all, I have the courage to love in the face of racism and in the circle of ceremony, carry the women’s light of Beauty. Peace, as in the excerpt of the famous Navajo Beauty Way prayer, I walk.

In beauty all day long may I walk. Through the returning seasons, may I walk. On the trail marked with pollen may I walk. With dew about my feet, may I walk. With beauty before me may I walk. With beauty behind me may I walk. With beauty below me may I walk. With beauty above me may I walk. With beauty all around me may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk. My words will be beautiful…

Elizabeth Woody (Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama) has published poetry, short fiction, essays, and is a visual artist. Her first collection of poetry, Hand Into Stone, received a 1990 American Book Award. Luminaries of the Humble, UAZ, and Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, Prose and Poetry (Eighth Mountain Press) reached print in 1994. In March 2016, Woody was the first Native American to be named Poet Laureate of Oregon by Governor Kate Brown.

EssayGuest CollaboratorDecember 12, 2024Marisa Cadena