Read First Citizen for Free Online Page B

of a circle, which is the proper birthing place for any native American child. I came forth into a frame house, with no paint on its splintering boards, standing in a white man’s straight line along the road. My mother told me all this, as I was too busy at the time to notice and understand.
    It was being born in a straight line, like the whites, that caused all the trouble. I have lived sixty years too long. When Quetzalcoatl the Serpent came for me in the Bay of Campeche, even though he had to fly a hundred miles across the waters, I resisted like the white man. Now I am lost and have no true place to go.
    Of course, it does not help that my father was not an Indian. He was a Hell’s Angel on a run. His tribe had turned up one day on the reservation, half drunk and looking for peyote buttons, which we did not have. His name was Red, so he must have been Irish. All he owned was a chrome and steel Harley-Davidson with a turquoise-blue teardrop gas tank. That and his greasy denims. He and his companions lived like Apaches: just a horse for travel, a pair of leggings for the brush, and an attitude. My father was a white Indian.
    He may have come from Las Vegas or Los Angeles; I never found out which. When I was tall enough for my thumb to be seen above the roadway and smart enough to figure that staying on the reservation was no good unless I could learn to farm sand and eat it, I went to both places. But I never saw or heard about a Hell’s Angel named Red.
    You might think that all tribes are rich now that coal and oil and other precious things have been found under the sad scrublands the White Father deeded to us in perpetuity. The Navaho are rich, yes, if they can sell their mineral rights at a good price or finance the machinery to dig the coal themselves—and not get taken by the white lawyers and moneymen.
    The Chinook are not so rich, having exclusive rights to the salmon on the Columbia—so long as they take the fish themselves with techniques that are more picturesque than profitable.
    The white law is sometimes clumsy. Here and there, it lets a native American make off with something of value, just as here and there a crack in the pavement lets a tough weed, a thistle, grow up to the sunlight. But it is still the white law.
    What I learned in Las Vegas, and improved on later in Los Angeles, was how to find things that people wanted. Cigarettes, loose change, tape decks, contraband—there was usually a way. The most valuable lesson for a twelve-year-old scrounger was the margin: The more people wanted something, the greater is the risk of obtaining it, so the higher the price must be. Hubcaps are easy to get, but nobody wants them.
    The first corollary to the rule of margin is: dodging and hiding. You never tell anyone, no matter how strong or mean he is, what you have in your pockets. You never tell precisely where you got anything. You never tell your real name.
    What else did I learn between Las Vegas and Los Angeles? How to pick anything that grows, fast enough so that I could afford to eat. How to walk a horse slow enough to keep from crippling him—that was as stable boy at the racetrack. How to bus dishes fast enough to keep the Mexican mamas who owned those storefront eateries from taking a nick out of my ear.
    I learned that a native American, whose people have been buried in this land twenty-five thousand years, has the same economic value as a guy with squishy sneakers who is still shitting jalapeno seeds that grew in Chihuahua.
    That does not mean I wanted to keep America for the tribes. Nothing is funnier than those intertribal community houses and their unity nights, when everyone sits around drinking 7-Up and pretending that the next brave over did not used to eat human flesh. And those tribal songs, sung high in the nose. Like some kind of Red Rotary ... No, I did not want to keep the Mexicans out, but I wanted everything they were getting and a big slice of what the whites had. And I got it.
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